Among the other friends of this period must be reckoned his biographer, Hawkins, an attorney who was afterwards Chairman of the Middlesex Justices, and knighted on presenting an address to the King.  Boswell regarded poor Sir John Hawkins with all the animosity of a rival author, and with some spice of wounded vanity.  He was grievously offended, so at least says Sir John’s daughter, on being described in the Life of Johnson as “Mr. James Boswell” without a solitary epithet such as celebrated or well-known.  If that was really his feeling, he had his revenge; for no one book ever so suppressed another as Boswell’s Life suppressed Hawkins’s.  In truth, Hawkins was a solemn prig, remarkable chiefly for the unusual intensity of his conviction that all virtue consists in respectability.  He had a special aversion to “goodness of heart,” which he regarded as another name for a quality properly called extravagance or vice.  Johnson’s tenacity of old acquaintance introduced him into the Club, where he made himself so disagreeable, especially, as it seems, by rudeness to Burke, that he found it expedient to invent a pretext for resignation.  Johnson called him a “very unclubable man,” and may perhaps have intended him in the quaint description:  “I really believe him to be an honest man at the bottom; though, to be sure, he is rather penurious, and he is somewhat mean; and it must be owned he has some degree of brutality, and is not without a tendency to savageness that cannot well be defended.”

In a list of Johnson’s friends it is proper to mention Richardson and Hawkesworth.  Richardson seems to have given him substantial help, and was repaid by favourable comparisons with Fielding, scarcely borne out by the verdict of posterity.  “Fielding,” said Johnson, “could tell the hour by looking at the clock; whilst Richardson knew how the clock was made.”  “There is more knowledge of the heart,” he said at another time, “in one letter of Richardson’s than in all Tom Jones.”  Johnson’s preference of the sentimentalist to the man whose humour and strong sense were so like his own, shows how much his criticism was biassed by his prejudices; though, of course, Richardson’s external decency was a recommendation to the moralist.  Hawkesworth’s intimacy with Johnson seems to have been chiefly in the period between the Dictionary and the pension.  He was considered to be Johnson’s best imitator; and has vanished like other imitators.  His fate, very doubtful if the story believed at the time be true, was a curious one for a friend of Johnson’s.  He had made some sceptical remarks as to the efficacy of prayer in his preface to the South Sea Voyages; and was so bitterly attacked by a “Christian” in the papers, that he destroyed himself by a dose of opium.