Through Langton, Johnson became acquainted with the friend whose manner was in the strongest contrast to his own.  Topham Beauclerk was a man of fashion.  He was commended to Johnson by a likeness to Charles II., from whom he was descended, being the grandson of the first Duke of St. Alban’s.  Beauclerk was a man of literary and scientific tastes.  He inherited some of the moral laxity which Johnson chose to pardon in his ancestor.  Some years after his acquaintance with Boswell he married Lady Diana Spencer, a lady who had been divorced upon his account from her husband, Lord Bolingbroke.  But he took care not to obtrude his faults of life, whatever they may have been, upon the old moralist, who entertained for him a peculiar affection.  He specially admired Beauclerk’s skill in the use of a more polished, if less vigorous, style of conversation than his own.  He envied the ease with which Beauclerk brought out his sly incisive retorts.  “No man,” he said, “ever was so free when he was going to say a good thing, from a look that expressed that it was coming; or, when he had said it, from a look that expressed that it had come.”  When Beauclerk was dying (in 1780), Johnson said, with a faltering voice, that he would walk to the extremity of the diameter of the earth to save him.  Two little anecdotes are expressive of his tender feeling for this incongruous friend.  Boswell had asked him to sup at Beauclerk’s.  He started, but, on the way, recollecting himself, said, “I cannot go; but I do not love Beauclerk the less.”  Beauclerk had put upon a portrait of Johnson the inscription,—­

            Ingenium ingens
  Inculto latet hoc sub corpore.

Langton, who bought the portrait, had the inscription removed.  “It was kind in you to take it off,” said Johnson; and, after a short pause, “not unkind in him to put it on.”

Early in their acquaintance, the two young men, Beau and Lanky, as Johnson called them, had sat up one night at a tavern till three in the morning.  The courageous thought struck them that they would knock up the old philosopher.  He came to the door of his chambers, poker in hand, with an old wig for a nightcap.  On hearing their errand, the sage exclaimed, “What! is it you, you dogs?  I’ll have a frisk with you.”  And so Johnson with the two youths, his juniors by about thirty years, proceeded to make a night of it.  They amazed the fruiterers in Covent Garden; they brewed a bowl of bishop in a tavern, while Johnson quoted the poet’s address to Sleep,—­

  “Short, O short, be then thy reign,
  And give us to the world again!”

They took a boat to Billingsgate, and Johnson, with Beauclerk, kept up their amusement for the following day, when Langton deserted them to go to breakfast with some young ladies, and Johnson scolded him for leaving his friends “to go and sit with a parcel of wretched unidea’d girls.”  “I shall have my old friend to bail out of the round-house,” said Garrick when he heard of this queer alliance; and he told Johnson that he would be in the Chronicle for his frolic.  “He durst not do such a thing.  His wife would not let him,” was the moralist’s retort.