Bruce Alexander - Blind Justice

“Her son was one you sent off to sea?”

“He was-and it was not easy arranging it. He and his two fellows were guilty of a theft in which severe bodily injury was inflicted upon the victim. They truly wanted to hang those boys, Jeremy, and not a one of them older than you.”

The thought made me most uncomfortable. “But you sent them to sea?”

“Two of them.”

I dared not ask what became of the third.

He remained silent until we emerged from the Haymarket and turned onto Pall Mall. I exclaimed at the sight, and he brightened considerably: “Ah yes, I wanted you to see this. Isn’t it beautiful? It certainly smells beautiful. So much of London could be like this, and so little of it is.”

I looked about me. There were trees and flowers-gardens as I had never seen them-and gentry as I had never imagined them. They were dressed finely but not so gaudily as the courtesans and their gallants whom I had seen in the Haymarket. Ladies and gentlemen ambled carelessly along as we passed them by, and there were groupings of a few posed most decorously here and there, all of them conversing in modulated tones. Even the horse traffic differed notably from what I had seen elsewhere. Only carriages and single mounts seemed to be allowed here. I saw no wagons or drays.

We walked Pall Mall up one side and down the other, which gave me a glimpse of Green Park and St. James and of many fine houses along the way. It was all so much more than I had expected that I felt quite the bumpkin there. Even Sir John, whom I had judged to be well dressed, seemed plain by comparison to the gentry around us. And here he did seem to be treated with a certain cold indif- ference. Little notice was taken of him, and he received no salutations. When attention was given, it came in the form of rude stares. And thus, much as I was impressed by what I saw there, I was relieved when at last we turned down Charing Cross and found our way to the Strand.

There was a swarm of people before us, the great ocean of humanity in full tide. Sir John halted there at the head of the great street, listening, smelling, taking it all in. “Is it not wondrous?” he asked. “This great gang of people before us, all of them so different and yet all human and therefore much the same. Is it not glorious? A man who has written many foolish things and a few wise ones once said that when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford.”

“That must have been one of the wise things he said.”

“Indeed it was. He, by the by, is the man whom we shall now seek on your behalf.”

“Who is that, Sir John?”

“Samuel Johnson.”

”Dictionary Johnson?”

“The same, my boy, a man of many admirable qualities, though overvalued in certain respects.”

“Which respects are they?” For I had only heard good spoken of him by my father, both natives of Lichfield, after all.

“For his wit, chiefly. He feels qualified to speak to every subject, including the law, in which he has no foundation, and when he speaks he wishes to be listened to by all and sundry. The man is a bore, and he has the way of all bores: that practice of talking at you, not with you. Even in literature, where he is held to be a great judge, his opinions are quite fallible. Mr. Johnson-or Dr, Johnson, as he styles himself-had the audacity and bad sense to write ill of my brother and his work.”

Reader, you will recognize this last as the true cause of Sir John Fielding’s restrained animosity toward Dr. Johnson, though I did not for many years. One should rather have spoken ill of the King in Sir John’s presence than criticize his late brother.

“But let us be off, Jeremy,” said he. “It is dusk, and we must try to find him at the place he often takes his supper, an inferior eating place frequented by scribblers and their masters that is known as the Cheshire Cheese.”

And so we plunged into the throng there on the Strand, swimming along with the tide, he calling my attention to shops for the gentry along the way. I was then quite surprised when, somewhat past these, my nose was assaulted by a stench as foul as any I had known in the country. Involuntarily, I exclaimed at it.

“At last you smell it, do you?”

“Would that I did not, sir!”

“That is the Fleet River, so called, yet hardly more than a stream flowing into the Thames. Actually, it is little better than a sewer running beneath Fleet Street, open at some points, one of them nearby. I he odor will lessen somewhat as we leave here, so let us do that with haste.”

At last he halted me at a small alleyway hardly noticeable from the street itself. “Just here, I believe, is it not?”

I looked down the alley and in the gathering dark I saw a sign giving announcement to the Cheshire Cheese. I conveyed this to him. Yet how could he have known his location so well?

“Johnson lived just around the corner in an alley square, and he takes his meals here. His housekeeper is, by all reports and unlike Mrs. Gredge, a foul cook. I have no wish to knock upon the man’s door in search of a favor, but I had thought, were we to meet and talk with him at his eating house, it might be easy to present you and your predicament to him. He is not without good qualities. I’m sure he would be moved to help.”

With that we proceeded to the Cheshire Cheese, yet just at the door he halted once again. “One more thing, my boy. When we meet Johnson he may be in the company of one James Boswell, a popinjay and a libertine who calls himself a lawyer. He is visiting and has attached himself to Johnson as a veritable lamprey. My point in mentioning this to you is that Boswell is a Scotsman from Edinburgh and has that manner of speech common to his countrymen. You must in no wise laugh at him, nor even show notice, for he is very vain.” I promised, and we entered.

Although outside darkness had nearly fallen, inside it was darker still. Sir John found a waiter and inquired after Dr. Johnson. He was informed that although the lexicographer had not yet arrived, he was expected and that Mr. Boswell awaited him in the Chop Room. Thence we were conducted. The man whom I rightly took to be James Boswell jumped to his feet and welcomed us-or rather, the magistrate-with great ostentation. In truth, his accent was not much pronounced. It could be detected, certainly, in his rolling of the letter “r” and in the flat nasal inflection he put on nearly all his vowels. However, I found him not in the least amusing.

If Dr. Johnson was a bore, what was I to make of this man who claimed loudly and at length to be his friend? A popinjay? No doubt, and a gossip and a wiseacre, as well. I am aware of the tradition that charges us to speak well of the recently dead, and in the main I hold to it, yet I saw this James Boswell exhaust the time and patience of Sir John on so many subsequent occasions that I find little good in my heart to say of him. Worse still, later, as a young man, I myself heard him deride the chief magistrate of Bow Street, and I hesitated not to take him to task for it directly. Yet I anticipate somewhat. I cannot pretend that my first estimate was as fully formed as this nor as prejudiced. He seemed to me then only a tedious and long-winded man, one so keen to make a good impression on Sir John that he would continually solicit the opinion of the magistrate, and before it was half-stated rush in with his own.

It was thus they discussed a range of topics, chiefly the then notorious John Wilkes, the Parliamentarian who had previously been jailed for fomenting riot. When Boswell noted to Sir John that Wilkes had recently been returned to Parliament in absentia, he then swore the fellow should be clapped in the stocks forthwith, but it soon turned out his objection to the riotous Wilkes was due chiefly to the latter’s abusive pronouncements against the Scots.