Howard, was
at a time when he probably had not another.
We retired from Mrs. Williams to another room. Tom Davies soon after
joined us. He had now unfortunately failed in his circumstances, and
was much indebted to Dr. Johnson's kindness for obtaining for him many
alleviations of his distress. After he went away, Johnson blamed his
folly in quitting the stage, by which he and his wife got five hundred
pounds a year. I said, I believed it was owing to Churchill's attack
upon him,
'He mouths a sentence, as curs mouth a bone.'
JOHNSON. 'I believe so too, Sir. But what a man is he, who is to be
driven from the stage by a line? Another line would have driven him from
his shop.'
He returned next day to Streatham, to Mr. Thrale's; where, as Mr.
Strahan once complained to me, 'he was in a great measure absorbed from
the society of his old friends.' I was kept in London by business, and
wrote to him on the 27th, that a separation from him for a week, when we
were so near, was equal to a separation for a year, when we were at four
hundred miles distance.
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