Blind Justice by Bruce Alexander Read Free Book Online Page A

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.