Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/117

87 THE LONGMAN FAMILY. 87 a monthly meeting at the " Shakspeare." Here was originated the germ of many a valuable production. Under their auspices Davies (in whose shop Boswell first met Johnson) produced his only valuable work, the Life of Garrick. Poor Davies had been an actor till Churchill's satire drove him off the stage " He mouths a sentence as curs mouth a bone." From this he fled to the refuge of a bookselling shop in Russell-street, Covent-garden. He is described variously as "not a bookseller, but a gentleman dealing in books/' and as " learned enough for a clergyman." Here he strived indifferently well till we come upon his epitaph "Here lies the author, actor Thomas Davies, Living he shone a very rara avis ; The scenes he played life's audience must commend- He honour'd Garrick, Johnson was his friend." At this club meeting, too, Johnson's Lives of the Poets were first resolved on, and by the club clique the work was ultimately produced. William West, a bookseller's assistant, who died at a great age at the Charter House, in 1855, has left in his Fifty Years' Reminiscences, and in the pages of the Aldine Magazine, a number of garrulous, amusing, but sometimes incoherent stories of the old book- sellers. West says he knew all the members of the club, and bears witness that " Longman was a man of the most exemplary character both in his profession and in his private life, and as universally esteemed for his benevolence as for his integrity." He mentions in particular Longman's generosity in offering George Robinson any sum he wished on credit, when his business was in a critical condition,