Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/13

 Rh Johnson's monument and as the executor of Reynolds, was one of those responsible for his funeral at St. Paul's and for the sale of his pictures. Dr. Warner was for many years associated with the pleasures as well as with the serious business of George Selwyn and he endeavoured after his friend's death to remove from the public mind the belief that the wit took an inordinate pleasure in witnessing the executions of conspicuous criminals. He was the first to start and the chief person to carry into effect, the proposal, that a statue of Howard, the philanthropist, should be placed in London's cathedral.

The mention of Scrope Davies recalls the life of Byron. They were friends in college days and in the fashionable life of their early manhood. Byron borrowed from him large sums of money, and showed the warmth of his friendship by the efforts which he made to repay them, as well as by the public dedication to Davies of one of his chief poems. Like many another conspicuous gambler during the Regency, the declining days of the life of Davies were passed in banishment from England. "Jack" Taylor knew everyone. With Sheridan and the theatrical circle which surrounded him he was closely intimate. He was the companion of Boswell in his hours of gaiety in the city when his song, repeated over and over again, threw the stiff form of Pitt into convulsions of laughter. In the busy haunt of Fleet Street and amid the jostling of the crowd which thronged that thoroughfare, Boswell submitted to him the proof sheets of the title-page of his immortal volumes and adopted the word which his critical friend suggested. Taylor corresponded with Byron and one of the poet's letters is for the first time given to the world in its entirety in these pages.

Scrope Davies was a student in classical literature until he had earned, when barely out of his teens, the wages sufficient to keep him in idleness for the rest of his existence.