scurrilities, those stink-pots of your offensive war.’ Ib. p. xxii.  On page xl. he returns again to their ’cold buffoonery.’  In the Appendix to vol. v, p. 414, he thus wittily replies to Lowth, who had maintained that ’idolatry was punished under the DOMINION of Melchisedec’(p. 409):—­’Melchisedec’s story is a short one; he is just brought into the scene to bless Abraham in his return from conquest.  This promises but ill.  Had this King and Priest of Salem been brought in cursing, it had had a better appearance:  for, I think, punishment for opinions which generally ends in a fagot always begins with a curse.  But we may be misled perhaps by a wrong translation.  The Hebrew word to bless signifies likewise to curse, and under the management of an intolerant priest good things easily run into their contraries.  What follows is his taking tythes from Abraham.  Nor will this serve our purpose, unless we interpret these tythes into fines for non-conformity; and then by the blessing we can easily understand absolution.  We have seen much stranger things done with the Hebrew verity.  If this be not allowed, I do not see how we can elicit fire and fagot from this adventure; for I think there is no inseparable connexion between tythes and persecution but in the ideas of a Quaker.—­And so much for King Melchisedec.  But the learned Professor, who has been hardily brought up in the keen atmosphere of WHOLESOME SEVERITIES and early taught to distinguish between de facto and de jure, thought it ’needless to enquire into facts, when he was secure of the right’.

This ‘keen atmosphere of wholesome severities’ reappears by the way in Mason’s continuation of Gray’s Ode to Vicissitude:—­

     ’That breathes the keen yet wholesome air
      Of rugged penury.’

And later in the first book of Wordsworth’s Excursion (ed. 1857, vi. 29):—­

     ‘The keen, the wholesome air of poverty.’

Johnson said of Warburton:  ’His abilities gave him an haughty confidence, which he disdained to conceal or mollify; and his impatience of opposition disposed him to treat his adversaries with such contemptuous superiority as made his readers commonly his enemies, and excited against the advocate the wishes of some who favoured the cause.  He seems to have adopted the Roman Emperour’s determination, oderint dum metuant; he used no allurements of gentle language, but wished to compel rather than persuade.’  Johnson’s Works, viii. 288.  See ante, ii. 36, and iv. 46.

* * * * *

APPENDIX B.

(Page 158.)

Johnson’s Ode written in Sky was thus translated by Lord Houghton:—­