But, in truth, it was characteristic of Johnson to turn away his mind from such topics.  He was interested in ethical speculations, but on the practical side, in the application to life, not in the philosophy on which it might be grounded.  In that direction, he could see nothing but a “milking of the bull”—­a fruitless or rather a pernicious waste of intellect.  An intense conviction of the supreme importance of a moral guidance in this difficult world, made him abhor any rash inquiries by which the basis of existing authority might be endangered.

This sentiment is involved in many of those prejudices which have been so much, and in some sense justifiably ridiculed.  Man has been wretched and foolish since the race began, and will be till it ends; one chorus of lamentation has ever been rising, in countless dialects but with a single meaning; the plausible schemes of philosophers give no solution to the everlasting riddle; the nostrums of politicians touch only the surface of the deeply-rooted evil; it is folly to be querulous, and as silly to fancy that men are growing worse, as that they are much better than they used to be.  The evils under which we suffer are not skin-deep, to be eradicated by changing the old physicians for new quacks.  What is to be done under such conditions, but to hold fast as vigorously as we can to the rules of life and faith which have served our ancestors, and which, whatever their justifications, are at least the only consolation, because they supply the only guidance through this labyrinth of troubles?  Macaulay has ridiculed Johnson for what he takes to be the ludicrous inconsistency of his intense political prejudice, combined with his assertion of the indifference of all forms of government.  “If,” says Macaulay, “the difference between two forms of government be not worth half a guinea, it is not easy to see how Whiggism can be viler than Toryism, or the Crown can have too little power.”  The answer is surely obvious.  Whiggism is vile, according to the doctor’s phrase, because Whiggism is a “negation of all principle;” it is in his view, not so much the preference of one form to another, as an attack upon the vital condition of all government.  He called Burke a “bottomless Whig” in this sense, implying that Whiggism meant anarchy; and in the next generation a good many people were led, rightly or wrongly, to agree with him by the experience of the French revolution.

This dogged conservatism has both its value and its grotesque side.  When Johnson came to write political pamphlets in his later years, and to deal with subjects little familiar to his mind, the results were grotesque enough.  Loving authority, and holding one authority to be as good as another, he defended with uncompromising zeal the most preposterous and tyrannical measures.  The pamphlets against the Wilkite agitators and the American rebels are little more than a huge “rhinoceros” snort of contempt against all who are fools enough or wicked enough to promote war and disturbance in order to change one form of authority for another.  Here is a characteristic passage, giving his view of the value of such demonstrators:—­