reconciliation, though he would not press for one if his first overtures were rejected.  There was no venom in the wounds he inflicted, for there was no ill-nature; he was rough in the heat of the struggle, and in such cases careless in distributing blows; but he never enjoyed giving pain.  None of his tiffs ripened into permanent quarrels, and he seems scarcely to have lost a friend.  He is a pleasant contrast in this, as in much else, to Horace Walpole, who succeeded, in the course of a long life, in breaking with almost all his old friends.  No man set a higher value upon friendship than Johnson.  “A man,” he said to Reynolds, “ought to keep his friendship in constant repair;” or he would find himself left alone as he grew older.  “I look upon a day as lost,” he said later in life, “in which I do not make a new acquaintance.”  Making new acquaintances did not involve dropping the old.  The list of his friends is a long one, and includes, as it were, successive layers, superposed upon each other, from the earliest period of his life.

This is so marked a feature in Johnson’s character, that it will be as well at this point to notice some of the friendships from which he derived the greatest part of his happiness.  Two of his schoolfellows, Hector and Taylor, remained his intimates through life.  Hector survived to give information to Boswell, and Taylor, then a prebendary of Westminster, read the funeral service over his old friend in the Abbey.  He showed, said some of the bystanders, too little feeling.  The relation between the two men was not one of special tenderness; indeed they were so little congenial that Boswell rather gratuitously suspected his venerable teacher of having an eye to Taylor’s will.  It seems fairer to regard the acquaintance as an illustration of that curious adhesiveness which made Johnson cling to less attractive persons.  At any rate, he did not show the complacence of the proper will-hunter.  Taylor was rector of Bosworth and squire of Ashbourne.  He was a fine specimen of the squire-parson; a justice of the peace, a warm politician, and what was worse, a warm Whig.  He raised gigantic bulls, bragged of selling cows for 120 guineas and more, and kept a noble butler in purple clothes and a large white wig.  Johnson respected Taylor as a sensible man, but was ready to have a round with him on occasion.  He snorted contempt when Taylor talked of breaking some small vessels if he took an emetic.  “Bah,” said the doctor, who regarded a valetudinarian as a “scoundrel,” “if you have so many things that will break, you had better break your neck at once, and there’s an end on’t.”  Nay, if he did not condemn Taylor’s cows, he criticized his bulldog with cruel acuteness.  “No, sir, he is not well shaped; for there is not the quick transition from the thickness of the fore-part to the tenuity—­the thin part—­behind, which a bulldog ought to have.”  On the more serious topic of politics his Jacobite fulminations