vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expense.  Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to error.  Truth, sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.”  On another occasion poor Boswell, not yet acquainted with the master’s prejudices, quoted with hearty laughter a “very strange” story which Hume had told him of Johnson.  According to Hume, Johnson had said that he would stand before a battery of cannon to restore Convocation to its full powers.  “And would I not, sir?” thundered out the sage with flashing eyes and threatening gestures.  Boswell judiciously bowed to the storm, and diverted Johnson’s attention.  Another manifestation of orthodox prejudice was less terrible.  Boswell told Johnson that he had heard a Quaker woman preach.  “A woman’s preaching,” said Johnson, “is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs.  It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

So friendly had the pair become, that when Boswell left England to continue his studies at Utrecht, Johnson accompanied him in the stage-coach to Harwich, amusing him on the way by his frankness of address to fellow-passengers, and by the voracity of his appetite.  He gave him some excellent advice, remarking of a moth which fluttered into a candle, “that creature was its own tormentor, and I believe its name was Boswell.”  He refuted Berkeley by striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it.  As the ship put out to sea Boswell watched him from the deck, whilst he remained “rolling his majestic frame in his usual manner.”  And so the friendship was cemented, though Boswell disappeared for a time from the scene, travelled on the Continent, and visited Paoli in Corsica.  A friendly letter or two kept up the connexion till Boswell returned in 1766, with his head full of Corsica and a projected book of travels.

In the next year, 1767, occurred an incident upon which Boswell dwells with extreme complacency.  Johnson was in the habit of sometimes reading in the King’s Library, and it came into the head of his majesty that he should like to see the uncouth monster upon whom he had bestowed a pension.  In spite of his semi-humorous Jacobitism, there was probably not a more loyal subject in his majesty’s dominions.  Loyalty is a word too often used to designate a sentiment worthy only of valets, advertising tradesmen, and writers of claptrap articles.  But it deserves all respect when it reposes, as in Johnson’s case, upon a profound conviction of the value of political subordination, and an acceptance of the king as the authorized representative of a great principle.  There was no touch of servility in Johnson’s respect for his sovereign, a respect fully reconcilable with a sense of his own personal dignity.  Johnson spoke of his interview with an unfeigned satisfaction, which it would be difficult in these days to preserve