Johnson, however, is the only member of that illustrious company who can profitably be compared with Burke in strength and impressiveness of personality, in a large sensibility at once serious and genial, in brooding care for all the fulness of human life.  This striking pair were the two complements of a single noble and solid type, holding tenaciously, in a century of dissolvent speculation, to the best ideas of a society that was slowly passing.  They were powerless to hinder the inevitable transformation.  One of them did not even dimly foresee it.  But both of them help us to understand how manliness and reverence, strength and tenderness, love of truth and pity for man, all flourished under old institutions and old ways of thinking, into which the forces of the time were even then silently breathing a new spirit.  The friendship between Burke and Johnson lasted as long as they lived; and if we remember that Johnson was a strong Tory, and declared that the first Whig was the devil, and habitually talked about cursed Whigs and bottomless Whigs, it is an extraordinary fact that his relations with the greatest Whig writer and politician of his day were marked by a cordiality, respect, and admiration that never varied nor wavered.  “Burke,” he said in a well-known passage, “is such a man that if you met him for the first time in the street, where you were stopped by a drove of oxen, and you and he stepped aside to take shelter but for five minutes, he’d talk to you in such a manner that, when you parted, you would say, This is an extraordinary man.  He is never what we would call humdrum; never unwilling to begin to talk, nor in haste to leave off.”  That Burke was as good a listener as he was a talker, Johnson never would allow.  “So desirous is he to talk,” he said, “that if one is talking at this end of the table, he’ll talk to somebody at the other end.”  Johnson was far too good a critic, and too honest a man, to assent to a remark of Robertson’s, that Burke had wit.  “No, sir,” said the sage, most truly, “he never succeeds there.  ’Tis low, ’tis conceit.”  Wit apart, he described Burke as the only man whose common conversation corresponded to his general fame in the world; take up whatever topic you might please, he was ready to meet you.  When Burke found a seat in Parliament, Johnson said, “Now we who know Burke, know that he will be one of the first men in the country.”  He did not grudge that Burke should be the first man in the House of Commons, for Burke, he said, was always the first man everywhere.  Once when he was ill, somebody mentioned Burke’s name.  Johnson cried out, “That fellow calls forth all my powers; were I to see Burke now it would kill me.”