Burke heartily returned this high appreciation.  When some flatterer hinted that Johnson had taken more than his right share of the evening’s talk, Burke said, “Nay, it is enough for me to have rung the bell for him.”  Some one else spoke of a successful imitation of Johnson’s style.  Burke with vehemence denied the success:  the performance, he said, had the pomp, but not the force of the original; the nodosities of the oak, but not its strength; the contortions of the sibyl, but none of the inspiration.  When Burke showed the old sage of Bolt Court over his fine house and pleasant gardens at Beaconsfield, Non invideo equidem, Johnson said, with placid good-will, miror magis.  They always parted in the deep and pregnant phrase of a sage of our own day, except in opinion not disagreeing.  In truth, the explanation of the sympathy between them is not far to seek.  We may well believe that Johnson was tacitly alive to the essentially conservative spirit of Burke even in his most Whiggish days.  And Burke penetrated the liberality of mind in a Tory, who called out with loud indignation that the Irish were in a most unnatural state, for there the minority prevailed over the majority, and the severity of the persecution exercised by the Protestants of Ireland against the Catholics exceeded that of the ten historic persecutions of the Christian Church.

The parties at Beaconsfield, and the evenings at the “Turk’s Head” in Gerard Street, were contemporary with the famous days at Holbach’s country house at Grandval.  When we think of the reckless themes that were so recklessly discussed by Holbach, Diderot, and the rest of that indefatigable band, we feel that, as against the French philosophic party, an English Tory like Johnson and an English Whig like Burke would have found their own differences too minute to be worth considering.  If the group from the “Turk’s Head” could have been transported for an afternoon to Grandval, perhaps Johnson would have been the less impatient and disgusted of the two.  He had the capacity of the more genial sort of casuist for playing with subjects, even moral subjects, with the freedom, versatility, and ease that are proper to literature.  Burke, on the contrary, would not have failed to see, as indeed we know that he did not fail to see, that a social pandemonium was being prepared in this intellectual paradise of open questions, where God and a future life, marriage and the family, every dogma of religion, every prescription of morality, and all those mysteries and pieties of human life which have been sanctified by the reverence of ages, were being busily pulled to pieces as if they had been toys in the hands of a company of sportive children.  Even the Beggar’s Opera Burke could not endure to hear praised for its wit or its music, because his mind was filled by thought of its misplaced levity, and he only saw the mischief which such a performance tended to do to society.  It would be hard to defend his judgment in this particular