case, but it serves to show how Burke was never content with the literary point of view, and how ready and vigilant he was for effects more profound than those of formal criticism.  It is true that Johnson was sometimes not less austere in condemning a great work of art for its bad morality.  The only time when he was really angry with Hannah More was on his finding that she had read Tom Jones—­that vicious book, he called it; he hardly knew a more corrupt work.  Burke’s tendency towards severity of moral judgment, however, never impaired the geniality and tenderness of his relations with those whom he loved.  Bennet Langton gave Boswell an affecting account of Burke’s last interview with Johnson.  A few days before the old man’s death, Burke and four or five other friends were sitting round his bedside.  “Mr. Burke said to him, ’I am afraid, sir, such a number of us may be oppressive to you.’  ‘No, sir,’ said Johnson, ’it is not so; and I must be in a wretched state indeed when your company is not a delight to me.’  Mr. Burke, in a tremulous voice, expressive of being very tenderly affected, replied, ’My dear sir, you have always been too good to me.’  Immediately afterwards he went away.  This was the last circumstance in the acquaintance of these two eminent men.”

One of Burke’s strongest political intimacies was only less interesting and significant than his friendship with Johnson.  William Dowdeswell had been Chancellor of the Exchequer in the short Rockingham administration of 1765.  He had no brilliant gifts, but he had what was then thought a profound knowledge both of the principles and details of the administration of the national revenue.  He was industrious, steadfast, clearheaded, inexorably upright.  “Immersed in the greatest affairs,” as Burke said in his epitaph, “he never lost the ancient, native, genuine English character of a country gentleman.”  And this was the character in which Burke now and always saw not only the true political barrier against despotism on the one hand and the rabble on the other, but the best moral type of civic virtue.  Those who admire Burke, but cannot share his admiration for the country gentleman, will perhaps justify him by the assumption that he clothed his favourite with ideal qualities which ought, even if they did not, to have belonged to that position.

In his own modest imitation and on his own humble scale he was a pattern of the activity in public duty, the hospitality towards friends, the assiduous protection of neglected worth, which ought to be among the chief virtues of high station.  It would perhaps be doubly unsafe to take for granted that many of our readers have both turned over the pages of Crabbe’s Borough, and carried away in their minds from that moderately affecting poem, the description of Eusebius—­

  That pious moralist, that reasoning saint! 
  Can I of worth like thine, Eusebius, speak? 
  The man is willing, but the muse is weak.