No word on Toryism would be complete without mention of Dr. Johnson.  Here, indeed, we meet less with opinion than with a set of gloomy prejudices, acceptable only because of the stout honesty of the source from which they come.  He thought life a poor thing at the best and took a low view of human nature.  “The notion of liberty,” he told the faithful Boswell, “amuses the people of England and helps to keep off the tedium vitae.”  The idea of a society properly organized into ranks and societies he always esteemed highly.  “I am a friend to subordination,” he said, “as most conducive to the happiness of society.”  He was a Jacobite and Tory to the end.  Whiggism was the offspring of the devil, the “negation of all principle”; and he seems to have implied that it led to atheism, which he regarded as the worst of sins.  He did not believe in the honesty of republicans; they levelled down, but were never inclined to level up.  Men, he felt, had a part to act in society, and their business was to fulfil their allotted station.  Rousseau was a very bad man:  “I would sooner sign a sentence for his transportation than that of any fellow who has gone from the Old Bailey these many years.”  Political liberty was worthless; the only thing worth while was freedom in private concerns.  He blessed the government in the case of general warrants and thought the power of the Crown too small.  Toleration he considered due to an inapt distinction between freedom to think and freedom to talk, and any magistrate “while he thinks himself right ... ought to enforce what he thinks.”  The American revolt he ascribed to selfish faction; and in his Taxation no Tyranny (1775) he defended the British government root and branch upon his favorite ground of the necessity of subordination.  He was willing, he said, to love all mankind except an American.

Yet Dr. Johnson was the friend of Burke, and he found pleasure in an acquaintance with Wilkes.  Nor, in all his admiration for rank and fortune, is there a single element of meanness.  The man who wrote the letter to Lord Chesterfield need never fear the charge of abasement.  He knew that there was “a remedy in human nature that will keep us safe under every form of government.”  He defined a courtier in the Idler as one “whose business it is to watch the looks of a being weak and foolish as himself.”  Much of what he felt was in part a revolt against the sentimental aspect of contemporary liberalism, in part a sturdy contempt for the talk of degeneracy that men such as Brown had made popular.  There is, indeed, in all his political observations a strong sense of the virtue of order, and a perception that the radicalism of the time was too abstract to provide an adequate basis for government.  Here, as elsewhere, Johnson hated all speculation which raised the fundamental questions.  What he did not see was the important truth that in no age are fundamental questions raised save where the body politic