But it is in Johnson’s capacity for friendship that his greatness is specially revealed.  ‘Keep your friendships in good repair.’  As the old friends disappeared, new ones came to him.  For Johnson seems never to have sought out friends.  He was not a common ‘mixer.’  He stooped to no devices for the sake of popularity.  He pours only scorn upon the lack of mind and conviction which is necessary to him who is everybody’s friend.

His friendships included all classes and all ages.  He was a great favorite with children, and knew how to meet them, from little four-months-old Veronica Boswell to his godchild Jane Langton.  ‘Sir,’ said he, ’I love the acquaintance of young people, . . . young men have more virtue than old men; they have more generous sentiments in every respect.’  At sixty-eight he said:  ’I value myself upon this, that there is nothing of the old man in my conversation.’  Upon women of all classes and ages he exerts without trying a charm the consciousness of which would have turned any head less constant than his own, and with their fulsome adoration he was pleased none the less for perceiving its real value.

But the most important of his friendships developed between him and such men of genius as Boswell, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Edmund Burke.  Johnson’s genius left no fit testimony of itself from his own hand.  With all the greatness of his mind he had no talent in sufficient measure by which fully to express himself.  He had no ear for music and no eye for painting, and the finest qualities in the creations of Goldsmith were lost upon him.  But his genius found its talents in others, and through the talents of his personal friends expressed itself as it were by proxy.  They rubbed their minds upon his, and he set in motion for them ideas which they might use.  But the intelligence of genius is profounder and more personal than mere ideas.  It has within it something energetic, expansive, propulsive from mind to mind, perennial, yet steady and controlled; and it was with such force that Johnson’s almost superhuman personality inspired the art of his friends.  Of this they were in some degree aware.  Reynolds confessed that Johnson formed his mind, and ‘brushed from it a great deal of rubbish.’  Gibbon called Johnson ‘Reynolds’ oracle.’  In one of his Discourses Sir Joshua, mindful no doubt of his own experience, recommends that young artists seek the companionship of such a man merely as a tonic to their art.  Boswell often testifies to the stimulating effect of Johnson’s presence.  Once he speaks of ’an animating blaze of eloquence, which roused every intellectual power in me to the highest pitch’; and again of the ‘full glow’ of Johnson’s conversation, in which he felt himself ‘elevated as if brought into another state of being.’  He says that all members of Johnson’s ‘school’ ’are distinguished for a love of truth and accuracy which they would not have possessed in the same degree if