And then his prejudices!  Most of us have some unreasoning aversion.  In our more generous moments we are not proud of it.  But consider those of Johnson!  When they were all eliminated there was not so very much left.  He hated Whigs.  He disliked Scotsmen.  He detested Nonconformists (a young lady who joined them was “an odious wench").  He loathed Americans.  So he walked his narrow line, belching fire and fury at everything to the right or the left of it.  Macaulay’s posthumous admiration is all very well, but had they met in life Macaulay would have contrived to unite under one hat nearly everything that Johnson abominated.

It cannot be said that these prejudices were founded on any strong principle, or that they could not be altered where his own personal interests demanded it.  This is one of the weak points of his record.  In his dictionary he abused pensions and pensioners as a means by which the State imposed slavery upon hirelings.  When he wrote the unfortunate definition a pension must have seemed a most improbable contingency, but when George III., either through policy or charity, offered him one a little later, he made no hesitation in accepting it.  One would have liked to feel that the violent expression of his convictions represented a real intensity of feeling, but the facts in this instance seem against it.

He was a great talker—­but his talk was more properly a monologue.  It was a discursive essay, with perhaps a few marginal notes from his subdued audience.  How could one talk on equal terms with a man who could not brook contradiction or even argument upon the most vital questions in life?  Would Goldsmith defend his literary views, or Burke his Whiggism, or Gibbon his Deism?  There was no common ground of philosophic toleration on which one could stand.  If he could not argue he would be rude, or, as Goldsmith put it:  “If his pistol missed fire, he would knock you down with the butt end.”  In the face of that “rhinoceros laugh” there was an end of gentle argument.  Napoleon said that all the other kings would say “Ouf!” when they heard he was dead, and so I cannot help thinking that the older men of Johnson’s circle must have given a sigh of relief when at last they could speak freely on that which was near their hearts, without the danger of a scene where “Why, no, sir!” was very likely to ripen into “Let us have no more on’t!” Certainly one would like to get behind Boswell’s account, and to hear a chat between such men as Burke and Reynolds, as to the difference in the freedom and atmosphere of the Club on an evening when the formidable Doctor was not there, as compared to one when he was.