He would have been a great lawyer or divine.  Nothing, one would think, could have kept him from Canterbury or from the Woolsack.  In either case his memory, his learning, his dignity, and his inherent sense of piety and justice, would have sent him straight to the top.  His brain, working within its own limitations, was remarkable.  There is no more wonderful proof of this than his opinions on questions of Scotch law, as given to Boswell and as used by the latter before the Scotch judges.  That an outsider with no special training should at short notice write such weighty opinions, crammed with argument and reason, is, I think, as remarkable a tour de force as literature can show.

Above all, he really was a very kind-hearted man, and that must count for much.  His was a large charity, and it came from a small purse.  The rooms of his house became a sort of harbour of refuge in which several strange battered hulks found their last moorings.  There were the blind Mr. Levett, and the acidulous Mrs. Williams, and the colourless Mrs. De Moulins, all old and ailing—­a trying group amid which to spend one’s days.  His guinea was always ready for the poor acquaintance, and no poet was so humble that he might not preface his book with a dedication whose ponderous and sonorous sentences bore the hall-mark of their maker.  It is the rough, kindly man, the man who bore the poor street-walker home upon his shoulders, who makes one forget, or at least forgive, the dogmatic pedantic Doctor of the Club.

There is always to me something of interest in the view which a great man takes of old age and death.  It is the practical test of how far the philosophy of his life has been a sound one.  Hume saw death afar, and met it with unostentatious calm.  Johnson’s mind flinched from that dread opponent.  His letters and his talk during his latter years are one long cry of fear.  It was not cowardice, for physically he was one of the most stout-hearted men that ever lived.  There were no limits to his courage.  It was spiritual diffidence, coupled with an actual belief in the possibilities of the other world, which a more humane and liberal theology has done something to soften.  How strange to see him cling so desperately to that crazy body, with its gout, its asthma, its St. Vitus’ dance, and its six gallons of dropsy!  What could be the attraction of an existence where eight hours of every day were spent groaning in a chair, and sixteen wheezing in a bed?  “I would give one of these legs,” said he, “for another year of life.”  None the less, when the hour did at last strike, no man could have borne himself with more simple dignity and courage.  Say what you will of him, and resent him how you may, you can never open those four grey volumes without getting some mental stimulus, some desire for wider reading, some insight into human learning or character, which should leave you a better and a wiser man.

IV.