put thus: Liberalism guarantees the liberties of the extraordinary man, Toryism of the ordinary man. Thus Liberalism demands that everyone who wants to write a pamphlet should be allowed to write a pamphlet, Toryism that everyone who wants to have a drink should be allowed to have a drink. Of those liberties which the ordinary man does not wish to exercise it is more contemptuous-perhaps, in all but the sanest Toryism, too contemptuous. Be that as it may. Take, at any rate, Johnson's excellent sense about the liberty of the Press.

They make a rout about universal liberty without considering that all that is to be valued, or indeed can be enjoyed by individuals, is private liberty. Political liberty is good only so far as it produces private liberty. Now, sir, there is the liberty of the Press, which you know is a constant topic. Suppose you and I and two hundred more were constrained from printing our thoughts what then? What proportion would that restraint upon us bear to the private happiness of the nation?

Or his characteristic comment on the fuss of the Middlesex election.

"A Government, of which an erroneous or an unjust representation of Middlesex is the greatest crime that interest can discover or malice can upbraid, is government approaching nearer to perfection than any that experience has known or history related."

It is then important to get some notion of the position in the world to which such a man as Michael Johnson would expect his son to aspire. He would expect him to grow up ready to accept the rule of a governing class to

which he did not belong. He would equally expect him to grow up conscious of his dignity as a man even before members of that governing class, ready to behave, indeed, as his son did afterwards behave before Lord Chesterfield or the dons of Pembroke, as ready to write of a courtier as one "whose business is to watch the looks of a being weak and foolish as himself" as he was to knock down the insolent Osborne, the bookseller, or to toss from the circle into the stalls the rash man who stole his seat in the theatre. Indeed, one cannot better sum up Johnsonian Toryism than by saying that it is built upon the Socratic maxim of each man to his trade and the Christian dogma of the equality of man. "The scholar's rank, like the Christian's," Johnson was to say, "levels all distinctions of rank." "But in this," engagingly adds that gorgeous fool, Sir John Hawkins, "he was mistaken." The relationship of governor to governed Johnson expressed in the phrase" a casual superiority over those who are by nature equal to us."

One day, when the matter happened to crop up in conversation, Johnson said to Boswell, "You are a gentleman; I am not." Johnson certainly was not a gentlemanthat is, he was not born into the governing class-nor would he ever have dreamed of claiming to be. He could hardly tell who was his grandfather. Yet he did not for that reason think that Boswell was in any way a better man than he. Still less was the accident that Boswell had inherited certain social duties from which he himself was exempt any reason why they should not argue with one another across a tavern-table in perfect equality. About the governing class he had no more illusions than had his enemy, Lord Chesterfield, whom he so curiously resembled and from whom he so curiously differed. Their opinions upon it were very similar." It is wonderful, sir," said Johnson," with how little real superiority of mind men can make an

eminent figure in public life." Such figures were, to quote Carlyle, but " as apples or horse-dung on the top of the current." Johnson never made the snob's blunder of confounding the lord with the man nor of imagining that the horse-dung propelled itself by its own energy.

When one runs through a list of his friends, one finds that they were chosen quite impartially from those who were and those who were not gentlemen. He had neither the snob's prejudice in favour of gentlemen nor the snob's prejudice against them. Boswell, of course, was a gentleman; Garrick as obviously was not; Beauclerk and Langton were; Thrale, I suppose, not-Murphy says of him, with a certain carefulness of accuracy, that he had "the habits of a gentleman "-Goldsmith and Burkethough the word has very little meaning when applied to an Irishman-not. Johnson, one may guess, would have understood very well the French revolutionary who objected to the concentration of political power into the hands of a class. He would have found it much harder to understand the modern attitude by which we all have a vote but one does not speak to the servants, by which we are free and equal and all privileges of rank are abolished, so we club together and elect a lord.

Everybody is familiar with the story of how Johnson challenged Mrs. Macaulay, the Radical, to prove the sincerity of her equalitarian opinions by bidding her butler sit down to her table. Not everybody remarks upon the most interesting lesson to be learnt from that story-the lesson that it does not, at that date, seem to have been thought especially odd to carry on such a conversation before a servant. The inequality between servant and master, from which we still suffer to-day, was, it seems, a special vice of Victorian England. The Continent has never properly had it. The Middle Ages did not have it. The Shakespearean masters and servants knew nothing of

it, nor did the masters and servants of Sir Walter Scott. In the seventeenth century the Pepys sent for their servants to join in their games as a matter of course. Only the worst of the eighteenth century tried to insist on it.

It is characteristic that the first incident-or one of the first incidents—in Johnson's life was that of being taken by his mother to be touched by Queen Anne. Johnson" had a confused but somehow a sort of solemn recollection of a lady in diamonds and a long black hood." As they returned from the touching in the stage-coach, he records, "We were troublesome to the passengers. . . . I was sick; one woman fondled me, the other was disgusted." One can believe it.

Macaulay jeers away the tale. Leslie Stephen is content to note that "disease and superstition stood by his cradle." It is, I think, foolish to dismiss it so cavalierly. Whether or not the Kings of England ever had a power of curing disease by a touch I do not know. The evidence is not conclusive. I am willing to be sceptical, but I am not willing to be more than sceptical. The King is a sacramental person. He has authority over his subjects because it has been conferred on him by God, and that God, while conferring the right to rule, should also have conferred the power to heal, does not seem to be inherently unreasonable. If the Johnsons were superstitious, they are to be blamed, for superstition is a great vice. Yet it seems that their conduct was that of the entirely rational sceptic. They thought that the evidence did not clearly show whether the touch was effective or not; to try it might do good and could not do harm. They tried, having no especial hopes, and, of course, it did no good.

All the world knows of the superficial oddities of Samuel Johnson-that he collected orange-peel; that he touched railings; that he contorted himself so queerly as sometimes to terrify those who saw him; that he rolled down a hill in

Lincolnshire; that he ran a race with Baretti in the rain in Paris; that he ran another race with a young lady in Devonshire and kicked his shoes off that he might run the better; that he talked with Mrs. Thrale through a conventgrill; that he challenged a don " eminent for learning and worth" and "of an ancient and respectable family in Berkshire" to climb a wall with him. All the world knows these things, and much of the world is content to know very little else about him, to think of him as a buffoon figureas it were a Falstaff of reality, a subsidiary and historical member of the Pickwick Club. His oddities Johnson himself and Reynolds ascribed merely to habit. Doubtless they were caused, or partly caused, by some physical affliction, and, had he lived at a later date, science would have been able, if not to cure, at least to name them. In a ruder age such afflictions had to be suffered unchristened.

Yet Johnson, though he was, it must be admitted, extravagantly eccentric in the fields in which men ought to be moderately eccentric, yet was eccentric only in those fields. Men ought to think alike but behave differently, for reason is absolute, taste personal. Johnson certainly dressed differently from his contemporaries, if only because his linen was dirtier and his wig more scorched; where he thought differently from them, it was usually only because he thought better.

It is the fashion, on the other hand, to say that Johnson had a conventional mind. Strictly, it is not possible to have a conventional mind. It is possible to have conventional opinions, but reason a man either uses or he does not use. Conventional opinions I do not think that Johnson did have. Often, it is true, his opinion agreed with the conventional opinion, as does that of every sensible person. But it would be difficult-though, I admit, not impossible -to find a conventional opinion which he held that was not also a true opinion. If that be so, you have proved nothing