ut interruption to the end of Johnson's political
career, it should here he told that he published (in 1774) a short
pamphlet in support of his friend, Mr. Thrale, who at that time was one
of the candidates in a contested election, and a zealous supporter of
the government. But his devotion to the powers that be, never led him to
so great lengths as in the following year (1775), when he wrote Taxation
no Tyranny: an Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American
Congress. Now that we look back with impartiality and coolness to the
subject of dispute between the mother country and her colonies, there
are few, I believe, who do not acknowledge the Americans to have been
driven into resistance by claims, which, if they were not palpably
unlawful, were at least highly inexpedient and unjust. But Johnson was
no statist. With the nature of man taken individually and in the detail,
he was well acquainted; but of men as incorporated into society, of the
relations between the governors and the governed, and of all the
complicated interests of polity and of civil life, his knowledge was
very limited. Biography was his favourite study; history, his aversion.
Sooner than hear of the Punic war (says Murphy), he would be rude to the
person that introduced the subject; and, as he told Mr. Thrale, when a
gentleman one day spoke to him at the club of Catiline's conspiracy, he
withdrew his attention, and thought about Tom Thumb. In his Taxation no
Tyranny, having occasion to notice a reference made by the American
Congress to a passage in Montesquieu, he calls him in contempt the
fanciful Montesquieu. Yet this is the man, of whom Burke, when his just
horror of every thing fanciful in politics was at its height, has passed
the noblest eulogium that one modern has ever made on another, and which
the reader will pardon me if in my veneration for a great name I place
here as an antidote to the detraction of Johnson.

Place before your eyes such a man as Montesquieu. Think of a genius not
born in every country, or every time; a man gifted by nature with a
penetrating aquiline eye; with a judgment prepared with the most
extensive erudition; with an herculean robustness of mind, and nerves
not to be broken with labour; a man who could spend twenty years in one
pursuit. Think of a man, like the universal patriarch of Milton (who had
drawn up before him in his prophetic vision, the whole series of the
generations which were to issue from hi