ts to deal with the
constitutional aspect of the question, the real strength of his case is
to be found in passages like the following:

'The grievance which has produced all this tempest of outrage, the
oppression in which all other oppressions are included, the invasion
which has left us no property, the alarm that suffers no patriot to
sleep in quiet, is comprised in a vote of the House of Commons, by
which the freeholders of Middlesex are deprived of a Briton's
birthright--representation in Parliament. They have, indeed, received
the usual writ of election; but that writ, alas! was malicious
mockery; they were insulted with the form, but denied the reality, for
there was one man excepted from their choice. The character of the
man, thus fatally excepted, I have no purpose to delineate. Lampoon
itself would disdain to speak ill of him of whom no man speaks well.
Every lover of liberty stands doubtful of the fate of posterity,
because the chief county in England cannot take its representative
from a gaol.'

Temperament was of course at the bottom of this indifference. Johnson
was of melancholy humour and profoundly sceptical. Cynical he was not--he
loved his fellow-men; his days were full of

'Little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.'

But he was as difficult to rouse to enthusiasm about humanity as is Mr.
Justice Stephen. He pitied the poor devils, but he did not believe in
them. They were neither happy nor wise, and he saw no reason to believe
they would ever become either. 'Leave me alone,' he cried to the sultry
mob, bawling 'Wilkes and Liberty.' 'I at least am not ashamed to own
that I care for neither the one nor the other.'

No man, however, resented more fiercely than Johnson any unnecessary
interference with men who were simply going their own way. The
Highlanders only knew Gaelic, yet political wiseacres were to be found
objecting to their having the Bible in their own tongue. Johnson flew to
arms: he wrote one of his monumental letters; the opposition was quelled,
and the Gael got his Bible. So too the wicked interference with Irish
enterprise, so much in vogue during the last century, infuriated him.
'Sir,' he said to Sir Thomas Robinson, 'you talk the language of a
savage. What, sir! would you prevent any people from feeding themselves,
if by any honest means they can do so?'

Were Johnson to come to life again, total