Mackintosh, that Gibbon might have been taken from a
corner of Burke's mind without ever being missed. Though Burke and
Gibbon constantly met, it is not likely that, until the Revolution,
there was much intimacy between them, in spite of the respect which
each of them might well have had for the vast knowledge of the other.
When the _Decline and Fall_ was published, Burke read it as everybody
else did; but he told Reynolds that he disliked the style, as very
affected, mere frippery and tinsel. Sir Joshua himself was neither
a man of letters nor a keen politician; but he was full of literary
ideas and interests, and he was among Burke's warmest and most
constant friends, following him with an admiration and reverence that
even Johnson sometimes thought excessive. The reader of Reynolds's
famous Discourses will probably share the wonder of his
contemporaries, that a man whose time was so absorbed in the practice
of his art, should have proved himself so excellent a master in the
expression of some of its principles. Burke was commonly credited with
a large share in their composition, but the evidence goes no further
than that Reynolds used to talk them over with him. The friendship
between the pair was full and unalloyed. What Burke admired in the
great artist was his sense and his morals, no less than his genius;
and to a man of his fervid and excitable temper there was the most
attractive of all charms in Sir Joshua's placidity, gentleness,
evenness, and the habit, as one of his friends described it, of being
the same all the year round. When Reynolds died in 1792, he appointed
Burke one of his executors, and left him a legacy of two thousand
pounds, besides cancelling a bond of the same amount.

Johnson, however, is the only member of that illustrious company who
can profitably be compared with Burke in strength and impressiveness
of personality, in a large sensibility at once serious and genial, in
brooding care for all the fulness of human life. This striking pair
were the two complements of a single noble and solid type, holding
tenaciously, in a century of dissolvent speculation, to the best ideas
of a society that was slowly passing. They were powerless to hinder
the inevitable transformation. One of them did not even dimly
foresee it. But both of them help us to understand how manliness and
reverence, strength and tenderness, love of truth and pity for man,
all flourished under old institutions and old ways of t