spiration. When Burke showed the old
sage of Bolt Court over his fine house and pleasant gardens at
Beaconsfield, _Non invideo equidem_, Johnson said, with placid
good-will, _miror magis_. They always parted in the deep and pregnant
phrase of a sage of our own day, _except in opinion not disagreeing_.
In truth, the explanation of the sympathy between them is not far
to seek. We may well believe that Johnson was tacitly alive to the
essentially conservative spirit of Burke even in his most Whiggish
days. And Burke penetrated the liberality of mind in a Tory, who
called out with loud indignation that the Irish were in a most
unnatural state, for there the minority prevailed over the majority,
and the severity of the persecution exercised by the Protestants
of Ireland against the Catholics exceeded that of the ten historic
persecutions of the Christian Church.

The parties at Beaconsfield, and the evenings at the "Turk's Head" in
Gerard Street, were contemporary with the famous days at Holbach's
country house at Grandval. When we think of the reckless themes that
were so recklessly discussed by Holbach, Diderot, and the rest of that
indefatigable band, we feel that, as against the French philosophic
party, an English Tory like Johnson and an English Whig like Burke
would have found their own differences too minute to be worth
considering. If the group from the "Turk's Head" could have been
transported for an afternoon to Grandval, perhaps Johnson would have
been the less impatient and disgusted of the two. He had the capacity
of the more genial sort of casuist for playing with subjects, even
moral subjects, with the freedom, versatility, and ease that are
proper to literature. Burke, on the contrary, would not have failed
to see, as indeed we know that he did not fail to see, that a social
pandemonium was being prepared in this intellectual paradise of open
questions, where God and a future life, marriage and the family, every
dogma of religion, every prescription of morality, and all those
mysteries and pieties of human life which have been sanctified by the
reverence of ages, were being busily pulled to pieces as if they had
been toys in the hands of a company of sportive children. Even the
_Beggar's Opera_ Burke could not endure to hear praised for its wit
or its music, because his mind was filled by thought of its misplaced
levity, and he only saw the mischief which such a performance tended
to do to society. It would