s
to the public, which I here dare you to refute. Your rage I defy.
Your abilities, since your Homer, are not so formidable, and what I
hear of your morals inclines me to pay regard not to what you shall say
but to what you shall prove. You may print this if you will.

"SAM. JOHNSON."

{118}

The first thing then to get clear about Johnson is that there was a
very vigorous animal at the base of the mind and soul that we know in
his books and in his talk. Part of the universal interest he has
inspired lies in that. The people who put off the body in this life
may be divine, though that is far from certain, but they are apt to
affect us little because we do not feel them to be human. There is
much in Johnson--a turn for eating seven or eight peaches in the garden
before breakfast, for instance--which gives unregenerate beings like
schoolboys a feeling of confidence at once. And older persons, not yet
altogether regenerate, are apt to have a weakness for a man who was
willing to be knocked up at three in the morning by some young
roysterers, and turn out with them for a "frisk" about the streets and
taverns and down the river in a boat. The "follies of the wise" are
never altogether follies. Johnson at midnight outside the Temple
roaring with Gargantuan laughter that echoed from Temple Bar to what we
now call Ludgate Circus is a picture his wisest admirers would be
slowest to forget. The laugh and the frisk and the peaches are so many
hall-marks to assure us that the philosopher is still a man and has not
forgotten that he was once a boy: that he has always had five senses
like the rest of us; and {119} that if he bids us take a grave view of
life it is not because he knows nothing about it.

Another note of catholicity in Johnson is his wide experience of social
conditions. The man in him never for an instant disappeared in the
"gentleman." Very few of our great men of letters have ever known
poverty in the real sense of the word, in the way the really poor know
it. Johnson had, and he never forgot it. It is true that like most
people who have known what it is to be uncertain about to-morrow's
dinner he did not much care to talk about these experiences. No one
does perhaps except politicians who find them useful bids for
popularity at a mass meeting. Johnson at any rate when he had arrived
at comparatively easy social conditions frankly admitted that he did
not like "low life." His sympathy with the