e formalities of social respect, and
would no doubt, like Mr. Gladstone, have repudiated with horror the
idea of being placed at dinner above the obscurest of peers. His bow
to an Archbishop is described as a studied elaboration of temporal and
spiritual homage, and he once went so far as to imply that nothing
would induce him to contradict a Bishop. There no doubt he promised
more than the presence of a stupid Bishop or a Whig Bishop would have
allowed him to perform. For no considerations of rank ever prevented
him from expressing his own opinions or trampling upon those of other
people. Except Swift, perhaps, he was the most independent man that
ever lived. Of Swift's jealous and angry arrogance he had nothing.
But he was full of what he {124} himself called "defensive pride."
That was his answer when he was accused of showing at least as much
pride as Lord Chesterfield in the affair of the Dictionary; "but mine,"
he said, "was defensive pride." He was always on his guard against the
very appearance of accepting the patronage of the great. Even
Thackeray's Argus eye could not have detected a grain of snobbery in
him. At Inverary he would not let Boswell call before dinner lest it
should look like fishing for an invitation; and when he dined there the
next day and sat next the Duke, he did not refrain, even in that Whig
holy of holies, from chaffing about one of the Campbells who "had been
bred a violent Whig but afterwards kept better company and became a
Tory"! So once, when he dined at Bowood with Lord Shelburne he refused
to repeat a story at the request of his host, saying that he would not
be dragged in as story-teller to the company. And he would never give
the authority for any fact he mentioned, if the authority happened to
be a lord. Indeed he carried his sturdy independence so far that in
his last years he fancied that his company was no longer desired in
these august circles. "I never courted the great," he said; "they sent
for me, but I think they now give me up"; adding, in reply to Boswell's
polite disbelief, "No, sir; great lords and great {125} ladies don't
love to have their mouths stopped."

Here again Johnson represented the typical Englishman as foreigners
then and since have read his character. An accepter and respecter of
rank as a social fact and a political principle, he was as proud in his
way as the proudest man in the land. Tory as he was, for him every
freeborn Englishman was