be
impressed by his profound and awe-inspiring sincerity. Mrs. Thrale
says that when he repeated the _Dies Irae_ "he never could pass the
stanza ending _Tantus labor non sit cassus_ without bursting into a
flood of tears"; and another witness records how one night at a dinner
where some one quoted the nineteenth psalm his worn and harsh features
were transformed, and "his face was almost as if it had been the face
of an angel" as he recited Addison's noble version of that psalm.
Phrases that came unbidden to his voice or pen show the same constant
sense of this life as a thing to be lived in the sight and presence of
Eternity. When at Boswell's request he sends him a letter of advice,
one of his sentences is "I am now writing, and you, when you read this,
are reading, under the Eye of Omnipresence." {141} So on one occasion
he said, "The better a man is, the more afraid he is of death, having a
clearer view of infinite purity"; and he would quote Law's remark that
"every man knows something worse of himself than he is sure of in
others." Such sayings do not come to the lips of men to whom the life
of the spirit and the conscience is not a daily and hourly reality.
That it was to Johnson; and no one understands him who does not lay
stress on it. It does not always appear in such grave guise as in
these instances, but it is always there. We may take our leave of it
as we see it in simpler and happier shape in Boswell's account of
himself and Johnson sharing a bedroom at Glen Morrison. "After we had
offered up our private devotions and had chatted a little from our
beds, Dr. Johnson said 'God bless us both for Jesus Christ's sake!
Good-night.' I pronounced 'Amen.' He fell asleep immediately."

A serious conviction held by a human being is generally found to be an
inner citadel surrounded by a network of prejudices. It was only
Johnson's intimate friends who were admitted into the central fortress
of his faith: the rest of the world saw it plainly indeed, but did not
get nearer than the girdle of defensive prejudices outside, and to them
they {142} often got nearer than they liked. Whether people discovered
that Johnson was a Christian or not, they were quite certain to
discover that he was a Churchman. His High Church and Tory guns were
always ready for action, and Lord Auchinleck is perhaps the only
recorded assailant who succeeded in silencing them. The praise he gave
to the dearest of his friends, "He hate