Sir, we are here as Christians
in Turkey." These ingeniously exact analogies were always a favourite
weapon with him; and perhaps the most brilliant of them all is one he
used on this same subject in reply to Robertson, who said to him in
London, "Dr. Johnson, allow me to say that in one respect I have the
advantage of you; when you were in Scotland you would not come to hear
any of our preachers, whereas, when I am here, I attend your public
worship without scruple, and, indeed, with great satisfaction." "Why,
sir," said Johnson, "that is not so extraordinary: the King of Siam
sent ambassadors to Louis the Fourteenth: but Louis the Fourteenth sent
none to the King of Siam." This topic also enjoys another distinction.
It is one of many proofs of the superlative excellence of Johnson's
talk that it cannot be imitated. Hundreds of clever men have made the
attempt, but, with the exception of a single sentence, not one of these
manufactured utterances could impose for an instant upon a real
Johnsonian. That single exception deals with this same
anti-Presbyterian prejudice. It is variously inscribed to Thorold
Rogers and to Birkbeck Hill, the most Johnsonian of all men. It
supposes that Boswell and Johnson are walking in Oxford, and Boswell,
endowed with {147} the gift of prophecy, asks Johnson what he would say
if he were told that a hundred years after his death the Oxford
University Press would allow his Dictionary to be re-edited by a Scotch
Presbyterian. "Sir," replies Johnson, "to be facetious it is not
necessary to be indecent." Here and here alone is something which
might deceive the very elect.

In several of these last utterances the bias is as much anti-Scotch as
anti-Presbyterian. Of course Johnson, as his _Journey to the Western
Islands_ amply proves, had no serious feeling against Scotchmen as
Scotchmen like the settled convictions which made him dislike
Presbyterians. But then, as always, the Scot had a specially "gude
conceit" of himself and a clannish habit of pushing the interest of his
brother Scots wherever he went, so that it was commonly thought that to
let a Scot into your house or business was not only to let in one
conceited fellow, but to be certain of half a dozen more to follow.
The English were then still so far from their present admiring
acceptance of Scotsmen as their ordinary rulers in Church and State
that they had not even begun to think of them as their equals.
Scotland was a