a type of the lawyer who fights his way to
success and cares for little else. But he was a true and generous
friend to Johnson, for whose proposed journey to Italy he offered to
provide the means. And if his career allowed any one to think meanly
of his abilities, Johnson's opinion of them would be a sufficient
answer. He always maintained that "to make a speech in a public
assembly is a knack"; it {241} was the question and answer of
conversation, he thought, that showed what a man's real abilities were.
And out of that test Thurlow came so triumphantly that Johnson said of
him, "I would prepare myself for no man in England but Lord Thurlow.
When I am to meet with him I should wish to know a day before." He
paid him the same compliment more than once; and the man to whom he
paid it cannot have been the least interesting element in that
interesting circle. A very different figure was the infidel and
demagogue Wilkes, of whom Johnson had used the most violent language in
public and private, but with whom, under the dexterous management of
Boswell, he came to be on terms of friendly acquaintance. The story of
how Boswell brought them together, of which Burke said that there was
"nothing to equal it in the whole history of the _Corps Diplomatique_,"
is one of the very best things in the _Life_. Of course they never
became friendly, but they met occasionally and Johnson sent Wilkes a
presentation copy of his _Lives_. The acquaintance is one of the most
striking instances of the real tolerance which lay behind Johnson's
outbursts of prejudice. He and Wilkes had nothing in common but quick
brains, witty tongues, social gifts and dislike of the Scotch; but that
was enough. {242} Johnson would have sympathized with the respectable
freeholder of Middlesex who, when canvassed for his vote by Wilkes
replied, "Vote for you, sir! I would rather vote for the devil!" But
he would have sympathized even more with the candidate's reply:
"But--in case your friend does not stand?"

No one will say that a set of acquaintances which stretched from Burke
at one end to Wilkes at the other did not provide strong and varied
political meat for the society to which they belonged. It is just the
same when we look beyond politics. If all Johnson's acquaintances
could have been gathered into one room, the unlikeliest people would
have found themselves together. The saintly John Wesley, for instance,
and the very far from saintly Topha