and credulity--for rabid Toryism, High Church
doctrines verging on Romanism, and a confirmed belief in ghosts.
Imaginative romance in love and friendship is an elevating,
softening, and refining influence, which, especially when it forms
the basis of character, cannot co-exist with habitual rudeness,
uncouthness, arrogance, love of toadying, selfishness, and disregard
of what Johnson himself called the minor morals. Equally
heterogeneous is the "compound of the bright lady of fashion and the
ideal Urania." A goddess in crinoline would be a semi-mundane
creature at best; and the image unluckily suggests that Johnson was
unphilosophically, not to say vulgarly, fond of rank, fashion, and
their appendages.

His imagination, far from being of the richest or highest kind, was
insufficient for the attainment of dramatic excellence, was
insufficient even for the nobler parts of criticism. Nor had he much
to boast of in the way of delicacy of perception or sensibility. His
strength lay in his understanding; his most powerful weapon was
argument: his grandest quality was his good sense.

Thurlow, speaking of the choice of a successor to Lord Mansfield,
said, "I hesitated long between the intemperance of Kenyon, and the
corruption of Buller; not but what there was a d----d deal of
corruption in Kenyon's intemperance, and a d----d deal of
intemperance in Buller's corruption." Just so, we may hesitate long
between the romance and the worldliness of Johnson, not but what
there was a d----d deal of romance in his worldliness, and a d----d
deal of worldliness in his romance.

The late Lord Alvanley, whose heart was as inflammable as his wit was
bright, used to tell how a successful rival in the favour of a
married dame offered to retire from the field for _5001_., saying, "I
am a younger son: her husband does not give dinners, and they have no
country house: no _liaison_ suits me that does not comprise both." At
the risk of provoking Mr. Carlyle's anathema, I now avow my belief
that Johnson was, nay, boasted of being, open to similar influences;
and as for his "ideal Uranias," no man past seventy idealises women
with whom he has been corresponding for years about his or their
"natural history," to whom he sends recipes for "lubricity of the
bowels," with an assurance that it has had the best effect upon his
own.[1]

[Footnote 1: Letters, vol. ii. p. 397. The letter containing the
recipe actually begins "My dear Angel." Had Johnso