The conversation next turned on the Philosophical Transactions, when Johnson observed that they had now a better method of arranging their materials than formerly. "Ay, (said the King,) they are obliged to Dr. Johnson for that;" for his Majesty had heard and remembered the circumstance, which Johnson himself had forgot.
His Majesty expressed a desire to have the literary biography of this country ably executed, and proposed to Dr. Johnson to undertake it. Johnson signified his readiness to comply with his Majesty's wishes.
During the whole of this interview, Johnson talked to his Majesty with profound respect, but still in his firm manly manner, with a sonorous voice, and never in that subdued tone which is commonly used at the levee and in the drawing-room. After the King withdrew, Johnson shewed himself highly pleased with his Majesty's conversation and gracious behaviour. He said to Mr. Barnard, "Sir, they may talk of the King as they will; but he is the finest gentleman I have ever seen." And he afterwards observed to Mr. Langton, "Sir, his manners are those of as fine a gentleman as we may suppose Lewis the Fourteenth, or Charles the Second."
Nothing in this conversation betrays symptoms of that state which he complains of in his devotional record (on the 2nd of August, 1767) when he says that he had been disturbed and unsettled for a long time, and had been without resolution to apply to study or to business. Half of this year he passed at a distance from the metropolis, and chiefly at Lichfield, where he prayed fervently by the death-bed of the old servant of his family, Catherine Chambers, leaving her with a fond farewell, and many tears. There was no greater proof of the goodness of Johnson's nature, than his attachment to his domestics. Soon after this he placed Francis Barber, a negro boy who waited on him, at a school at Hertfordshire; and, during his education there, encouraged him to good behaviour by frequent and very kind letters. It is on such occasions that we are ready to allow the justice of Goldsmith's vindication of his friend, that he had nothing of the bear but the skin.
In the two succeeding years he continued to labour under the same restlessness and anxiety; again sought for relief in a long visit to Oxford, and another to Brighthelmstone with the Thrales; and produced nothing but a Prologue to one of Goldsmith's comedies.
The repeated expulsion of Wilkes from his seat, by a vote of the House of Commons, had (in 1770) thrown the nation into a ferment. Johnson was roused to take the side of the ministry; and endeavoured in a pamphlet, called the False Alarm, as much by ridicule as by argument, to support a violent and arbitrary measure. It appears, both from his conversation and his writings, that he thought there was a point at which resistance might become justifiable; and, surely it is more advisable to check the encroachments of power at their beginning, than to delay opposition, till it cannot be resorted to without greater hazard to the public safety. The ministry were happily compelled to give way. They were, however, glad to have so powerful an arm to fight their battles, and, in the next year (1771) employed him in a worthier cause. In his tract on the Falkland Islands, the materials for which were furnished him by Government, he appears to have much the better of the argument; for he has to shew the folly of involving the nation in a war for a questionable right, and a possession of doubtful advantage; but his invective against his opponents is very coarse; he does not perform the work of dissection neatly: he mangles rather than cuts. When he applies the word "gabble" to the elocution of Chatham, we are tempted to compare him to one of the baser fowl, spoken of by an ancient poet, that clamour against the bird of Jove.
Not many copies of this pamphlet had been dispersed, when Lord North stopped the sale, and caused some alterations to be made, for reasons which the author did not himself distinctly comprehend. Johnson's own opinion of these two political essays was, that there was a subtlety of disquisition in the first, that was worth all the fire of the second. When questioned by Boswell as to the truth of a report that they had obtained for him an addition to his pension of 200_l_. a year, he answered that, excepting what had been paid him by the booksellers, he had not got a farthing for them.
About this time, there was a project for enabling him to take a more distinguished part in politics. The proposition for bringing him into the House of Commons came from Strahan the printer, who was himself one of the members; Boswell has preserved the letter in which this zealous friend to Johnson represented to one of the Secretaries of State the services which might reasonably be expected from his eloquence and fidelity. The reasons which rendered the application ineffectual have not been disclosed to us; but it may be questioned whether his powers of reasoning could have been readily called forth on a stage so different from any to which he had been hitherto accustomed; whether so late in life he could have obtained the habit of attending to speakers, sometimes dull, and sometimes perplexed; or whether that dictatorial manner which easily conquered opposition in a small circle, might not have been borne down by resentment or scorn in a large and mixed assembly. Johnson would most willingly have made the experiment; and when Reynolds repeated what Burke had said of him, that if he had come early into parliament, he would certainly have been the greatest speaker that ever was there, exclaimed, "I should like to try my hand now." That we may proceed without interruption to the end of Johnson's political career, it should here he told that he published (in 1774) a short pamphlet in support of his friend, Mr. Thrale, who at that time was one of the candidates in a contested election, and a zealous supporter of the government. But his devotion to the powers that be, never led him to so great lengths as in the following year (1775), when he wrote Taxation no Tyranny: an Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress. Now that we look back with impartiality and coolness to the subject of dispute between the mother country and her colonies, there are few, I believe, who do not acknowledge the Americans to have been driven into resistance by claims, which, if they were not palpably unlawful, were at least highly inexpedient and unjust. But Johnson was no statist. With the nature of man taken individually and in the detail, he was well acquainted; but of men as incorporated into society, of the relations between the governors and the governed, and of all the complicated interests of polity and of civil life, his knowledge was very limited. Biography was his favourite study; history, his aversion. Sooner than hear of the Punic war (says Murphy), he would be rude to the person that introduced the subject; and, as he told Mr. Thrale, when a gentleman one day spoke to him at the club of Catiline's conspiracy, he withdrew his attention, and thought about Tom Thumb. In his Taxation no Tyranny, having occasion to notice a reference made by the American Congress to a passage in Montesquieu, he calls him in contempt the fanciful Montesquieu. Yet this is the man, of whom Burke, when his just horror of every thing fanciful in politics was at its height, has passed the noblest eulogium that one modern has ever made on another, and which the reader will pardon me if in my veneration for a great name I place here as an antidote to the detraction of Johnson.
Place before your eyes such a man as Montesquieu. Think of a genius not born in every country, or every time; a man gifted by nature with a penetrating aquiline eye; with a judgment prepared with the most extensive erudition; with an herculean robustness of mind, and nerves not to be broken with labour; a man who could spend twenty years in one pursuit. Think of a man, like the universal patriarch of Milton (who had drawn up before him in his prophetic vision, the whole series of the generations which were to issue from his loins), a man capable of placing in review, after having brought together, from the east, the west, the north, and the south, from the coarseness of the rudest barbarism, to the most refined and subtle civilization, all the schemes of government which had ever prevailed amongst mankind, weighing, measuring, collating, and comparing them all, joining fact with theory, and calling into council, upon all this infinite assemblage of things, all the speculations which have fatigued the understandings of profound reasoners in all times! Let us then consider that all these were but so many preparatory steps to qualify a man, and such a man, tinctured with no national prejudice, with no domestic affection to admire, and to hold out to the admiration of mankind the constitution of England.—Appeal from the Nero to the Old Institutes, at the end.
It is to be feared, that the diploma of Doctor of Laws, which was sent to Johnson in the same year (1775), at the recommendation of Lord North, at that time Chancellor of the University, and Prime Minister, was in some measure intended to be the reward of his obsequiousness. In this instrument, he is called, with an hyperbole of praise which the University would perhaps now he more cautious of applying to any individual, "In Literarum Republica Princeps jam et Primarius."