For all his love of a post-chaise, Johnson was happiest in London. "You yourself, Sir," said Boswell when they were in the Hebrides "have never seen, till now, any thing but your native island." "Johnson. 'But, Sir, by seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can shew.' Boswell. 'You have not seen Pekin.' Johnson. 'What is Pekin? Ten thousand Londoners would drive all the people of Pekin: they would drive them like deer.'"
The town, he said, was his element. He rejoiced in the "animated appearance" of Fleet Street and "the full tide of life" at Charing Cross, not so much because he loved shops and pavements better than fields and hedgerows, as because London held his friends, his books, and his amusements. Boswell once suggested that he himself might grow tired of the city if he lived continuously in it:
"Johnson. 'Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford'"; and to the very end he found that "such conversation as London affords, could be found nowhere else."
So, in his last illness in November 1784, he came to London to die. A month later he was buried in Westminster Abbey; Edmund Burke and Bennet Langton helped to bear the pall and Dr Taylor read the service. His monument, which Reynolds did not wish to see in the overcrowded Abbey, was erected in St Paul's Cathedral, and it is fitting that the nation's memorial of Dr Johnson should be within sound of Fleet Street.
If London meant life to Johnson, it meant the life of England. His prejudice against foreigners was of the old-fashioned kind:
"Like the ancient Greeks and Romans, he allowed himself to look upon all nations but his own as barbarians.... If he was particularly prejudiced against the Scots, it was because they were more in his way; because he thought their success in England rather exceeded the due proportion of their real merit.... He was indeed, if I may be allowed the phrase, much of a John Bull; much of a blunt true born Englishman."
Fleet Street in Johnson's day
His hatred of the Whigs was life-long and violent—the first Whig, he said, was the Devil; but whatever may be thought of his political opinions, there can be no doubt of his patriotism. What did he mean by a patriot [35]? Here is his definition: