But Johnson knew that he was better fitted to be a public oracle in Fleet Street than to catch the Speaker's eye at Westminster.
A true-born Englishman, he extolled the English virtues of honesty and courage. Of the 'English common soldier' he wrote:
"Our nation may boast, beyond any other people in the world, of a kind of epidemick bravery, diffused equally through all its ranks. We can shew a peasantry of heroes, and fill our armies with clowns, whose courage may vie with that of their general."
"Sir," he said at another time "you know courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other."
He himself had no small measure of it. True, he had an "aweful dread of death, or rather 'of something after death,'" but "he feared nothing else, not even what might occasion death":
"One day ... when two large dogs were fighting, he went up to them, and beat them till they separated; and at another time, when told of the danger there was that a gun might burst if charged with many balls, he put in six or seven, and fired it off against a wall.... He told me himself that one night he was attacked in the street by four men, to whom he would not yield, but kept them all at bay, till the watch came up, and carried both him and them to the round-house. In the play-house at Lichfield, as Mr Garrick informed me, Johnson having for a moment quitted a chair which was placed for him between the side-scenes, a gentleman took possession of it, and when Johnson on his return civilly demanded his seat, rudely refused to give it up; upon which Johnson laid hold of it, and tossed him and the chair into the pit."
Certainly Boswell may be allowed the phrase "much of a John Bull."
Honesty of heart, truth in the inward parts, was with Johnson the one thing needful.
To him no fraud could be innocent; the security of human society depended on truth and was weakened by a man whose words were at variance with his practice.