"Every man" he said (and here John Bull spoke again) "has a right to utter what he thinks truth and every other man has a right to knock him down for it."
To stretch a point in talking, in the use of a conventional phrase, did not matter. Common politeness, or the course of argument might demand it. Did he not himself often 'talk for victory'?
What he insisted on was that men should not deceive themselves and others by thinking foolishly. "Clear your mind" he said "of cant."
"Such," to quote Boswell for the last time, "was Samuel Johnson." Though he was the foremost man of letters of his generation, it is not for his scholarship or his writings, but rather for his pluck and his patriotism, his humour and his oddities, his blunt common-sense and his large humanity, and, above all, for the expression of these qualities in his talk, that he is best loved and remembered. For to appreciate Johnson's talk one need not be literary; it is enough to be English.
FOOTNOTES:
[35] When he made the often-quoted remark 'Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel' Johnson was referring to 'patriots' only in the party sense, to those who made patriotism a "cloak for self-interest."
[36] Buckingham House, which stood on the site of the present Buckingham Palace.