able enough, but not so here, for it was that impatience of the control of the laws, and indeed of all control, which characterizes the turbulent democrat of any period, and more especially our own. We scruple not to retort his epithet, he was himself a wretch, when he could thus stigmatize as "the lowest of all human beings," officials employed and paid by the state to collect one of the most important branches of the revenue, and whose bounden duty it became to detect any evasion, or concealment, like that which Michael Johnson seems to have been guilty of: for the facts are stated to have been "fairly against him." Under those circumstances, the officers appear to have adopted the more lenient course, by laying an information against him before the magistrates, which was doubtless less expensive and ruinous than a prosecution by the Exchequer—a forbearance which, if it did not elicit some gratitude from the Bookseller's Son, ought to have neutralized his resentment. How came Mr. Croker to overlook the coincidence between the Jacobite Johnson's hatred of an excise tax, and the democratical outcry against any tax they dislike, including tithes, which leads to unlawful combinations in Ireland at present? We do not know a more curious illustration of the commonplace truism, that "extremes always meet" than this affair affords, and—to improve the joke, we learn further, that, being one of those interesting men who are the founders of their own fortune, Mr. Croker was himself heretofore in an inferior grade of the Irish excise. This jostling might have been expected to induce some acerbity towards the departed philosopher: for could Johnson have been resuscitated, and had some humourist informed him that his biography was annotated by a quondam ganger of spirits above proof, he would have mustered as much ineffable contempt in the expression of his countenance, as the old Lord Auchenleek is described to have shown, while he commented in his native dialect on Jamie keeping such hopeful company.
The author of the Idler was unfortunate in pulling an old house over his head, when he vilified the Commissioners of
