perhaps have changed it before, with the like opportunities of instruction. This was then the state of popery; every artifice was used to shew it in its fairest form: and it must be owned to be a religion of external appearance sufficiently attractive.
‘It is natural to hope that a comprehensive is likewise an elevated soul, and that whoever is wise is also honest. I am willing to believe that Dryden, having employed his mind, active as it was, upon different studies, and filled it, capacious as it was, with other materials, came unprovided to the controversy, and wanted rather skill to discover the right than virtue to maintain it. But enquiries into the heart are not for man; we must now leave him to his Judge.’
Nothing is more admirable in Johnson than his splendid tolerance of bad characters. Boswell was perhaps a little timid in his record of this; it appears most luminously in the conversations recorded by Miss Burney. She stayed with the Thrales at Streatham in August 1778; Johnson was in the house; he had just finished the Life of Dryden, and was engaged on Butler. Some passages of his conversation shall be quoted here, though from a well-known source, because they show the author of the Lives of the Poets at his ease, and exhibit in him that broad enjoyment of human character which fitted him for his biographical task. When mention was made at table that Johnson would not hear Sir John Hawkins abused, he rose to the occasion. ‘As to Sir John,’ he said, ‘why really I believe him to be an honest man at the bottom: but to be sure he is penurious, and he is mean, and it must be owned he has a degree of brutality, and a tendency to savageness, that cannot easily be defended.’ ‘We all laughed (says
