Samuel Johnson: The Critical Heritage

DECLAMATION

[quotes first five paragraphs.]

We shall make no other observation on the foregoing passage, than—that it is extremely characteristic of the writer.

ARGUMENT

In discussing the question ‘whether a member expelled, can be so disqualified by a vote of the house, as that he shall be no longer eligible by lawful electors?’ he has the following argument against those who maintain ‘that expulsion is only a dismission of the representative to his constituents, with such a testimony against him as his sentence may comprise.’

[quotes ‘and that if his constituents, notwithstanding’ to ‘buy them again at a higher price’, Works, 1792, viii. 77–8.]

This back stroke, by which many of our author’s friends in that House whose wisdom and rectitude he is now so zealously vindicating, are, perhaps, harder hit than he was aware of, seems not much unlike the action represented in the noted picture of the country-parson and his wife, riding double:—while the good man is lifting his staff on high, to smite his sluggish beast, he unwittingly breaks the head of the poor woman who sits behind him.

RIDICULE

The following account of the progress of a petition has humour, at least, if not the most scrupulous verity.

[quotes ‘An ejected placeman’ to ‘tax upon his windows’, Works, viii. 87–90.]

After all, however, that ingenuity itself may find to urge in behalf of the measures of administration, and the power, wisdom, and justice of parliaments, ought not some regard to be had to the plain common-sense of the people, who, as an acute writer observes *, ‘feel that the right of election, that great foundation and best security of all their other rights, has been violently taken away from them, by the sole authority of those, who were chosen for their defence.’

39. Percival Stockdale, The Remonstrance

1770

Extract from pp. 15–19.
Stockdale (1736–1811) was for a time editor of the Critical Review and of the Universal Magazine, and later biographer of Waller (see Lives, i. 267 n. 4) and Thomson.

[Britons are urged to abandon belief in the ‘Pretended patriotism’ of men like Wilkes and William Beckford, and to rely on trustworthy guides like Johnson.]

And you, great JOHNSON, to your latest breath,
Shall find your ruling object strong in death;
Such in those moments as in all the past,
‘Receive thy votary, Heaven,’ shall be your last.
Thou nobly singular, immortal man!
Whom nought could e’er divert from virtue’s plan!
The cruel straits, with genius oft at strife,
Which make a feeling nature sick of life;
A mortal stab to fine existence give,
And kill the man who should for ever live;
Thy steddy purpose never could controul,
Nor check one vigorous effort of thy soul.
Thy glorious purpose didst thou still sustain,
And fortune frowned, and envy snarled in vain.
Can the dim taper supersede the day?
Can buzzing myriads hide the solar ray?
Ah! no: these objects hardly meet the sight;
As VENUS dwindles on returning light.
Never wilt thou retain the hoarded store,
In virtue affluent, but in metal poor;
Thou feelest, oft, the sympathy of grief,
And oft thy hand extends the kind relief:
The tears of orphans melt thee as they roll;
The widow’s misery shakes the sage’s soul.
Thy honest censure, and thy honest praise,
Perhaps ill suit our false, and polished days;
Timid politeness says thou art severe;
But simple virtue loves the tongue sincere.
Say, to a blockhead, is it love, or spite,
To mortify him ne’er again to write;
To rescue from his own aerial views,
A solitary man without a muse?
Great is thy prose; great thy poetic strain;
Yet to dull coxcombs are they great in vain.
When weak opponents would thy strength defeat,
Thy words, like babbling parrots, they repeat;
But mixed with theirs, the vigour all is fled,
The letter living, but the spirit dead:
Their want of powers these insects will not see;
Bombast in them, is the sublime in thee.
Say, should a swain a royal mandate bear?
Say, should a dwarf the warriour’s plumage wear?
Poorly a GARRICK, HOLLAND strove to show,¹
In frantic terror, or in plaintive woe.
At length thy Sovereign gave his bounteous aid
To worth sequestered in the private shade.
Pensions, thus fixed, an equal honour bring
To the deserving subject, and the King:
Yet at thy pension rave the callous tribe,
Who bluster only to obtain a bribe.
Must pensions always honesty discard?
Should merit never meet it’s just reward?
‘Pensioner JOHNSON,’ bawls the venal knave:
But has thy conduct marked thee for a slave?
Find in the man some more material flaw;
Nor public guilt from public honour draw.

The throb of virtue is to them unknown;
And hence they form thy image from their own.
Keen in their breasts the lust of gold they feel;
For gold they would destroy the public weal;
Shake o’er the land oppression’s iron rod,
Betray their father, and blaspheme their GOD.
Go on, heroic man! thy setting sun
Will sink, majestic, as thy race begun;
A favourite, thou, of Heaven, and of the Nine;
Through BRITAIN’S latest ages born to shine:
Heedless of ceasure, when for justice warm,
And from thy conscience flowed the False Alarm.

40. John Wilkes, A Letter to Samuel Johnson LL.D.

1770

Extracts from pp. 5–8, 32–8, 50–4.
In The False Alarm Wilkes is described as a ‘retailer of sedition and obscenity’; Johnson adds for good measure that ‘lampoon itself would disdain to speak ill of him, of whom no man speaks well.’ Experienced in abuse, Wilkes here replies anonymously to Johnson’s. See Introduction, pp. 6, 28.

Sir,

Without hesitation or apology, I address myself to YOU, as the undoubted author of the ministerial rhapsody that has been so industriously circulated under the title of The False Alarm. You have ambitiously declared yourself the spitter forth of that effusion of servility and bombast. You could not have been concealed. —Whilst the tenets it spreads abroad might have directed us to you, as to a probable source, the strain in which they are delivered marks you decisively.

But allow me, Sir, to ask you, for what class of reader your reasonings are intended? or, for whose benefit you have stalked forth from your Vocabulary, an Orator of Polysyllables?

Your great friends could not, surely, exact this service from you, for their own sakes. Men who resolve without waiting for conviction, will persist without wishing for a defence. And for the rest of us, the rabble of England, who might all sink into non-existence without any sensible effect on the state;¹ WE, doubtless, are either unworthy of your high instruction, or, at least, (permit us to say) not capable of profiting by it.

Believe me, Sir, the intellectual sight of ordinary freeholders is liable to be offusqued by a superfluous glare of erudition. The dimension of OUR understanding is not of the proper magnitude to admit of sesquipedalian documents. OUR undisciplined taste is apt to be nauseated by the reduplicated evomition of unknown idioms. If you would adapt yourself to OUR faculties, you must sink into language of a lower stature than hendecasyllables. WE are not skilled to estimate the weight of terms,² by their literal contents.

I am ready, however, to acknowledge that your book may be well enough calculated for the region, where (as I understand) it has been most greedily devoured. A certain protuberancy of diction may be very edifying to the maids of honour; and the inflation of your periods cannot fail to find a passage into that quarter where the ERSE is said to have been the reigning dialect.³

It shall be my humble, but laborious province, to endeavour to reduce your lofty speculations to the level of vulgar apprehension; not so much with a view to unwind a thread of refined sophistry, of which indeed you have observed a commendable frugality; still less to investigate candid argument, of which it is not easy to discover a trace; but to develope what little meaning you may have wished to impart, by dissipating the cloud of words in which it is at present involved, and by exhibiting it in the form in which it must destroy itself, the language of common sense.

[scornfully rejects arguments which justify his being disqualified as a parliamentary candidate.]

But what are we to think of your total defection from yourself? of such

a shameful revolt from principles long and strenuously, and even honourably maintained? Your friends may pity; the public abominates.

Your original sentiments concerning placemen and pensioners ⁴ are as notorious to the world as your inveteracy against the Scotch. You have at length, it seems, discovered worth and dignity in the former; and are so perfectly reconciled to the latter, as to have deviated (in despite of nature) into an attempt at humour in their defence, holding out to public ridicule the unwieldy exhibition of the gambols of a colossus! —But the merits of Lord Bute are superabundant; and, let me add, his discernment is not of the meanest; by a well-placed pension of three hundred pounds a year he has expiated his own sins and those of his country.

Yet, surely, if it be upon such terms that you are become a PENSIONER, it were far better to return back to that poor but honest state, when you and the miserable Savage*, on default of the pittance that should have secured your quarters at the club, were contented—in the open air—to growl at the moon, and Whigs, and Walpole, and the house of Brunswick.⁵

But, if the wages of prostitution, once tasted, are too delicious to be relinquished, you must, at least, be sensible, that they are not to be enjoyed but by the loss of all respect and consideration with the public. A reflection, one would think, that might have secured you from the indiscretion of attempting to impose unwelcome falshoods on the ignorant or superficial, by the mere weight of your authority. The gross and virulent insults you have affectedly thrown out against Mr. WILKES, (who is confessedly the favourite of the public, whose private friendships are extensive and sincere; yet of whom you chuse to assert, that he is spoken well of by no man⁶) are not more scandalous than they are injudicious.

The greater part of the world do not appear to acquiesce in the criminality of the charges that have been alleged against that gentleman; although he has been singled out for the RE-PUBLICATION† of a paper that had been re-published before in almost all the journals in the kingdom, and although his servant was bribed to rob him of a poem⁷ which he

had scrupulously shut up from the general eye. The poem, indeed, by the common accounts of it, is not much more defensible than the shocking vices of your employers: but the disgust naturally excited in liberal minds by indecency, is, in this instance, lost in the abhorrence of the means by which evidence was obtained against its PUBLISHER.*

But it is not enough to load Mr. Wilkes with crimes. You charge the Freeholders of the first county in England with re-electing him upon the recommendation of those crimes. I must ask you plainly, Sir, is it your intention, in this passage, to lend a lie the confidence of truth?⁸ or do you seriously believe, that even the most insignificant borough that your masters command, would adopt the interest of any person whatsoever, merely on the merit of sedition and obscenity? —I give you the alternative of being infamous or contemptible.

The freeholders of Middlesex (men of plain sense, and of an honesty that has stood unshaken against all the assaults of corruption, and all the intimidations of power) did not select Mr. WILKES for their representative, in so distinguished a manner, in reward of the crimes imputed to him—an insinuation that must rouze the indignation of every man of honour in the kingdom—but in acknowledgment of substantial benefits obtained by that gentleman to the constitution of this country; in detestation of the unjust, illegal, oppressive, and ungentlemanly means put in practice to convict him; and in order to mark to the present age and to latest posterity, that the man who encounters the attacks of despotism with fortitude and perseverance, shall never want the avowed protection, and generous support of the great body of the people of England.

But, at every step, you advance in brutal insolence. These noble spirits might, in your judgment it seems, ‘all sink into non-existence, without any other effect, than that there would be room made for a NEW RABBLE,’⁹ who, by parity of absurdity, might perish in their turn, with as little detriment to the state.

We are not at a loss to discover, to what quarter you are indebted for a mode of thinking and of speaking that has never before been endured in any country pretending to freedom.

[Wilkes continues his vilification of Johnson as a government hack.]

Your book supplies all the materials of an answer to itself. In one place, you suppose expulsions to be very rare: in another your argument turns upon the idea of their frequency.¹⁰

You tell us, at setting out, that the House cannot subsist without the power of incapacitation: In another passage, you are at much pains to prove that this power is ineffectual to any essential purposes of the constitution, which can only be secured by the permanency of a statute.¹¹

It is your established principle, that the House have an absolute, uncontrolable power of expelling any one of their members: yet, when it suits your occasions, you maintain expressly ‘that there cannot exist, with respect to the same subject, at the same time, an absolute power to chuse, and an absolute power to reject.’¹² This indeed, is to do business effectually: it is to interdict every candidate, and make the vote of every elector useless and dead.

In the midst of these contradictions, there is one point in which you are consistent. You discover in every line a rooted attachment to ‘the unhappy family’ whom ‘the gloomy, sullen William’ drove out:—and, in the blindness of your zeal, or in the candor of Jacobitism, when you even mean to pay a compliment to the best of princes,¹³ you are betrayed into the detestable and traiterous insinuation, that he is the only king since the Revolution, whose character, or whose measures, have borne any resemblance to those of the abdicated line.

You expressly accuse the party whose cause I am maintaining, ‘of having endeavoured to alienate the affections of the people from the only king, who, for almost a century, has much appeared to desire, or much endeavoured to deserve them.’¹⁴

It is impossible to misunderstand you. A complete century would have left us amidst the infamies of the Second Charles; but you are habituated to the name of James, and are determined to bring us down to the æra of your abomination, the glorious Revolution. —Yet, surely, the good Anne might have been excepted, for the merit of the pious purposes of her last four years. —But I repress myself. —It is but too notorious, that you are not the only person who has been suffered to approach St. James’s, with all the principles and prejudices of St. Germains.¹⁵ What better, then, was to be expected, than unheard-of exertions of unconstitutional powers, on

the part of administration: and the prostitution of some HIRELING PEN, in the cause of passive obedience and non-resistance, but thinly veiled in their new-fangled disguise of A GREAT AND PREGNANT PRINCIPLE OF POLITICAL NECESSITY?¹⁶

I am, &c. &c.
THE AUTHOR.

41. Joseph Towers, A Letter to Dr. Samuel Johnson

1775

Extracts from pp. 1–17, 43–8.
This (anonymous) pamphlet was the most distinguished contribution to the controversy provoked by Johnson’s political writings; it seemed to ‘impress him much’ (Boswell, Life, ii. 316). The author, Dr Joseph Towers (1737–99), was a well-known dissenting minister and political controversialist. See Introduction, pp. 6, 10, 28.

Sir,

When a man, who has rendered himself eminent by his productions in morals, and in polite literature, engages in political contentions, and in those which are apprehended to be of great national importance, it may reasonably be expected of such a writer, that he should distinguish himself not by party violence and rancour, but by moderation and by wisdom: and that at least he should not wholly lose sight of that liberality of sentiment, which should characterize the scholar; nor of that decency and politeness, which should adorn the gentleman. But unhappily your political productions have been chiefly remarkable for bitterness of invective, unjust and uncandid representations, the most bigotted

prejudices against them whom you oppose, and the highest strains of contemptuous insolence. You have written in a manner which must degrade you in the judgment of the impartial public, in a manner utterly unworthy of a great, or liberal, or philosophic mind, and for which even your being a royal pensioner cannot apologize.

When I first heard that a pension had been conferred upon you by those in power, I hoped that it might have been given as the reward of merit. I knew that your literary labours, your elaborate Dictionary, and other works, in which you had displayed great force of genius, extensive knowledge, and uncommon powers of language, had given you a just claim to public support and encouragement. I thought it not impossible, that those by whom your pension was procured, might have been satisfied with rewarding your ingenuity, without imposing any services on you unworthy of your character. But the use that has been since made of you, renders it sufficiently apparent, that a pension was conferred on you with other views. It now seems probable, that your known Jacobitical principles, which, however strange it may be thought, appear now to be in high estimation at court, were among your chief recommendations; and that it was these, added to the hope of employing you in the service of your new masters, which really occasioned your being placed in the list of royal pensioners.

It has been said, that few men are capable of bearing prosperity well; and if receiving a pension may be considered as a species of prosperity, it appears sufficiently evident, that this has not had a favourable effect either upon your head, or upon your heart. Not one truly valuable piece has issued from your pen, since you received the royal bounty. From that time, your native pride and arrogance appear to have been augmented; and your latter pieces are far from breathing that virtuous spirit, by which your former writings were generally distinguished. Instead of employing your talents in the service of the republic of letters, and in benefitting mankind, you are now dwindled into the rancorous writer of a party; and produce only such performances as the False Alarm, the Thoughts on the transactions respecting Falkland’s Islands, and the Patriot.

During the last reign, you were generally considered as one of the most bigotted Jacobites in the kingdom. It is commonly said, that you scarcely ever spoke of the family on the throne with any degree of temper or decency; and you not unfrequently exhibited in your writings your aversion to the government. It was then a subject of your most pathetic complaints, that England was oppressed with excise, that it was a cheated and a groaning nation, and a beggar’d land. We were then cursed with a pensioned band, and with hireling senators; and it was a thoughtless age lull’d to SERVITUDE.¹

You then wished for those happy days of old, when justice was uprightly and impartially administered. You sighed for the age of Alfred, because, as you inform us,

Fair Justice then, without constraint ador’d,

Held high the steady scale, but deep’d the sword;

No spies were paid, no SPECIAL JURIES known,

Blest Age! but ah! how different from our own!²

But whatever evils the nation suffered from an iniquitous government in the last reign, they are, it seems, happily removed in the present; so that you can now discover nothing to complain of, but the turbulence and wickedness of the popular party.

As this country was so much oppressed, and laboured under such a variety of evils, in the reign of George the Second, it may amuse a speculative man to enquire, by what means so happy a revolution in public affairs has been effectuated in the Reign of George the Third. Are our taxes lessened? No. Is the nation freed from excise? No. Are the rights of the subject more religiously preserved? No. Is Justice more impartially administered in our courts of law? No. Are special juries less frequent? No. Has the commerce of the nation been encreased, and its interests better attended to? No. Are our Parliaments more incorrupt, and less under the influence of the court? No. What is it then that has so wonderfully changed the face of public affairs, as entirely to reconcile the author of the RAMBLER to the government? The whole may be answered in one short sentence. The grievances of the kingdom are removed; the nation is no more in a groaning or a sinking state; for DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON HAS A PENSION. It follows, as a necessary consequence, that wisdom presides over our councils, that all complaints against the administration must be unjust and unreasonable, and that we have the happiness to possess ‘a government approaching nearer to perfection, than any that experience has known, or history related!’³

You have observed, (False Alarm, p. 28 [Works, viii. 80]) that ‘the acceptance of a place contaminates no character;’ and you have probably the same ideas of the acceptance of a pension. But surely the characters of those men are contaminated, who are induced by a place, to sacrifice the rights of their country; or by a pension to write in defence of

measures that are oppressive and iniquitous. As to your engaging in vindication of an arbitrary administration, some allowance ought, perhaps, to be made, for that attachment to despotic principles which you early imbibed, and by which you have so often distinguished yourself. That bigotry which could lead you to celebrate in the highest strains of panegyric, that most eminent high-church saint, archbishop LAUD, and that zeal in favour of tyranny which could induce you to deplore the death of the Earl of STRAFFORD,⁴ may perhaps be pleaded in extenuation of your conduct. And as you appear to have been always disposed to justify the tyranny of the Stuarts, you were already half prepared to defend despotic proceedings under a prince of another family. Though your Jacobite prejudices gave you a predilection in favour of the Stuarts, yet it might somewhat reconcile you to the government of the House of Hanover, if you had reason to believe that principles were now adopted at court, similar to those of that family, whose attempts to enslave the nation had been the cause of their expulsion from the throne. But whatever allowances may be made to you on this account, you are still extremely censurable for those notorious fallacies and misrepresentations, and that gross scurrillity, with which your late political productions so much abound.

As a specimen of the moderation and civility with which you have expressed yourself concerning the party whom you oppose, I shall collect a few of the rhetorical flowers, and polite phrases, which are scattered throughout your political pieces in such bountiful profusion. Of JUNIUS you say, that he burst into notice with a blaze of impudence; and of Mr. WILKES that he was a varlet driven out of the House with public infamy. The popular party are stiled by you a despicable faction, bellowers of sedition, ruffians who would gain power by mischief and confusion, and those who having fixed their hopes on public calamities, sit like vultures waiting for a day of carnage. You also say, ‘Of this faction what evil may not be credited? They have hitherto shewn no virtue, and very little wit, beyond that mischievous cunning, for which it is held by Hale that children may be hanged.’ —You have also discovered, that they are more wicked than the Devil. —‘As they have not the wit of Satan, they have not his virtue.’ —‘Their hope is malevolence, and their good is evil.’ And you likewise complain of the howl of Plebeian patriotism, and the howling violence of patriotic rage.⁵

Is this the language of a man whose understanding has been refined by literature? Is this the language of a scholar, a gentleman, or a philosopher? In the heat of a political controversy, such scurrillity might not have been wondered at in low and vulgar minds; but surely something better might have been justly expected from a teacher of morals, and a professed improver of our language. Nor do the terms in which you have expressed yourself of them whom you oppose, convey a very favourable idea of your heart. The utmost stretch of candour cannot lead any man to suppose, that you believe one half of the evil that you have said of the popular party. You must be the most prejudiced man in the kingdom if you do: and if you do not, have you any right to be considered as a man of principle, or probity?

Such is your rancour against all who have engaged in any opposition to the court, that you cannot express yourself with decency even of the Earl of CHATHAM. The eloquence of that illustrious nobleman, who is unquestionably one of the greatest ornaments of his age and country, is described by you under the contemptuous appellation of feudal gabble, and you observe that it will be happy for him, ‘if the nation shall at last dismiss him to nameless obscurity.’⁶ But however highly you may estimate your own talents, be assured, that you will be extremely fortunate in this respect, if your fame should be as lasting as that of the Earl of CHATHAM, whose name will be mentioned with distinguished honour in the annals of this country, so long as any records of it shall be preserved.

The people are frequently honoured by you with the polite appellation of the rabble; and the citizens of London, and the freeholders of Middlesex, are also spoken of by you with similar contempt. They have been both active in the opposition to the court, and must therefore experience the effects of your loyal indignation. The inhabitants of London, have, indeed, long been under obligations to you, for the genteel terms in which you have spoken of their city. It was thus described by you many years since:

LONDON, the needy villain’s general home,

The common sewer of Paris and of Rome.⁷

The freeholders of Middlesex have also the honour to be thus distinguished by you: ‘Mr. Wilkes, and the freeholders of Middlesex, might all sink into non-existence, without any other effect, than that

there would be room made for a new rabble, and a new retailer of sedition and obscenity.’⁸ It is needless to make any remarks on this passage. It is equally characterized by politeness and humanity.

In your last political publication, the Patriot, speaking of the opponents of government, you say, ‘The greater, far the greater number of those who rave, and rail, and enquire, and accuse, neither suspect, nor fear, nor care for the public; but hope to force their way to riches by virulence and invective, and are vehement and clamorous, only that they may be sooner hired to be silent.’⁹ That this assertion is notoriously untrue, must be evident to every man who will consider it. A great majority of those who are dissatisfied with the measures of government, and who testify their discontent, cannot possibly have any hope of acquiring riches by their opposition, or cherish any hope of being bribed to silence. But you have, with an equal disregard to truth, also passed a similar unjust and undistinguishing censure of the popular party, in the False Alarm. You there commend the King for having neglected or forgotten the many petitions sent to him from different parts of the kingdom; because you say, ‘he might easily know, that what was presented as the sense of the people, was the sense only of the profligate and dissolute.’¹⁰ That this is a gross falshood must be evident to every candid person in the kingdom, of whatever party. Among those who approved of the petitions to the throne, and who joined in their complaints of those grievances of which the petitions contained an enumeration, were many of the worthiest persons in this country; and not a few who were distinguished both by abilities and learning, as well as by integrity. Surely then neither party violence, nor the influence of a pension, can be pleaded even by your friends as a justification of what you have written. Nor can you possibly vindicate yourself, unless you think it right to support the cause of your patrons, not only by a total disregard of candour, but by the most gross deviations from truth and justice.

You observe in the Patriot, p. 1. that ‘at the end of every seven years comes the Saturnalian season, when the people of Great Britain may please themselves with the choice of their representatives. This happy day has now arrived, somewhat sooner than it could be claimed.’ Your comparison here of the period of election with a Roman festival, wherein the slaves were put on a level with their masters, appears to convey in it a compliment to your countrymen not of the most delicate

kind. And as to your remark, that this happy day has arrived somewhat sooner than it could be claimed, for which you seem to suppose that the people are under some obligation to administration, it is, I believe, far from being generally apprehended, that the unexpected dissolution of the parliament arose from any desire to gratify, or to serve the people. And if it was done with the views that are supposed, little gratitude can be due from them on that account.

In the course of those observations wherein you profess to point out the marks which distinguish true patriots from those who falsely assume that character, you say, ‘Some claim a place in the list of Patriots by an acrimonious and unremitting opposition to the court. This mark is by no means infallible. Patriotism is not necessarily included in rebellion.’¹¹ Was it your design here to insinuate, that opposition to the court and rebellion are synonimous terms? Something like this appears to have been intended. That opposition to administration merely for the sake of opposition, or when engaged in from private views, is not Patriotism, may readily be granted. But if the prevailing measures of government are unjust, pernicious, and despotic, the purest public virtue would dictate an opposition to such an administration: and it is natural and reasonable for the people to consider those as their friends, who distinguish themselves by their opposition to measures of this kind. With whatever caution the people may elect their representatives, they are often liable to be deceived. But they always act rightly in electing such men for members of the House of Commons, whom they believe to be friends of freedom, and disposed to join in a vigorous opposition to all schemes for aggrandizing the power of the crown, or depriving the people of their rights.

You say, Patriot, p. 4 [Works, viii, 143], that ‘a man may hate his king, yet not love his country.’ I shall not dispute this assertion, because I consider yourself as an evidence of its truth. In the last reign, no man suspected you of any affection for the King: and yet there were reasons to believe that you had not much more for your country. When the rest of the nation were rejoicing at the advantage which they had gained over their enemies by the conquest of Louisbourgh, you seemed to view it with disgust; and therefore wrote an Essay in the Idler, calculated to depreciate the merit of the English in that capture, and to lessen the general joy on the occasion, under the pretence of shewing the partiality of national historians. You remark in that essay, that ‘there is no crime more infamous than the violation of truth.’¹² It would have been much

for your reputation as a moral man, if you had attended more to this consideration in your late political productions.

[There follow over 20 pages of analysis and rebuttal of Johnson’s political principles and judgments on a wide range of topics including the Quebec Act, the late proceedings respecting the Americans, and the conduct of the previous Parliament. Towers concludes:]

It is somewhat curious to observe, how much your Jacobitism is apt to break forth, notwithstanding your present zeal in support of the government of a Prince of the House of Hanover. All your newly acquired loyalty to George III cannot make you forget your much-favoured House of Stuart, nor wholly remove your attachment to it. It was too deeply rooted, and become too natural to you, to be totally eradicated:

Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret.¹³

In the False Alarm, p. 51 [Works, viii. 94], you say, that ‘the struggle in the reign of Anne was to exclude or restore an exiled King.’ This exiled lung was the Pretender. And notwithstanding the many resplendent virtues which you have discovered in his present majesty, you are far from paying any compliments to his predecessors since the expulsion of the House of Stuart. For you inform us, that the prince from whom you received your pension, and in whose reign of consequence your loyalty commenced, is ‘the only king, who, for almost a century, has appeared to desire, or much endeavoured to deserve, the affections of the people.’¹⁴ The caution, and attention to chronology, with which you express yourself here, is truly admirable; you compliment his present majesty, but take care to exclude from your list of those Kings, who deserved the affections of the people, William III, George I, and George II. At the same time, leaving room for your readers to draw all honourable conclusions in favour of their predecessors, the Stuarts; whom you have entirely excepted from your censure; and, indeed, it ought to be remembered, that if, peradventure, they had a few faults, they were amply atoned for by that divine and hereditary right, which resided in their sacred persons!

You observe of Falkland’s Island, Patriot, p. 20 [Works, viii. 150], ‘that it is a bleak and barren spot in the Magellanic ocean, of which no use could be made, unless it were a place of exile for the hypocrites of

Patriotism.’ But, perhaps, a better use might be made of it. It would at least be well adapted for the reception of men, who, though born under a free constitution of government, have no sense of its value, or concern for its preservation; who are ready to prostitute their talents in the service of every minister who will employ them; or who have so much attachment to despotic principles, as to be for ever incapable of becoming real friends to that public liberty, by which this country has been so long, and so honourably distinguished. Men of slavish principles must ever be unworthy members of a free state. And as to yourself, however unwilling you may now be, when you can bask in beams of royal favour, to remove to a spot like this, there was a time when you seemed to languish for such a retreat: when you pathetically exclaimed,

Has Heav’n reserv’d, in pity to the poor,

No pathless waste, or undiscovered shore?

No secret island in the boundless main?

No peaceful desart, yet UNCLAIM’D BY SPAIN?

Quick let us rise, the happy seats explore,

And bear OPPRESSION’S INSOLENCE no more.¹⁵

It is a misfortune which has attended your political writings, that they have degraded your own character, without rendering much service to those by whom you were employed. I believe no writer of your abilities ever engaged in politics, whose productions were of so little effect, and so unprofitable to his patrons. And you may in many respects be considered as a memorable instance of human weakness. For though you have given evidences of great force of genius, you have at the same time discovered such little prejudices, and such bigotted attachments, as would have disgraced a common understanding.

You will probably, with that haughtiness which is natural to you, but which even your best friends must acknowledge to be a considerable flaw in your character, affect to disregard whatever can be offered against your conduct, or your writings. But should you ever again really be influenced by those principles of virtue, which you have so forcibly inculcated on others, you will regret that your time has been mis-employed in the vindication of measures, which should have excited the indignation of every honest man. I would, however, wish you to remember, should you again address the public under the character of a political writer, that luxuriance of imagination, or energy of language, will ill compensate for the want of candour, of justice, and of truth.

And I shall only add, that should I hereafter be disposed to read, as I heretofore have done, the most excellent of all your performances, THE RAMBLER, the pleasure which I have been accustomed to find in it will be much diminished by the reflexion, that the writer of so moral, so elegant, and so valuable a work, was capable of prostituting his talents in such productions, as the False Alarm, the Thoughts on the Transactions respecting Falkland’s Islands, and the Patriot.

I am Sir,
Your very humble Servant.

42. Tyranny Unmasked

1775

Extracts from pp. 2–11, 79–90.
This anonymous pamphlet is representative of the response provoked by Johnson’s final excursion into political writing, Taxation no Tyranny (March 1775). See Introduction, p. 28.

In deference to truth and fact, it must be observed, that reason and argument have for some time plainly decided the matter in favour of American exemption. Without doors, the much boasted supremacy of Parliament, to tax an unrepresented and unrepresentable part of British subjects, hath hardly a single mouth left to echo it. Within the two great national assemblies, the question now decides, for government, those measures, which government no longer strives to discuss. It may still go on to adopt such as may promise success to it in its present struggle with America; but the generality are nevertheless unanimous, that America cannot constitutionally be taxed here.

In this state of the matter, when all men had hitherto weighed it by law and constitution, as applied to the specific circumstances of the American Colonies, and when thus put in the balance it began to shew itself wanting on the side of government; steps forth a most redoubted ministerial champion, who tells us that Taxation is no Tyranny: thus shaking off at once all the shackles of local circumstances, specific rights, and constitutional liberties; cutting asunder the several knots, which all former combatants, finding themselves bound by them, had patiently tried to untie; and, with his own right arm, laying the Americans on their backs, stunned, silenced, crippled, defeated, at the mercy of government.

Nothing indeed can be more decisive than the principle, which this advocate has chosen to convey the sense of his performance. It scorns exactness, as it scorns all fear. It scorns limitations, it scorns circumstances; rejecting all mesne views, it darts to an universal conclusion at once: Taxation is no Tyranny. We must consider this as an universal proposition. At least, it must be meant as a catch-word, to lay hold of those, who cannot reason; or to make those who can, and who think America injured, distrust for a moment, at least, their reasonings. And truly, if men can be brought to swallow this proposition, it will prove an effectual quietus to silence the Americans, and to allay all the present ferments, excited by American taxation, in the British Empire, But, was ever a more daring proposition offered to mankind? one more insulting to common understanding? ’Tis too absurd to deserve a confutation. To attempt to give it one by ever so little reasoning, would be an abuse and waste of sense. But to Englishmen the assertion is attended with double shame and effrontery: though it is entirely of a piece with what tyrants, and the tools of tyrants, even in this nation, have ever wished to establish; and therefore, though not new to Englishmen, yet the more unpardonable by them, who have ever shewn their indignation against it, and risen in fury to crush it. Methinks, therefore, the Author might have chosen a more cautious and decent sentiment for the index to his pamphlet; one more near to truth, one less irritating to Englishmen. But these are times, perhaps, for ministerial advocates to try, what Tory-doctrines may be disseminated.

The pamphlet before us evidently fathers itself upon one of such principles. And here, before I proceed further in this thought, I cannot help remarking, that it is exceedingly odd to find, so early as in the third generation from the time that we put an absolute exclusion, as we thought, upon Toryism from the government of these realms, Toryism now again making its way upon us in open publications, countenanced even by an administration. This is indeed exceedingly grievous to all honest men; because, if government approves it, it teaches others the worst lesson against itself; as it insinuates, by a most odious implication, an injury done to those, who lost the crown of England for their Tory principles.

If it should be found further, that the writer of the pamphlet above-mentioned is so much distinguished by the immediate notice of government as to be pensioned; the remark I have just made will require other and stronger terms to be given to it, before it will adequately express my feelings. Fame strongly confirms this circumstance; and fixes that production on an eminent lexicographer, who has, on former occasions, drawn his pen to gloss over the bad measures of this very administration, and to save them, when gasping for life. If we may judge indeed from the internal marks of style and diction, I know not any writer to whom we should be more apt to ascribe so operose a deduction,¹ than to that same person, whose very operose pen hath consummated more works of operosity, than that perhaps of any man existing; and now (if this fame be true) is more operose than ever, having the defence of a minister added to its other operosities—the vindication of dark and difficult Machiavelian politics superadded to, perhaps superseding, the plain and pleasurable pursuit of science and the muses. Yet, notwithstanding these appearances, I can hardly concur in fixing this production on that gentleman: Because, on one hand, though he is pensioned, I have no doubt he would never convict himself out of his own mouth, nor invite the obloquy of the world, by becoming so very a pensioner, or (in his own words) so very a slave of state, as to be hired by his stipend to obey his master in all things: And yet, having once passed that definition, he must (if this production be his) inevitably have damned his own definition, or have damned himself for a slave. On another hand, when I consider with what singular virulence that gentleman has, all his life-long, written of the Revolution and the House of Hanover; I can as little believe that he would undertake the vindication of a minister in these days, as that a minister should employ him—reversing what rulers have ever shewn (I will not be so harsh as to say here to traitors, but) to deserters, and the half-converted of every kind, by loving and trusting the deserter, however they might love the desertion.

What effect that pamphlet hath had upon the public, I know not. But if it hath operated upon others, as it hath done upon myself, it must have rivetted all who have read it in an unalterable conviction, that America is unjustly dealt with. I understand however, that a great man in office hath thought proper to become the herald of its merits.² He said there was

an abundance of wit in it. Whether there be this or not, every one will judge for himself. But if there be no argument, or only little of it, I cannot see what all its wit can be worth. In my judgment, wit has no sort of business in the present question, nor can be employed in it, without bespeaking those who employ it to be, even in their own consciousness, on the worst side. I grant however, on recollection, that people may be outwitted of their property: and when that property cannot otherwise be fairly obtained, I know of no other mean but wit, by which it can be come at. I am one of the first to believe, that if the property of the Americans is wrested from them by British Taxation, it must be by outwitting them. In this view, therefore, I wonder not at all that the wit of that pamphlet should be so well spoken of. For if that be the ministerial battery against the property of the Americans, perhaps he that proclaimed the wit, and he that wrote it, may be equally dexterous in playing it off.

Whatever figure this gentleman may make in wit, he makes, I will venture to say, a very poor one in argument. If he be that Colossus of knowledge above hinted at, never could he have let himself down lower. Not even, when he attempted to palliate the wretched timidity, which sacrificed to our enemies the Falkland Islands and the honour of this nation together, was he more unfortunate, than when he vindicates the present blustering despotic measures against our fellow-subjects in America. But, in candor, I cannot lay the blame on the writer, but on his cause. There is no making bricks without straw. Ex nihilo nihil fit.³ Not all the wit, nor all the industry of man, not all the learning of Johnson, can strike abundance out of that which is barren, reason out of that which is absurd, nor make palpable wrong appear to be right. Accordingly, the writer of that pamphlet, whoever he is, hath left the ministerial cause very lamely defended. Whoever looks for argument from him, must be disappointed: Whoever is convinced by him, must be previously determined to be so convinced. No subject can be more loosely treated. There is an evident shyness in him at coming to the point. If ever he does so, he seems impatient in his situation, and eager to quit it. He dwells chiefly on the outlines of his subject, where his observations are seldom pertinent, oftner bold than exact. He seems to promise himself more from plausibility than truth; and to make invective, of which he is ever exceedingly profuse, supply the place of argument. Thus, notwithstanding the high-sounding title he has given to his book, we find it not in any degree proved: After all the expectations we were bid to form from that, and

the name given to the writer, what has he told us? but that the mountain laboured, and brought forth a mouse.⁴

[follows the course of Johnson’s argument and, ‘having…rendered the fabric of [his] vision a baseless one’, draws to his conclusion.]

He comes next to the cardinal hinge on which the whole question turns; —turns by the moderation and affectionate dispositions of the Americans, who are unwilling to push the rights of their chartered constitution to that utmost line which would encircle them as distinct states, and therefore say, that, as dependant on the parliament of England, they cannot be taxed in England, because taxation and representation are inseparable. I must observe, that having smothered this swelling argument within him, through so many labouring pages, he apparently expires with uttering it, as if it exhausted his whole vital breath. He is able just to follow the first utterance of it with a page and an half; and then, after panting a little with the old member, he collects his breath again for about two pages more upon it, and DIES. For as to what follows, in long quotations from the continental congress, occasional sarcasms, and the beautiful analogy from Truro,⁵ I am convinced every body will think, what he himself knows, that they were only intended to bring his pamphlet to bear Eighteen Pence.

But it were fit he should give us a reason why he treats this, which is the very marrow of the question, so briefly and so lightly. We have it. It carries sound without meaning. It is a pity these sort of writers cannot agree with one another. For Mr. Hume says, in his History of England, that it is the point of which the English were ever, WITH REASON, particularly jealous.⁶

As a sound without meaning our author accordingly treats it. Every reader of him must have observed, that it is not his meaning to come into close quarters. It is his continual effort to subtilize, when he ought to reason; and to convert into air, what is founded on rocks. The reader will recollect, that when he was obliged to notice that principle, which gives the very foundation to representation, viz. ‘the natural right of the people to have a consent in their own laws;’ he tried to make us believe it was a sound without meaning.⁷ He is at the same game again here. Representation, when brought to fact, he tells us, vanishes in delusion. It is a thing, whose

whole effects, expected or desired, we feel, but cannot discern. It is, in short, (to wrap up his idea in the justest image) a sort of guardian-angel hovering over this isle, whose benign influence we actually participate, but without knowing where or when it rests itself: and as it thus hovers over us, it may as easily take America in the sweep of its flight, as confine itself within the air encircled by the British Channel. This is representation. —As our author plainly chuses to keep off the ground, so I do not chuse to fight the air; and therefore I shall leave him to the honour and happiness of his own vision….

Thus I have taken notice of all that appears in our author’s pamphlet worthy either of my animadversion, or of taking up the reader’s time. He is welcome to all that follows in the remaining pages. I must say, a stronger proof cannot be given, that administration finds itself run to earth, upon the merits of the great question now depending between itself and America, than in the publication of that pamphlet. It had been better, that it had never been born.⁸ The world might then have given them credit for many weighty arguments in their own breasts. But now they have exposed the nakedness of their land.⁹ Like honest men, they have published their case; but, like unfortunate men, they have lost the verdict. There is but one method left for consistency: Having appealed to the public, they should abide by the public voice, and resign at least the measures, which neither art nor eloquence can defend.

A Colossus in argument is like a lighted beacon in the country; it draws all men forth from their retirements. Such a one is in some sort a general challenger. And when a Goliath contemptuously throws down his glove to the whole forces of human kind, no wonder if a stripling David should go forth to meet him. He may count it honour, even to be defeated.

POLITICAL PAMPHLETS

37. Unsigned review of The False Alarm, Critical Review