Page:Footsteps of Dr. Johnson.djvu/342

 274 Here Johnson found an edition of Anacreon which he had long sought in vain. "They had therefore much matter for conversation without touching on the fatal topics of difference." In all questions of Church and State they were wide as the poles asunder. In the perfect confidence which each man had in his own judgment there was nothing to choose between them.

Yet with all Lord Auchinleck's gravity and contempt of his son's flightiness, he had known what it was not only to be young, but to be foolish. Like so many of the young Scotchmen of old, he had been sent to Holland to study civil law. Thence he had made his way to Paris, where he had played the fop. Years afterwards one of the companions of his youth, meeting his son at Lord Kames's table, "told him that he had seen his father strutting abroad in red-heeled shoes and red stockings. The lad was so much diverted with it that he could hardly sit on his chair for laughing." His appointment as judge he owed to that most corrupt of Whig ministers, the Duke of Newcastle, and he was as Whiggish as his patron. King William III., "one of the most worthless scoundrels that ever existed," according to Johnson, was to him the greatest hero in modern times. Presbyterianism he loved all the more because it was a cheap religion, and narrowed the power of the clergy. He laid it clown as a rule that a poor clergy was ever a pure clergy. He added that in former times they had timber communion cups and silver ministers, but now we were getting silver cups and timber ministers. According to Sir Walter Scott he carried "his Whiggery and Presbyte-