Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/63

Rh freedom often made difficulties for those who associated with him; indeed, as he himself remarked, it kept people of rank and fashion away from his company. ‘I never courted the great,’ he said to Boswell; ‘they sent for me; but I think they now give me up. They are satisfied; they have seen enough of me.’ Boswell, always eager to keep a topic alive, suggested that they must surely be highly pleased with his conversation, but he answered, ‘No, Sir; great lords and great ladies don’t love to have their mouths stopped.’ It is remarked by Dr. Birkbeck Hill that only one man of hereditary title, Sir Charles Bunbury, was among the mourners at Johnson’s funeral.

However dogmatic and fierce Johnson’s conversation may have been, it was always extraordinarily free from egotism. He takes the floor with all comers, and does not make for himself a place apart, sheltered and superior. He has no exquisite reasons, and looks at life, not from a delicate angle of his own, but from the broad standing-ground of common humanity. A very large number of his most famous sayings are cast in a single mould; almost all that he has to say can be expressed in sentences which have for subject ‘A man,’ or ‘Every man.’ ‘A man loves to review his own mind.’ ‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.’ ‘No man loves labour for itself.’ If he had found his own tastes and opinions out of sympathy with average sentiment, he would have distrusted them, or rather, perhaps, would have thought them too trivial to mention. The true egotist nurses his singularity, and if he does not talk much of himself, desires at least that others should. Johnson nourished his intellect and his feelings on what he shared with all mankind. He had the soul of good