Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke (1999)

SAMUEL JOHNSON AND EDMUND BURKE Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke knew one another for more than 25 years, but the temperature of their friendship is hard to measure. The editors of Burke's Correspondence wrote confidently, "Johnson and Burke were both among the original members of the Literary Club founded in 1764; they met often at its meetings and much enjoyed each other's conversation" (1); but this is too simple. It is important also to say that each recognised in the other his worthy antagonist. The two had been acquainted for more than 20 years when on March 1, 1779, Burke wrote to Boswell: "I dined with your friend Dr Johnson on Saturday at Sir Joshua's. We had a very good day, as we had not a sentence, word, syllable, letter, comma or tittle of any of the elements that make politics." The great Tory and the great Whig agreeing not to talk politics may come as little surprise, but what of the frigid phrase “your friend Dr Johnson"? Perhaps Burke was teasing the hypersensitive Boswell about his tendency to claim possession of Dr Johnson -- the second sentence is clearly light-hearted -- but political words had evidently been exchanged in the past. Johnson was more obviously generous about Burke, but then he was the older man. In that same year he bought a print of Burke (2), and during his career as a talker he commended Burke's powers more than any other person's. Boswell preserves many of Johnson's tributes -- including five versions, over a decade, of his dictum that anyone meeting Burke by chance would pronounce him an extraordinary man (3) -- but he gives us very little of Burke's actual conversation. Unfortunately, Boswell didn't meet Burke for nine years after he met Johnson, and although over the years he inspired "great affection" in Burke, this did not survive the publication of the Tour of the Hebrides. Burke, we know, was cold, even icy, about the publication of Johnson's remark that he "never once made a good joke" -- which Boswell made more offensive by writing a long footnote of dissent, giving rather feeble examples of Burke's wit (4). Burke, it seems, found the writing down of remarks made behind the backs of friends distasteful, and though we are glad beneficiaries, he had a point (5). Boswell and Malone compounded the offence by elaborating the note still further in the second edition of the Tour, and relations became so difficult that in the Life of Johnson Boswell is shy of naming Burke, who appears as, for instance, "an eminent friend of ours" (6). We know that bouts of talk between Johnson and Burke became a spectator sport -- "there is no rising unless somebody will cry fire", remarked a lady when they continued very late into the night (7) -- but the chastened Boswell gives us all too little of what they said. Such is his reticence that Burke’s biographers rarely call him as a character witness. Johnson's regard for Burke impressed their contemporaries, with Joshua Reynolds going so far as to say that “even Dr Johnson felt himself his inferior” (8). In his life of Burke, Robert Bisset writes: “Mr Murphy informed me, that on Christmas Day, 1758, he dined in company with Dr Johnson and Mr Burke. He then, for the first time, observed that Dr Johnson would from Edmund bear contradiction, which he would tolerate from no other person. The principal subject of conversation was Bengal; concerning which, though then just beginning to be particularly known by our countrymen, Burke displayed the most accurate and extensive information" (9). It was the comprehensiveness of Burke’s knowledge that was so remarkable. He was ready for anyone, on any subject. Burke loved Johnson, certainly -- he was a pallbearer in 1784 -- but apparently he did not respect him in every sphere. Boswell records him as having said that if Johnson had been in the Commons he would have been "the greatest speaker that ever was there", and in 1792 he said in Parliament that he valued Johnson's friendship as "the greatest consolation and happiness of his life" (10) -- a tribute made more moving by the Johnsonian balance of its phrasing and its adoption of Johnson’s characteristic term “consolation”. Yet Boswell recorded in his private papers for 1786 that Burke was "violent against Dr Johnson's political writings" and "intemperately abusive to a departed great man" (11). Sir James Mackintosh recalled Burke's saying to him at Christmas 1793 that when Johnson had "neither a paradox to defend nor an antagonist to crush, he would preface his assent with 'Why, no, Sir'." (12). Burke was probably vexed by Johnson's use of all weapons, fair and unfair, when talking for victory, for in conversation the great lover of truth did not consider himself upon oath. In the longest conversation between the two given by Boswell, they discuss emigration and the Malthusian question of over-population (13). Burke argues that populations need not breed at a fixed rate (which we now know is true). Johnson maintains his opinion, which Boswell recorded elsewhere, that "Births at all times bear the same proportion to the same number of people" (14). Burke says: "We hear prodigious complaints at present of emigration. I am convinced that emigration makes a country more populous," and explains the paradox: "Exportation of men, like exportation of all other commodities, makes more be produced." Johnson is having none of it. "Nay, Sir, it is plain there will be more people, if there are more breeders. Thirty cows in good pasture will produce more calves than ten cows, provided they have good bulls." Burke: “There are bulls enough in Ireland." And now Johnson clinches the matter with an ad hominem joke. “Johnson (smiling): So, Sir, I should think from your argument." Burke, who farmed 400 acres at Beaconsfield and corresponded with the agriculturalist Arthur Young, was presumably about to make an informed point about cattle in Ireland not breeding as fast as in England, but Johnson, no farmer, gets the better of him. And Johnson is pleased with his triumph. Six pages later, when Burke makes a pun, Boswell compliments him on "the first play of words today", but Johnson insists "no, no; the bulls in Ireland". This both was and was not a serious argument: Johnson sidesteps the issue, perhaps an acknowledgment that Burke's expertise was overwhelming. This is as close as we come to overhearing the two men arguing. At other times they must have been in earnest over more pressing political questions. So in what did Johnson and Burke differ? By juxtaposing their sayings and writings, we can reconstruct some of their specific disagreements; but there were differences of temperament and outlook as well. To begin with there was the difference of education, between the Pembroke College in Oxford, the home of lost causes, and Trinity College, Dublin, cradle of the coming men (15). Yet in London Johnson and Burke moved in similar literary and political circles. Despite party differences, for instance, Johnson succeeded Burke as assistant to the MP William Gerard Hamilton when Burke resentfully resigned the post after six years. What, then, were their allegiances? Historians disagree over Johnson's attitude to Jacobitism, but it is fair to say that Johnson's politics were more old-fashioned and rigid than Burke's. In his youth Johnson may have been uneasy about the propriety of the replacement, just 20 years before he was born, of one royal line by another, but for Burke, born another 20 years on (16), this was never a live issue, and he affected to see in the Glorious Revolution only a conservative measure. Perhaps, however, we can find in Burke's wish at the end of his life to restore the French monarchy something in common with Johnson's early feelings about the House of Stuart. More clearly, Johnson’s ideas of economics remained based on the old mercantile model, whereas Burke’s were in advance of his time. Johnson thought British commerce would “most effectually be preserved by being kept always in our own power. Concessions may promote it for a moment, but superiority only can ensure its continuance" (17). He believed that the extent of trade, like the reproduction of cattle, was invariable, and so thought of trade not as a mutual and expandable benefit for both buyer and seller, but as a competition in which rivals must incommode and impede one another’s traffic. He wrote of the importation of tea as though it were a simple and irrecoverable exportation of money, forgetting that the trade was carried on entirely by British merchants, who then spent their profits at home. When he rejects the argument that the time wasted drinking tea is detrimental to the national economy, it is because he cannot think “that any work remains undone for want of hands. Our manufactures seem to be limited not by the possibility of work, but by the possibility of sale" (18). Markets, that is, are for him of fixed size. But although he was adamant that “trade produces no capital accession of wealth”, he accepted that it brought benefits by giving “to one nation the productions of another, as we have wines and fruits” (19). When in 1776 Boswell mentioned The Wealth of Nations (20), newly published by Adam Smith -- a member of the Club since the previous year -- Johnson evaded giving a judgment. Boswell's Victorian editor, Birkbeck Hill, comments: “Johnson can scarcely have read Smith; if he did it, made no impression on him. His ignorance on many points as to what constitutes the wealth of a nation remained as deep as ever" (21). Johnson himself said that he and Smith “did not take to each other" (22), and he was unlikely to have taken, either, to a book so alien to his thinking. Burke, by contrast, had reviewed Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments very favourably in 1759 (having been sent a copy by David Hume), and although his acquaintance and relations with Smith remain shadowy, he certainly understood free trade. Smith is said to have told Burke that he was the “only man I ever knew who thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do, without any previous communications having passed between us” (23). “As to mere wealth, that is to say, money, it is clear that one nation or one individual cannot increase its store but by making another poorer," declared Johnson (24). Two years later Burke wrote to constituents in Bristol who felt as Johnson did, in an attempt to persuade them that “trade is not a limited thing": "It is hard to persuade us that everything which is got by another is not taken from ourselves, but it is fit that we should get the better of these suggestions, which come from what is not the best and soundest part of our nature, and that we should form to ourselves a way of thinking, more rational, more just and more religious" (25). Johnson could never have understood the sophisticated arguments Burke made to his constituents about how American trade was increasing the wealth of all. (Neither did they, of course, and nor do many people today: protectionism is as popular as ever.) But Johnson might have taken more seriously Burke’s claim that free trade is just and religious. For a moral case for trade is implicit in a casual phrase of Johnson’s own, in the fourth paper of The Idler, where he writes of “the equal distribution of wealth, which long commerce has produced” (26). If commerce does indeed distribute wealth more and more evenly, and without the injustice of robbing the rich to give to the poor, then it should not be incommoded or impeded. Johnson and Burke are perceived to have taken different “sides" over the American War of Independence, but Burke would have denied that he took either side, any more than he took the side of either the King or of the people against the other. He was for consensus, conciliation and combination, appalled by the prospect in America of what he called a civil war, with British blood shed by British hands. Whatever the political outcome, he argued, it could not be worth the moral cost, for "The very names of affection and kindred, which were the bonds of charity whilst we agreed, become new incentives to hatred and rage when the communion of our country is dissolved" (27). In Taxation No Tyranny (1775), Johnson demonstrated that Parliament had the right to tax the Americans. Burke didn't disagree, but saw that the argument was worse than a waste of time. “I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions; I hate the very sound of them,” he said in his great Speech on American Taxation (28). Back in 1771, Johnson had written about the Falkland Islands: "The utmost exertion of right is always invidious, and where claims are not easily determinable is always dangerous" (29). The danger of insisting on rights was Burke's great theme with regard to America -- outflanking the great empiricist -- and a fortiori with regard to France. But for Johnson the authority of government was at stake in America, and must remain paramount. He was, he said, "zealous for subordination". The grounds on which Johnson and Burke disagreed over the repeated exclusion of John Wilkes from the Commons in 1769 are symptomatic of their fundamentally different political visions. Burke argued that the Commons could not disregard the power of the electors to select their MP (30); but in The False Alarm (1770) Johnson argues that the Commons must have the power to exclude a Member duly elected as part of its autonomous authority: "All government supposes subjects, all authority implies obedience. To suppose in one the right to command what another has the right to refuse is absurd and contradictory. A state so constituted must rest for ever in motionless equipoise, with equal attractions of contrary tendency, with equal weights of power balancing each other" (31). Here Johnson unwittingly describes exactly what Burke sought in a good constitution. For Burke, the safety of the British constitution was precisely that different powers did balance one another; that while one estate might command, others should have the right to refuse; that no single power could achieve ascendancy, but that they would remain in equipoise. (In Burke's Reflections, "equipoise" is linked to "tranquillity", and it is the final virtue, the word on which that work comes its conclusion.) The British form of government that Burke idolized was one that resisted "sole sovereignty", and its characteristic was a system of complex mutual checks: * The King might have the power to dissolve Parliament, but he was not sole sovereign, reigning by divine and arbitrary right, for he could neither live without Parliament nor determine who might be elected to it. * The House of Commons could propose legislation, but was not sole sovereign because it could be resisted by the Lords, who were not beholden to anyone. * A Government drawing upon both the Lords and the Commons could override the wishes of the King, but it was not sole sovereign because the House of Commons could dislodge it. * And whilst Parliament had authority over the people, it was not sole sovereign either, because the people could periodically dismiss MPs and demand a new Government. * Yet nor were the people sovereign, because they could dismiss neither the Lords nor -- except in extreme circumstances -- the King. (Johnson, of course, agreed with Burke that it was not for men to overturn the constitution that history had given them.) Burke explained over and over again that British sovereignty "was not in its nature an abstract idea of unity, but was capable of great complexity and infinite modifications". He wrote of "collective sovereignty", and unlike Johnson he believed that power could and should be divided and dispersed. For him the constitution was so constructed as "to prevent any one of its principles from being carried as far as, taken by itself and theoretically, it would go" (32). Chivalry, manners, allegiance and the balance of the constitution were important because they helped to make "power gentle and obedience liberal", transmuting the sublime, the terrible and the powerful, into the beautiful, the moderate and the modest. The Irishman who understood all this must have been irritated by the Englishman so blasé about his own constitution that he could say in 1775, “Why, Sir, absolute princes seldom do any harm,” and who when reminded that there had been “many sad victims to absolute power” blithely replied “So, Sir, have there been to popular factions.” Johnson, here, is too ready to side with one form of oppression over another, whereas Burke saw how they could be made to keep one another in check (33). Johnson described the House of Commons as “co-ordinate with the other powers”, meaning the King and the Lords (34), and his Dictionary entry for “coordination” – “holding the same rank” -- cites Howel’s Pre-eminence of Parliament: “In this high court of parliament there is a rare coordination of power, a wholesome mixture betwixt monarchy, optimacy and democracy”. And yet he did not think in terms of wholesome mixtures when he asserted that "In sovereignty there are no gradations . . . There must in every society be some power or other from which there is no appeal, which admits no restrictions, which pervades the whole mass of the community, regulates and adjusts all subordination, enacts laws or repeals them, erects or annuls judicatures, extends or contracts privileges, exempt itself from question or control, and bounded only by physical necessity" (35). For Johnson as for Hobbes, Blackstone and most constitutional thinkers before and since, there must be an ultimate power; but not for Burke. Burke saw that government could work by a series of compromised, partial powers. During that fortunate period when this principle was understood in Britain, each of the pretenders to overriding power -- King, Parliament, Commons and people -- was prevented by the co-ordinate others from acting despotically. The importance of each of the restraining principles would be evident in different circumstances, and Burke campaigned against different dangers at different times. In 1770 he wrote against the "double cabinet" which was enabling George III to rule in contempt of Parliament (36), but also deplored the precedent set by the Wilkes case of Parliament ignoring the wishes of the people. Later and most famously, he wrote against the idea of the Commons (or its French equivalent) ruling in contempt of the other estates, as it virtually does today, when any authority that is not purely democratic is widely supposed to be unfounded and unjust. Crucially, Burke explained in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, that the Commons was not to be considered the only, or an adequate form of representation of the people: "For it is not the derivation of the power of that House from the people, which makes it in a distinct sense their representative. The King is the representative of the people; so are the lords; so are the judges. They all are trustees for the people, as well as the Commons; because no power is given for the sole sake of the holder; and although government certainly is an institution of Divine authority, yet its forms, and the persons who administer it, all originate from the people" (37). Johnson's most characteristic remarks about government are probably about its unimportance in the whole scheme of life. “I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual” (38). Burke, on the other hand, gave half his life to the question. “Sir,” said Johnson, “the danger of the abuse of power is nothing to a private man. What Frenchman is prevented from passing his life as he pleases?” Well, that was in 1772. Twenty years later, Burke was busy describing the new French system of totalitarianism, which didn't consider anyone to be a private man. “When I say that all governments are alike,” Dr Johnson told Sir Adam Fergusson, “I consider that in no government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it.” In the face of 20th-century history, this sounds complacent: the abuse of power can continue, catastrophically, for decades before mankind puts a stop to it. But Johnson stoically took an even longer view, as when he wrote: How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure. (Lines added to Goldsmith's The Traveller.) By comparison with the questions of eternal life or damnation that preoccupied him, even the worst that government can do is small matter. Boswell once wrote down Johnson's thoughts about Tories and Whigs, which began: “A wise Tory and a wise Whig, I believe, will agree. Their principles are the same, though their modes of thinking are different. A high Tory makes government unintelligible: it is lost in the clouds. A violent Whig makes it impractical: he is for allowing so much liberty to every man that there is not power enough to govern any man. The prejudice of the Tory is for establishment; the prejudice of the Whig is for innovation. A Tory does not wish to give more real power to government; but that government should have more reverence” (39). Burke, by that definition, was a Tory: he distrusted innovation, and wished government to be revered but restrained (40). Fifty years later, Coleridge spoke in terms similar to Johnson’s: The ideal Tory and the ideal Whig (and some such there have really been) agreed in the necessity and benefit of an exact balance of the three estates: but the Tory was more jealous of the balance being deranged by the people; the Whig, of its being deranged by the Crown. But this was a habit, a jealousy only; they both agreed in the ultimate preservation of the balance; and accordingly they might each, under certain circumstances, without the slightest inconsistency, pass from one side to the other, as the ultimate object required it. This the Tories did at the [Glorious] Revolution, but remained Tories as before. (Table Talk, January 28, 1832.) Johnson and Burke might well be cast as the ideal Tory and the ideal Whig, and although their habit of opposition was strong, each could admit some right on the other side. Boswell heard Johnson say that “after the death of a violent Whig” (probably Walmesley), “he felt his Toryism much abated”, and years later Burke said to him that the Revolution in France “would almost make me adopt your Tory principles” (41). Burke’s early biographer Robert Bisset also found a good measure of convergence: Although Mr Burke and Dr Johnson disagreed concerning political measures, internal and external, they still continued in mutual friendship. Indeed the disagreement in principle was rather apparent than real. The Tory was the supporter of personal independence, and regarded political liberty as far as it appeared to him to produce private liberty and happiness. Though averse to oppression, he admitted that “if the abuse be enormous, Nature will rise up, and, claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.” The Whig was a friend of subordination, the reverencer of rank and dignity, and the enemy of popular violence. Johnson did not maintain the duty of obedience to Kings and rulers on the ground of any divine right they had to such obedience; but on account of the conduciveness of the obedience to the happiness of the governed. Burke allowed that it was the duty and interest of the governed to obey their governors, unless in cases of very flagrant oppression; and considered the greatest evil of certain ministerial measures to be their tendency to arouse the people to a forcible resistance. (The Life of Edmund Burke, 2nd ed., 1800, I, pp.234-6.) Although Fanny Burney once immodestly claimed that the merit of her novel Evelina was almost the only thing that Johnson and Burke agreed upon, there was much that united them. Both abhorred slavery and were morally perturbed by the sins of empire. Both protested against the treatment of Irish Catholics. Both wished to abolish the laws of imprisonment for debt. Perhaps on these subjects, where they were in agreement, there was nothing to discuss, and we can readily agree with them too. But from this distance we can also see that the two men shared some premises startlingly at odds with today's consensus. Both were devout, abhorred atheists such as Rousseau, and thought that the established religion was the necessary basis of the state. Both were morally appalled by the sufferings of the poor, practised personal charity, and were anguished by how little it could achieve; yet both accepted that they could not alter the “decrees of Providence”, and could no more than slightly ameliorate “the condition of life”. Both agreed with Locke that “established property and inviolable freedom are the greatest of political felicities” (42), and both upheld the property qualification for the vote. Both were on guard against the centralization of power. Both considered a hierarchy inescapable and desirable, and believed in aristocracy, yet both were famously rude about individual aristocrats such as Chesterfield, Bolingbroke and the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale. Both understood what is often forgotten in public life today: that “cases are dead things, principles are living and productive” (43). And both valued experience far above political theory. Either of them, for instance, could have written this paragraph: Governments formed by chance, and gradually improved by such expedients as the successive discovery of their defects happened to suggest, are never to be tried by a regular theory. The states of the Christian world have grown up to their present magnitude in a great length of time and by a great variety of accidents. We must be content with them as they are; should we attempt to mend their disproportions, we might easily demolish, and difficultly rebuild them. Not one of them has been formed upon a regular plan or with any unity of design. Laws are now made and customs are established; these are our rules, and by them we must be guided. In all these old countries the state has been made to the people, and not the people conformed to the state. Those six sentences are taken alternately from Johnson's The False Alarm (1770) and Burke's Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796). Some of what Burke wrote at the end of his life fits well with what his Tory friend had written a quarter of a century before, because in the 1770s, while Burke had been principally concerned about excessive power in the hands of the King, Johnson had already had fears that it was the claims of the people that were becoming exorbitant. In Taxation No Tyranny he had warned against cant about the rights of man, and written that the Americans had “introduced into the history of mankind a new mode of disaffection” (44). This was his answer to the old exam question about whether the American Revolution led inevitably to the French: he thought that it would. But if he was prophetic, his warning went unheeded – Johnson’s only lasting impact on politics was as a pioneer of parliamentary reporting -- and it was left to Burke in the 1790s to alert men to the threat posed by the new philosophy. Quite properly Burke is praised for his prompt assessment of what was in the Pandora's Box opened by Paine and others, but Johnson had long before warned that the Devilish ideas it contained would “sow the seeds of sedition and propagate confusion, perplexity and pain” (45). Both Burke and Johnson believed that anything like a universal suffrage would dissolve the bonds of society and that mass democracy would be a shameless, insubordinate return to chaos. In one of the Vinerian lectures on law that he prepared for Robert Chambers, Johnson discusses the pronounced inequalities between constituencies, with tiny villages returning two MPs while modern cities had none, and says that as a result the Commons should be considered only “as a body of men summoned to consult the general interest of the community with very little or no reference of particular men to particular places . . . We shall be restrained from oppression by that great principle which holds all empires together, 'that the happiness of the whole is the happiness of its parts.'" Burke echoed him: “The very inequality of representation, which is so foolishly complained of, is perhaps the very thing which prevents us from thinking or acting as members for districts" (46). Because they wished government to be "a trustee for the whole, and not for the parts", and wished MPs to remain more than "bidders at an auction of popularity" (47), both men were horrified by the idea of unrestrained popular rule. Johnson refers to "putrefying democracy" and Burke to "a swinish multitude" (48). Johnson wrote: "Few errors, and few faults of government, can justify an appeal to the rabble, who ought not to judge of what they cannot understand, and whose opinions are not propagated by reason but caught by contagion" (49). The editor of his political writings, Donald Greene, with an excessive liberal zeal for the majority, was horrified by this kind of thing, because he suffered from the delusion that if Johnson was not a democrat, he must have been an authoritarian (50). As if in exculpation, Greene wrote that "most of Johnson's contemporaries would have agreed with him that there are limits of ignorance below which the privilege of participating in the government of a country should not be extended" (51). But do we really now believe that there are no limits of ignorance beyond which this privilege should not be extended? Privately, I suggest, most people agree with Johnson and Burke that among numbers of men "the smaller part may often be the wiser" (52), but publicly we pay ever more homage to the totem of democracy, and institutionally we are moving ever further from the balance that these two political opponents considered to be, if not perfect, at least well tried and benign. In another of the Vinerian lectures, Johnson wrote: “experience immediately shows that but a very small number of any society are qualified to regulate manners or superintend the interest of the rest" (53). John Cannon's comment on this applies as well to Burke as to Johnson: "It was not that he despised the poor and humble -- the whole of his life testifies against that -- but that he feared their ignorance, hastiness and impressionability" (54). In an age when we are told after a general election that "It's The Sun wot won it", there is little reason to disagree with their fears. Notes 1. The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, gen. ed. Thomas W. Copeland, 1958-78, II, p.145. 2. The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford, 1992-94, III, p.192: to Frances Reynolds, 19 October. 3. See T. W. Copeland's "Johnson and Burke" in Statemen, Scholars and Merchants: Essays in Eighteenth-Century History Presented to Dame Lucy Sutherland, ed. Anne Whiteman, J.S. Bromley and P.G.M. Dickson, 1973, pp.300-303. 4. Boswell met Johnson on May 16, 1763, but did not meet Burke until May 6, 1772. Reynolds mentions Burke's high regard for Boswell in two letters of 1782, see The Correspondence of James Boswell with Certain Members of the Club, ed. Charles N. Fifer, 1976, pp.126-27 and p.310 n.8. The relationship of Boswell and Burke is charted in Frank Brady's excellent introduction to their correspondence in The Correspondence of James Boswell with David Garrick, Edmund Burke and Edmond Malone, gen. ed. Brady, 1986, pp.81-102. The first volume of James Boswell's Life of Johnson: An Edition of the Original Manuscript, ed. Marshall Waingrow, 1994, p.316 n.1, reveals for the first time that Johnson's remark "He is indeed continually attempting wit but he fails" concerned Wilkes, not Burke, as was previously thought. 5. "The true cause, I perceive, of B.'s coldness, is that he thinks your habit of recording throws a restraint on convivial ease and negligence," Malone wrote to Boswell on September 14, 1787. After its publication, however, Burke valued the Life: "The discourse turning upon Dr Johnson, he said he was greater in conversation than even in writing, and that Boswell's Life was the best record of his powers. This work, he said, was the first experiment of complete transmission of conversation, delivering the wisdom without hiding the weakness" (Robert Bisset, The Life of Edmund Burke, 2nd ed., 1800, II, pp.431-2). Burke also told George III that the Life was the most entertaining book he knew: see The Correspondence of James Boswell with David Garrick, Edmund Burke and Edmond Malone, pp.101-102. 6. Burke is referred to anonymously more than anyone else except Boswell himself and Bennet Langton; the word "eminent" attaches to him seven times among the anonymous references listed in index and table in the Oxford edition of The Life of Johnson (ed. Hill, rev. Powell, 1934, VI, pp.57, 418-67). 7. Johnson to Hester Thrale, May 23, 1780. 8. James Northcote, Life of Reynolds, 2nd ed., 1819, II, p.211. Johnson liked to satisfy himself of his own superiority to others in conversation, because, as he said, "So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other" (Life, II, p.13). Coleridge commented that Johnson’s “bow-wow manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced; -- for no one, I suppose, will set Johnson before Burke, -- and Burke was a great and universal talker; -- yet now we hear nothing of this except by some chance remarks in Boswell. The fact is, Burke, like all men of genius who love to talk at all, was very discursive and continuous; hence he is not reported; he seldom said the sharp short things that Johnson almost always did” (Table Talk, July 4, 1833). 9. 2nd ed., 1800, I, pp.63-4. Johnson detested Clive of India for his depredations on the natives, but he did himself little credit by his well-intentioned remark in 1783, "I am clear that the best plan for the government of India is a despotic governor" (Life, IV, p.213). Like Johnson, Burke originally defended the independence of the East India Company, but his ideas about India changed utterly, and he must have realised that Johnson was hopelessly ill-informed. On January 24, 1784 Johnson wrote in a letter: "Mr Burke has just sent me his speech upon the affairs of India, a volume of above an hundred pages closely printed. I will look into it; but my thoughts now seldom travel to great distances." Perhaps Johnson never engaged with Burke in earnest again over the Indian question after that early meeting in 1758. 10. Life, IV, p.407 n.3. 11. Political Writings, ed. Donald J. Greene, 1977, p.348 n.7. 12. Recorded by Croker. Powell's revision of Hill's edition of Boswell's Life, misprints the date as 1797 (IV, p.316 n.1). 13. Life, III, pp.231-2. 14. Life, II, pp.101-102: though in Taxation No Tyranny he makes a frightful exception: "North America contains three millions, not of men merely, but of Whigs, of Whigs fierce for liberty, and disdainful of dominion... they multiply with the fecundity of their own rattle-snakes, so that every quarter of a century doubles their numbers" (Political Writings, p.414). 15. This perhaps bears on the difference in their manners of writing, noted by Hazlitt when he wrote of Burke that "He had nothing of the set or formal style, the measured cadence, and stately phraseology of Johnson" (The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 1930-34, VII, p.310). 16. As Copeland notes, "For most of the period of their friendship, Burke was in the world and Johnson half out of it," (see n.3 above). 17. Political Writings, p.415. 18. Review of "A Journal of Eight Days Journey" by Jonas Hanway in Literary Magazine no. 13, 1757 (Johnson: Prose and Poetry, Reynard Library, ed. Mona Wilson, 1950, p.341). 19. Life, II, p.98. 20. Life, II, pp.429-30. 21. Life, II, p.430 n.1. 22. Life, I, p.427. John H. Middendorf argues that their relations were "never completely harmonious nor completely discordant," Philological Quarterly, XL, 1961, pp.281-96. 23. Bisset, II, pp.429. Ian Simpson Ross gives detail of a visit by Burke to Smith in 1784, in The Life of Adam Smith, 1995, pp.355-8. F. P. Lock quotes a memorandum by Dugald Stewart recording that Burke spoke “coldly” of The Theory of Moral Sentiments on that visit, in Edmund Burke, Vol 1: 1730-1784, 1998, pp.186-7. 24. Life, II, p.430. He applied the same principle even to liberty: “We are all agreed as to our own liberty; we would have as much of it as we can get; but we are not agreed as to the liberty of others: for in proportion as we take, others must lose” (Life, III, p.383). 25. Two Letters to Gentlemen in the City of Bristol, 1778. It is certainly fit that we overcome this delusion, because otherwise we are liable to think in terms of plunder rather than trade, as Socrates blithely appears to when he discusses war with Plato’s brother Glaucon: “So before someone starts considering on whom to make war, he ought to know the strength both of his own country and of her opponents, so that, if his country is stronger, he may encourage her to undertake the war, and, if she is weaker, he may persuade her to be cautious” (“Memoirs of Socrates”, 3.6, in Xenophon Conversations of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick and Robin Waterfield, 1990, p.154). 26. The Idler, May 6, 1758. 27. Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, 1777: in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful and other pre-revolutionary writings, ed. David Womersley, 1998, p.411. 28. Womersley, pp.328-9. 29. Political Writings, pp.378-9. 30. Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, 1770: in Womersley (see especially p.247ff). 31. Political Writings, p.325. Despite his attitude to Wilkes, Johnson was shortly afterwards scathing about the pretences used by the Commons “to evade a majority” so that “the seat was at last his that was chosen not by his electors but his fellow-senators" (Political Writings, p.399). 32. An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, 1791: in Further Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Daniel E. Ritchie, 1992, p.194. 33. Life, II, 370. When Johnson supported the appointment of the Lord Mayor of London by seniority, he again inadvertently pointed to a Burkean solution. “There is no more reason to suppose that the choice of a rabble will be right, than that chance will be right,” he said (Life, III, pp.356-7). That is why the democracy of the House of Commons has been well balanced by the random selection of the House of Lords. 34. The False Alarm: in Political Writings, p.321. 35. Taxation No Tyranny: in Political Writings, p.423. 36. Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, in Womersley. 37. Womersley, p.244. 38. Life, II, p.170. 39. Life, IV, pp.117-18. J.C.D. Clark argues that “Johnson’s attempt to frame a formula of tranquil reconciliation quickly broke down” (Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism, 1994, p.205). 40. Burke declared in his Speech on American Taxation that he was appalled that the “reverential affection” which upheld Parliament was being lost, and that the House was “held up only by the treacherous underpinning and clumsy buttresses of arbitrary power” (Womersley, p.294). 41. Johnson: Life, I, p.430; Burke: Boswell's Journal, January 23, 1790. 42. Johnson, Sermons, ed. Jean Hagstrum and James Gray, 1978, pp.258-59., III, p.206. 43. Burke: Observations on a late State of the Nation, 1769. 44. Political Writings, p.441. 45. Piozzi’s Anecdotes in Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G.Birkbeck Hill, 1897, I, p.174. 46. Johnson: Lecture 15 in A Course of Lectures on the English Law Delivered at the University of Oxford, 1767-1773, by Sir Robert Chambers, ed. Thomas M. Curley, 1986, I, pp.291-2. Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790: ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien, 1968, p.304. J.C.D. Clark warns against assuming Johnson's authorship of the Vinerian lectures ("The Cultural Identity of Samuel Johnson" in The Age of Johnson, vol 8, p.52). 47. Reflections, p.303 and p.374. 48. Johnson: Political Writings, p.378; Burke: Reflections, p.173. 49. Political Writings, p.391. In May 1778 he said to Boswell: “There is no more reason to suppose that the choice of a rabble will be right, than that chance will be right” (Life, III, pp.356-7). 50. See the antithesis on p.176 of Greene's The Politics of Samuel Johnson, 2nd ed., 1990. 51. ibid, p.209. 52. As Johnson writes in a passage of The Patriot (Political Writings, p.395) which closely parallels Burke's contemporaneous Speech to the Electors of Bristol. 53. Lecture 12: A Course of Lectures, I, p.249. 54. Samuel Johnson and the Politics of Hanoverian England, 1994, p.146. PAGE 2