from manuscript into print; and intimately though he knew the foibles of Goldsmith's character, he did the amplest justice to his peculiar literary genius. "Goldsmith," he said, "was a man who, whatever he wrote, always did it better than any other man could do"—a judgment which stands in the Latin of his famous epitaph on Goldsmith as nihil tetigit quod non ornavit, "he touched nothing which he did not adorn." Horace Walpole described Johnson as "the representative in epitome of all the contradictions in human nature." This gives a rather superficial view of him. No doubt there was sometimes an odd disproportion in his likings and dislikes; it might seem strange, for instance, that he could not tolerate the mention of a man so estimable as Joseph Priestley, and yet be ready to dine at the table of the sedition-monger Jack Wilkes. Macaulay dwells on the contrast between Johnson's reluctance to credit the account of the Lisbon earthquake, and his readiness to believe in the Cock-Lane ghost. But Macaulay puts the case here in a somewhat misleading perspective. Johnson was slow to credit reports of extraordinary incidents in the ordinary course of nature, when he had no means of verifying such reports, because he was keenly alive to the various sources of falsehood in human life. In regard to alleged supernatural occurrences, he was not weakly credulous; it was he, for example, who demolished this very Cock-Lane ghost in the Gentleman s Magazine; but he wished to keep his mind open. Believing firmly in the
