they can make. A general combination against them would be little short of annihilation.
We are both of Dr. Johnson's school T . For my own part, I acknowledge the highest obligations to him. He may be said to have formed my mind, and to have brushed from it a great deal of rubbish. Those very people whom he has brought to think rightly will occasionally criticise the opinions of their master when he nods. But we should always recollect that it is he him self who taught us and enabled us to do it 2 .
The drawback of his character is entertaining prejudices on very slight foundations ; giving an opinion, perhaps, first at random, but from its being contradicted he thinks himself obliged always to support [it], or, if he cannot support, still not to acquiesce [in the opposite opinion]. Of this I remember an instance of a defect or forgetfulness in his ' Dictionary.' I asked him how he came not to correct it in the second edition. ( No/ says he, ' they made so much of it that I would not flatter them by altering it 3 ! '
From passion, from the prevalence of his disposition for the minute, he was constantly acting contrary to his own reason, to his principles. It was a frequent subject of animadversion with him, how much authors lost of the pleasure and comfort of life by their carrying always about them their own consequence and celebrity 4 . Yet no man in mixed company, not to his intimates, certainly, for that would be an insupportable slavery, ever acted with more circumspection to his character than himself. The most light and airy dispute was with him a dispute on the arena 5 .
1 Post, p. 359 ; Life, i. 245, n. 3 ; liberately writing it,' he did his best iii- 369- to make it ' permanent.' 'Id. iv. 429.
2 ' It is not uncommon for those 4 * Milton, in a letter to a learned who have grown wise by the labour stranger, by whom he had been of others to add a little of their own visited, with great reason congratu- and overlook their masters.' Works, lates himself upon the consciousness vii- 470- of being found equal to his own
3 His erroneous definitions of lee- character, and having preserved in ward and pastern remain unchanged a private and familiar interview that in the fourth edition, the last cor- reputation which his works had pro- rected by him. Life, \. 293, n. 2. In cured him.' The Rambler, No. 14. retaining these definitions, if he did 5 Speaking of Dr. Campbell, he not * make error pernicious by de- told us, that he one day called on
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