Being often very hungry when he sat down to his meals, he contracted a habit of eating with ravenous greediness.Even to the end of his life, and even at the tables of the great, the sight of food affected him as it affects wild beasts and birds of prey.His taste in cookery, formed in subterranean ordinaries and alamode beefshops, was far from delicate.Whenever he was so fortunate as to have near him a hare that had been kept too long, or a meat pie made with rancid butter, he gorged himself with such violence that his veins swelled, and the moisture broke out on his forehead.The affronts which his poverty emboldened stupid and low-minded men to offer to him would have broken a mean spirit into sycophancy, but made him rude even to ferocity.
Unhappily the insolence which, while it was defensive, was pardonable, and in some sense respectable, accompanied him into societies where he was treated with courtesy and kindness.He was repeatedly provoked into striking those who had taken liberties with him.All the sufferers, however, were wise enough to abstain from talking about their beatings, except Osborne, the most rapacious and brutal of booksellers, who proclaimed everywhere that he had been knocked down by the huge fellow whom he had hired to puff the Harleian Library.
About a year after Johnson had begun to reside in London, he was fortunate enough to obtain regular employment from Cave, an enterprising and intelligent bookseller, who was proprietor and editor of the "Gentleman's Magazine." That journal, just entering on the ninth year of its long existence, was the only periodical work in the kingdom which then had what would now be called a large circulation.It was, indeed, the chief source of parliamentary intelligence.It was not then safe, even during a recess, to publish an account of the proceedings of either House without some disguise.Cave, however, ventured to entertain his readers with what he called "Reports of the Debates of the Senate of Lilliput." France was Blefuscu; London was Mildendo: pounds were sprugs: the Duke of Newcastle was the Nardac secretary of State: Lord Hardwicke was the Hurgo Hickrad: and William Pulteney was Wingul Pulnub.To write the speeches was, during several years, the business of Johnson.He was generally furnished with notes, meagre indeed, and inaccurate, of what had been said; but sometimes he had to find arguments and eloquence both for the ministry and for the opposition.He was himself a Tory, not from rational conviction--for his serious opinion was that one form of government was just as good or as bad as another--but from mere passion, such as inflamed the Capulets against the Montagues, or the Blues of the Roman circus against the Greens.In his infancy he had heard so much talk about the villanies of the Whigs, and the dangers of the Church, that he had become a furious partisan when he could scarcely speak.
Before he was three he had insisted on being taken to hear Sacheverell preach at Lichfield Cathedral, and had listened to the sermon with as much respect, and probably with as much intelligence, as any Staffordshire squire in the congregation.
The work which had been begun in the nursery had been completed by the university.Oxford, when Johnson resided there, was the most Jacobitical place in England; and Pembroke was one of the most Jacobital colleges in Oxford.The prejudices which he brought up to London were scarcely less absurd than those of his own Tom Tempest.Charles II.and James II.were two of the best kings that ever reigned.Laud, a poor creature who never did, said, or wrote anything indicating more than the ordinary capacity of an old woman, was a prodigy of parts and learning over whose tomb Art and Genius still continued to weep.Hampden deserved no more honourable name than that of "the zealot of rebellion." Even the ship money, condemned not less decidedly by Falkland and Clarendon than by the bitterest Roundheads, Johnson would not pronounce to have been an unconstitutional impost.
Under a government, the mildest that had ever been known in the world--under a government, which allowed to the people an unprecedented liberty of speech and action--he fancied that he was a slave; he assailed the ministry with obloquy which refuted itself, and regretted the lost freedom and happiness of those golden days in which a writer who had taken but one-tenth part of the license allowed to him would have been pilloried, mangled with the shears, whipped at the cart's tail, and flung into a noisome dungeon to die.He hated dissenters and stockjobbers, the excise and the army, septennial parliaments, and continental connections.He long had an aversion to the Scotch, an aversion of which he could not remember the commencement, but which, he owned, had probably originated in his abhorrence of the conduct of the nation during the Great Rebellion.It is easy to guess in what manner debates on great party questions were likely to be reported by a man whose judgment was so much disordered by party spirit.A show of fairness was indeed necessary to the prosperity of the Magazine.But Johnson long afterwards owned that, though he had saved appearances, he had taken care that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it; and, in fact, every passage which has lived, every passage which bears the marks of his higher faculties, is put into the mouth of some member of the opposition.
