single meaning; the plausible schemes of philosophers give no solution
to the everlasting riddle; the nostrums of politicians touch only the
surface of the deeply-rooted evil; it is folly to be querulous, and as
silly to fancy that men are growing worse, as that they are much better
than they used to be. The evils under which we suffer are not skin-deep,
to be eradicated by changing the old physicians for new quacks. What is
to be done under such conditions, but to hold fast as vigorously as we
can to the rules of life and faith which have served our ancestors, and
which, whatever their justifications, are at least the only consolation,
because they supply the only guidance through this labyrinth of
troubles? Macaulay has ridiculed Johnson for what he takes to be the
ludicrous inconsistency of his intense political prejudice, combined
with his assertion of the indifference of all forms of government.
"If," says Macaulay, "the difference between two forms of government be
not worth half a guinea, it is not easy to see how Whiggism can be viler
than Toryism, or the Crown can have too little power." The answer is
surely obvious. Whiggism is vile, according to the doctor's phrase,
because Whiggism is a "negation of all principle;" it is in his view,
not so much the preference of one form to another, as an attack upon the
vital condition of all government. He called Burke a "bottomless Whig"
in this sense, implying that Whiggism meant anarchy; and in the next
generation a good many people were led, rightly or wrongly, to agree
with him by the experience of the French revolution.

This dogged conservatism has both its value and its grotesque side. When
Johnson came to write political pamphlets in his later years, and to
deal with subjects little familiar to his mind, the results were
grotesque enough. Loving authority, and holding one authority to be as
good as another, he defended with uncompromising zeal the most
preposterous and tyrannical measures. The pamphlets against the Wilkite