was somewhat singular. "Campbell," said he, "is a good man, a pious man.
I am afraid he has not been in the inside of a church for many years,
but he never passes a church without pulling off his hat: this shows he
has good principles." Spain and Sicily must surely contain many pious
robbers and well-principled assassins. Johnson could easily see that a
Roundhead who named all his children after Solomon's singers, and talked
in the House of Commons about seeking the Lord, might be an unprincipled
villain whose religious mummeries only aggravated his guilt; but a man
who took off his hat when he passed a church episcopally consecrated
must be a good man, a pious man, a man of good principles. Johnson could
easily see that those persons who looked on a dance or a laced waistcoat
as sinful deemed most ignobly of the attributes of God and of the ends
of revelation; but with what a storm of invective he would have
overwhelmed any man who had blamed him for celebrating the redemption of
mankind with sugarless tea and butterless buns!...

Johnson, as Mr. Burke most justly observed, appears far greater in
Boswell's books than in his own. His conversation appears to have been
quite equal to his writings in matter, and far superior to them in
manner. When he talked, he clothed his wit and his sense in forcible
and natural expressions. As soon as he took his pen in his hand to write
for the public, his style became systematically vicious. All his books
are written in a learned language; in a language which nobody hears from
his mother or his nurse; in a language in which nobody ever quarrels, or
drives bargains, or makes love; in a language in which nobody ever
thinks. It is clear that Johnson himself did not think in the dialect in
which he wrote. The expressions which came first to his tongue were
simple, energetic, and picturesque. When he wrote for publication he did
his sentences out of English into Johnsonese. His letters from the
Hebrides to Mrs. Thrale are the original of that work of which the