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