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.

A few weeks after Johnson had entered on these obscure labours,
he published a work which at once placed him high among the
writers of his age. It is probable that what he had suffered
during his first year in London had often reminded him of some
parts of that noble poem in which Juvenal had described the