parties: 'Parties once had a PRINCIPLE belonging to them, absurd
perhaps, and indefensible, but still carrying a notion of DUTY, by
which honest minds might easily be caught.

'But they are now COMBINATIONS OF INDIVIDUALS, who, instead of being
the sons and servants of the community, make a league for advancing
their PRIVATE INTERESTS. It is their business to hold high the notion
of POLITICAL HONOUR. I believe and trust, it is not injurious to say,
that such a bond is no better than that by which the lowest and
wickedest combinations are held together; and that it denotes the last
stage of political depravity.'

To find a thought, which just shewed itself to us from the mind of
JOHNSON, thus appearing again at such a distance of time, and without
any communication between them, enlarged to full growth in the mind of
MARKHAM, is a curious object of philosophical contemplation. That two
such great and luminous minds should have been so dark in one
corner--that THEY should have held it to be 'wicked rebellion in the
British subjects established in America, to resist the abject
condition of holding all their property at the mercy of British
subjects remaining at home, while their allegiance to our common Lord
the King was to be preserved inviolate'--is a striking proof to me,
either that 'He who fitteth in Heaven', scorns the loftiness of human
pride, or that the evil spirit, whose personal existence I strongly
believe, and even in this age am confirmed in that belief by a Fell,
nay, by a Hurd, has more power than some choose to allow.]

He told us of Cooke, who translated Hesiod, and lived twenty years on
a translation of Plautus, for which he was always taking
subscriptions; and that he presented Foote to a club, in the following