many among them are in general backward in forming connections and affociating with scholars and the learned of the laity, at leaft with men of Johnson's temper, who, where he had reason to expect learning, never fhewed mercy to ignorance.

Hawkefworth was a man of fine parts, but no learning: his reading had been irregular and defultory: the knowledge he had acquired, he, by the help of a good memory retained, fo that it was ready at every call, but on no fubject had he ever formed any system. All of ethics that he knew, he had got from Pope's 'Effay on Man,' and Epiftles; he had read the modern French writers, and more particularly the poets, and with the aid of Keill's Introduction, Chambers's Dictionary, and other fuch common books, had attained fuch an infight into phyfics, as enabled him to talk on the fubject. In the more valuable branches of learning, he was deficient. His office of curator of the Magazine gave him great opportunities of improvement, by an extenfive correfpondence with men of all profeffions: it increafed his little ftock of literature, and furnished him with more than a competent share of that intelligence which is neceffary to qualify a man for converfation. He had a good fhare of wit, and a vein of humour. With all thefe talents, Hawkefworth could be no other than an instructive and entertaining companion.

Of a far more valuable kind were the endowments of Dyer; keen penetration and deep erudition were the qualities that fo diftinguifhed his character, that, in fome inftances, Johnfon might almoft be faid to have looked up to him. As the purpofe of our meetings

was

was the free communication of fentiments, and the enjoyment of focial intercourfe, our converfations were unrestrained, and the fubjects thereof multifarious. Dyer was a divine, a linguist, a mathematician, a metaphyfician, a matural philofopher, a claffical fcholar, and a critic; this Johnson faw and felt, and never, but in defence of fome fundamental and important truth, would he contradict him. The deference thus fhewn by Johnson to Dyer, may be said to have been involuntary, or respect extorted; for in their religious and political fentiments their difagreement was fo great, that lefs of it would, in fome minds, have engendered hatred. Of the fundamental and important truths above-mentioned, there was one, namely the nature of moral obligation, of which Johnson was uniformly tenacious. Every one, verfed in ftudies of this kind, knows, that there are, among the moderns, three fects or claffes of writers on morality, who, though perhaps deriving their refpective tenets from the Socratic, the Academic and other ancient schools, are, in these times, confidered, at least, as the guides of fects; these are the characteristic lord Shaftesbury, Dr. Samuel Clarke, and Mr. Wollafton: the first of thefe makes virtue to confift in a course of action conformable to what is called the moral fenfe; Wollafton fays it is acting, in all cafes, according to truth, and treating things as they are; Dr. Clarke fuppofes all rational agents as under an obligation to act agreeably to the relations that fubfift between fuch, or according to what he calls the fitnefs of things. Johnfon was ever an admirer of Clarke, and agreed with him in this and most other of his opinions, excepting in that of the Trinity,

7

Trinity, in which he said, as Dr. Bentley, though no very found believer, had done before, that Dr. Waterland had foiled him. He therefore fell in with the scheme of fitness, and thereby professed himself an adversary, in the mildest sense of the word, and an opponent of Dyer, who, having been a pupil of Hutcheson, favoured, notwithstanding his fufpected infidelity, this and many other notions and opinions of lord Shaftesbury.

To fay of lord Shaftesbury that he was but a fufpected infidel, is furely treating him mildly, and I forbear to tax him with unbelief, only because in his ⚫ Letters to a student at the University*,' he has affected to speak of the Chriftian religion, as if half perfuaded of its truth. Nevertheless, throughout his works it may be difcerned, that he omits no opportunity of branding it with fuperftition and enthusiasm, and of representing the primitive profeffors of it as provoking, by their factious and turbulent behaviour, those perfecutions from whence they derive the glory of martyrs. For these fentiments, as alfo for the invidious comparisons he is ever drawing between the

A young man, named Michael Ainsworth, the fon, as I have been informed, of the parish clerk of Winborne St. Giles in Dorsetshire, the feat of the Shaftesbury family, whom his lordship fent to and supported at Oxford, with a view of fettling him in the church, and giving to it a divine of his own forming. His lordship, however, failed of his end: the young man, if not in his religious, in his political principles chofe to think for himself; he might be as good a chriftian, but was not fo good a whig as his patron intended him to be: he thereby loft his favour, and incurred the cen fure of ingratitude.

philofophers Plato, Epictetus, Seneca and others, and the fathers, and his many contemptuous fneers at the writers on the fide of chriftianity, Johnfon bore him no good will, neither did he feem at all to relish the cant of the Shaftesburian school, nor inclined to admit the pretenfions of those who professed to be of it, to taftes and perceptions which are not common to all men; a taste in morals, in poetry, and profe-writing, in painting, in sculpture, in mufic, in architecture, and in government! a taste that cenfured every production, and induced them to reprobate every effort of genius that fell fhort of their own capricious standard*.

Little as Johnson liked the notions of lord Shaftesbury, he still lefs approved thofe of fome later writers, who have pursued the fame train of thinking and reasoning, namely, Hutchefon, Dr. Nettleton, and Mr. Harris of Salisbury, of which latter, for the many fingularities of fentiment and ftyle in his 'Hermes,' he fcrupled not to fpeak very lightly. There is a book extant, intitled, Letters concerning Mind,' written by a perfon of the fame school, named Petvin, which, with an arrow taken from the quiver of their great master, a ftroke of ridicule

• See lord Shaftesbury's Letter on Defign,' paffim, in which thefe fanciful notions prevail, that a tafte, an ear, a judgment, are the confequences of freedom, or civil liberty, and that not having attained to the perfection thereof, our ecclefiaftical ftructures, particularly the metropolitan, retain much of what artifts call the Gothic kind; and compare with it his own puerile devices, invented with great labour to illuftrate the characteristics.

fhot from one of the Idlers, Johnson may be fairly said to have transfixed. The paffage is in a high degree ludicrous, and will, I am persuaded, justify the infertion of it here at length.

The author begins by declaring, that the forts of things are things that now are, have been, and shall be, and the things that ftrictly ARE. In this position,

except the last claufe, in which he ufes fomething of • the scholastic language, there is nothing but what every man has heard, and imagines himself to know. But who would not believe that fome wonderful novelty is presented to his intellect, when he is afterwards told, in the true bugbear ftyle, that the ares, in the former fenfe, are things that lie between the have• beens and shall-bees. The have-beens are things that are past; the fhall-bes are things that are to come; and the things that ARE, in the latter fenfe, are things that have not been, nor shall be, nor ftand in the midst of fuch as are before them, or fhall be after them. The things that have been, and shall be, have, respect to prefent, past, and future. Thofe likewife that now ARE have moreover place; that, for instance, which is here, that which is to the east, that which is to • the west.

All this, my dear reader, is very strange; but < though it be ftrange, it is not new; furvey these • wonderful fentences again, and they will be found

to contain nothing more than very plain truths, which, till this author arose, had always been delivered in plain language.'

That Dyer fhould be a friend to the doctrine of the moral fenfe, and to the other tenets of this school, is

not