national Church and to the king (though theoretically he was a Jacobite, a
supporter of the supplanted Stuarts as against the reigning House of
Hanover); and that in conversation he was likely to roar down or scowl down
all innovators and their defenders or silence them with such observations
as, 'Sir, I perceive you are a vile Whig.' At worst it was not quite
certain that he would not knock them down physically. Of women's preaching
he curtly observed that it was like a dog walking on its hind legs: 'It is
not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.' English
insular narrowness certainly never had franker expression than in his
exclamation: 'For anything I can see, all foreigners are fools.' For the
American colonists who had presumed to rebel against their king his
bitterness was sometimes almost frenzied; he characterized them as
'rascals, robbers and pirates.' His special antipathy to Scotland and its
people led him to insult them repeatedly, though with some individual Scots
he was on very friendly terms. Yet after all, many of these prejudices
rested on important principles which were among the most solid foundations
of Johnson's nature and largely explain his real greatness, namely on sound
commonsense, moral and intellectual independence, and hatred of
insincerity. There was really something to be said for his refusal to
listen to the Americans' demand for liberty while they themselves held
slaves. Living in a period of change, Johnson perceived that in many cases
innovations prove dangerous and that the progress of society largely
depends on the continuance of the established institutions in which the
wisdom of the past is summed up. Of course in specific instances, perhaps
in the majority of them, Johnson was wrong; but that does not alter the
fact that he thought of himself as standing, and really did stand, for
order against a freedom which is always more or less in danger of leading
to anarchy.

Johnson's personality, too, cannot be fairly judged by its more grotesque