, and the gloss he put on the crime of covetousness; which
last error was not confined to his conversation, but mingled itself with
his writings, though no one could well be freer from any taint of the
vice in his own life. Many a man may have indulged his inclinations to
evil, with much less compunction, while he has imagined himself
sheltered under the sanction of the moralist who watches one side of the
entrance into the nave of St. Paul's.

There was, in his mind, a strange mixture of credulity and doubtfulness.
He did not disbelieve either in the existence of ghosts, or in the
possibility of commuting other metals into gold; but was very slow to
credit any fact that was at all extraordinary. He would tell of Cave's
having seen an apparition, without much apparent doubt; and, with more
certainty, of his having been himself addressed by the voice of his
absent mother. The deception practised by the girl in Cock Lane, who was
a ventriloquist, is well known to have wrought on him so successfully,
as to make him go and watch in the church, where she pretended the
spirit of a young woman to be, which had disclosed to her the manner of
its having been violently separated from the body. On this occasion,
Boswell endeavours in vain to clear him from the imputation of a
weakness, which was but too agreeable to the rest of his character. Yet
on Hume's argument against miracles, that it is more probable witnesses
should lie or be mistaken than that they should happen, he remarked, as
I think, very judiciously, that Hume, taking the proposition simply, is
right; but that the Christian revelation is not proved by the miracles
alone, but as they are connected with prophecies, and with the doctrines
in confirmation of which the miracles were wrought.

He was devout, moral, and humane; frequent and earnest in his petitions
for the divine succour, anxious to sublime his nature by disengaging it
from worldly soil, and prompt to sympathise with the sorrows, and out of
his scanty means, to relieve the necessities of others; but such is the
imperfection of man, that his piety was apt to degenerate into
superstition; his abstinence yielded to slight temptations, and his
charity was often not proof against a discrepancy of opinion either in
politics or literature.

Among his friends, Beauclerk seems most to have engaged his love,
Langton his respect, and Burke his admiration. The first was conspicuous
for wit, liveliness of feelings, an