traction for so many of the men of the eighteenth
century. His cottage in the Isle of Wight, with its Doric column to
the manes of Churchill, with its shrine to Fortuna Redux, was his idea
of the ancient city of Tusculum.

His tastes and pleasures were the tastes and pleasures of a man of
letters. He affected a curious kind of scholarship. The hand that had
been employed upon the _North Briton_, now devoted itself to the
editing of classic texts; the intellect that had been associated with
the privately printed "Essay on Woman" was now associated with
privately printed editions of Catullus which he fondly believed to be
flawless, and of Theophrastus, whose Greek text it pleased him to print
without accents. In his tranquil old age he made himself as many
friends as in his hot manhood he had made himself enemies. Those who
had most hated him came under the spell of his attraction, even the
King himself, even Dr. Johnson. His interview with Dr. Johnson is one
of the most famous episodes in the literary and political history of
the last century. His assurance to King George that he himself had
never been a Wilkite is in one sense the truest criticism that has ever
been passed upon him. If to be a Wilkite was to entertain {139} all
the advanced and all the wild ideas expressed by many of those who took
advantage of his agitation, then certainly Wilkes was none such. But
he was a Wilkite in the better sense of being true to his own opinions
and true to his sense of public duty. When he expressed the wish to
have the words "A friend to liberty" inscribed upon his monument, he
expressed a wish which the whole tenor of his life, the whole tone of
his utterances fully justified. And if he was loyal to his principles
he could be chivalrous to his enemies. Almost his last public
appearance was at the general election of 1796, when he came forward,
with a magnanimity which would have well become many a better man, to
support the candidature of Horne Tooke at Westminster, of the man who,
after having been his fawning friend, his fulsome flatterer, had turned
against him with the basest treachery and the bitterest malignity.
There may have been, surely there must have been, a vein of irony in
the words in which Wilkes complimented the apostate and the turncoat as
a man of public virtues. But the irony was cloaked by courtesy; if the
action smacked of the cynic, at least it was done in obedience to the
behest to forgive o