he best thing he said of himself,
that when he governed Ireland he governed so as to please Dean Swift.

[Sidenote: 1763--Dr. Samuel Johnson]

At a time when the King was surrounded by such advisers as we have
seen, the King's chief servant and most loyal subject was a man no
longer young, who had nothing to do with the courts or councils, and
who yet was of {39} greater service to the throne and its occupier than
all the House of Lords and half the House of Commons. Long years
before George the Third was born, a struggling, unsuccessful
schoolmaster gave up a school that was well-nigh given up by its
scholars and came to London to push his fortune as a man of letters.
When George the Third came to the throne the schoolmaster had not found
fortune--that he never found--but he had found fame, and the name of
Samuel Johnson was known and loved wherever an English word was spoken
or an English book read. The conditions of political life in England
in the eighteenth century made it impossible for such a man as Samuel
Johnson ever to be the chosen counsellor, the minister of an English
king. The field of active politics was reserved for men of family, of
wealth, or of the few whom powerful patronage served in lieu of birth
and aided to the necessary opulence. Johnson was one of the most
influential writers of his day, one of the strongest intellectual
forces then at work, one of the greatest personalities then alive. But
it would no more have occurred to him to dream of administrative honors
and a place in a Ministry than it would have occurred to George the
Third to send one of his equerries to the dingy lodgings of an author
with the request that Dr. Johnson would step round to St. James's
Palace and favor his Majesty with his opinion on this subject or on
that. It is not certain that the King would have gained very much if
he had done anything so unusual. Dr. Johnson's views were very much
the King's views, and we know that he would have been as obstinate as
the King in many if not most of the cases in which the King's obstinacy
was very fatal to himself.

When Queen Anne was still upon the throne of England, when James the
Second still lived with a son who dreamed of being James the Third, and
when George the First was only Elector of Hanover, people still
attributed to the sovereign certain gifts denied to subjects. They
believed, for instance, that the touch of the royal fingers could cure
the malady of scro