omote innocent
cheerfulness, he was too stubborn in retracting what he had thus
advanced. Hence, when menaced with a prosecution for his definition of
Excise in his Dictionary, so far from offering apology or promising
alteration, he called, in his Idler, a Commissioner of Excise the lowest
of human beings, and classes him with the scribbler for a party[11]. So
strange a definition and still less pardonable adherence to it can only
be justified on the ground of Johnson's warm feelings for the comfort of
the middle class of society. He knew that the execution of the excise
laws involved an intrusion into the privacies of domestic life, and
often violated the fireside of the unoffending and quiet tradesman. He,
therefore, disliked those laws altogether, and his warm-hearted
disposition would not allow him to calculate on their abstract
advantages with modern political economists, who, in their generalizing
doctrines, too frequently overlook individual comfort and interests. His
remarks, in the same paper, on the edition of the Pleas of the Crown
cannot be thus vindicated, and we must here lament an error in an
otherwise honest and well-intentioned mind[12]. Every impartial reader
of his works may thus easily trace to their origin Johnson's chief
political errors, and his research must terminate in admiration of a
writer, who never prostituted his pen to fear or favour; and who, though
erroneous often in his estimate of men and measures, still, in his
support of a party, firmly believed himself to be the advocate of
morality and right. His tenderness of spirit, his firm principles and
his deep sense of the emptiness of human pursuits are visible amidst the
lighter papers of the Idler, and his serious reflections are, perhaps,
more strikingly affecting as contrasted with mirthfulness and
pleasantry.

His concluding paper and the one[13] on the death of his mother have,
perhaps, never been surpassed. Here is no affectation of sentimentality,
no morbid and puling complaints, but the dignified and chastened
expression of sorrow, which a mind, constituted as Johnson's, must have
experienced on the departure of a mother. A heart, tender and
susceptible of pathetic emotion, as his was, must have deeply felt, how
dreary it is to walk downward to the grave unregarded by her "who has
looked on our childhood." Occasions for more violent and perturbed grief
may occur to us in our passage through life, but the gentle, quiet death
of a