the nursery had been completed by the university. Oxford, when
Johnson resided there, was the most Jacobitical place in England;
and Pembroke was one of the most Jacobital colleges in Oxford. The
prejudices which he brought up to London were scarcely less absurd than
those of his own Tom Tempest. Charles II. and James II. were two of the
best kings that ever reigned. Laud, a poor creature who never did, said,
or wrote anything indicating more than the ordinary capacity of an
old woman, was a prodigy of parts and learning over whose tomb Art and
Genius still continued to weep. Hampden deserved no more honourable name
than that of "the zealot of rebellion." Even the ship money, condemned
not less decidedly by Falkland and Clarendon than by the bitterest
Roundheads, Johnson would not pronounce to have been an unconstitutional
impost. Under a government, the mildest that had ever been known in the
world--under a government, which allowed to the people an unprecedented
liberty of speech and action--he fancied that he was a slave; he
assailed the ministry with obloquy which refuted itself, and regretted
the lost freedom and happiness of those golden days in which a writer
who had taken but one-tenth part of the license allowed to him would
have been pilloried, mangled with the shears, whipped at the cart's
tail, and flung into a noisome dungeon to die. He hated dissenters
and stockjobbers, the excise and the army, septennial parliaments,
and continental connections. He long had an aversion to the Scotch, an
aversion of which he could not remember the commencement, but which, he
owned, had probably originated in his abhorrence of the conduct of the
nation during the Great Rebellion. It is easy to guess in what manner
debates on great party questions were likely to be reported by a
man whose judgment was so much disordered by party spirit. A show of
fairness was indeed necessary to the prosperity of the Magazine. But
Johnson long afterwards owned that, though he had saved appearances, he
had taken care that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it; and,
in fact, every passage which has lived, every passage which bears the
marks of his higher faculties, is put into the mouth of some member of
the opposition.

A few weeks after Johnson had entered on these obscure labours, he
published a work which at once placed him high among the writers of his
age. It is probable that what he had suffered during his first year in
London ha