be hard to defend his judgment in this
particular case, but it serves to show how Burke was never content
with the literary point of view, and how ready and vigilant he was for
effects more profound than those of formal criticism. It is true that
Johnson was sometimes not less austere in condemning a great work of
art for its bad morality. The only time when he was really angry with
Hannah More was on his finding that she had read _Tom Jones_--that
vicious book, he called it; he hardly knew a more corrupt work.
Burke's tendency towards severity of moral judgment, however, never
impaired the geniality and tenderness of his relations with those whom
he loved. Bennet Langton gave Boswell an affecting account of Burke's
last interview with Johnson. A few days before the old man's death,
Burke and four or five other friends were sitting round his bedside.
"Mr. Burke said to him, 'I am afraid, sir, such a number of us may be
oppressive to you.' 'No, sir,' said Johnson, 'it is not so; and I must
be in a wretched state indeed when your company is not a delight
to me.' Mr. Burke, in a tremulous voice, expressive of being very
tenderly affected, replied, 'My dear sir, you have always been too
good to me.' Immediately afterwards he went away. This was the last
circumstance in the acquaintance of these two eminent men."

One of Burke's strongest political intimacies was only less
interesting and significant than his friendship with Johnson.
William Dowdeswell had been Chancellor of the Exchequer in the short
Rockingham administration of 1765. He had no brilliant gifts, but he
had what was then thought a profound knowledge both of the principles
and details of the administration of the national revenue. He was
industrious, steadfast, clearheaded, inexorably upright. "Immersed in
the greatest affairs," as Burke said in his epitaph, "he never
lost the ancient, native, genuine English character of a country
gentleman." And this was the character in which Burke now and always
saw not only the true political barrier against despotism on the one
hand and the rabble on the other, but the best moral type of civic
virtue. Those who admire Burke, but cannot share his admiration for
the country gentleman, will perhaps justify him by the assumption that
he clothed his favourite with ideal qualities which ought, even if
they did not, to have belonged to that position.

In his own modest imitation and on his own humble scale he was a
pattern o