orge III had
many faults, but all through his reign he was an admirable
representative of the general feelings of his people. And he never did
a more representative act than when he gave Johnson a pension, or when
he received him in the library of Buckingham House. No doubt many,
though not all, of Johnson's political and ecclesiastical prejudices
were very congenial to the king, but plenty of people shared George
Ill's views without gaining from him an ounce of respect. What he and
the nation dimly felt about Johnson was a quality belonging less to the
author than to the man. The English, as we were saying just now, think
of themselves as a plain people, more honest and direct in word and
deed than the rest of the world. George III never affected to be
anything but a plain man, was very honest according to his lights, and
never for an instant failed to have the courage of his convictions.
Such a king and such a people would inevitably be attracted to a man of
Johnson's fearless sincerity and invincible common sense. The ideal of
the nation is {18} still the same. Johnson once praised the third Duke
of Devonshire for his "dogged veracity." We have lately seen one of
that duke's descendants and successors, a man of no obvious or shining
talents, attain to a position of almost unique authority among his
fellow countrymen mainly by his signal possession of this hereditary
gift of veracity, honesty and good sense. So it was with Johnson
himself. Behind all his learning lay something which no learned
language could conceal. "On s'attend a voir un auteur et on trouve un
homme." Authors then, as now, were often thought to be fantastical,
namby-pamby persons, living in dreams, sharing none of the plain man's
interests, eager and querulous about trifles and unrealities,
indifferent and incapable in the broad world of life. Nobody could
feel that about Johnson.

He never pretended to be superior to the pains or pleasures of the body
and never concealed his interest in the physical basis of life. He
might with truth have spoken, as Pope did, of "that long disease, my
life," for he declares in one of his letters that after he was past
twenty his health was such that he seldom enjoyed a single day of ease;
and he was so scrupulously truthful when he had a pen in his hand that
that must be taken as at the least a literal record of the truth as it
appeared {19} to him at that moment. But though he never enjoyed
health