poor, was, as we shall see,
one of the strongest things in him, and made one of the deepest marks
in his actual life; but he never thought it necessary to indulge in
polite or political fictions about the superior virtue or wisdom of the
working class. "Poverty," he once wrote in words that come at first
sight rather startlingly from the mouth of so strictly Biblical a
Christian as he, "is a great enemy to human happiness . . . it makes
some virtues impracticable and others extremely difficult." {120} "Of
riches," he said on another occasion, "it is not necessary to write the
praise." No doubt the opposition between such remarks as these, meant
as Johnson meant them, and certain sayings in the Gospels, is like the
opposition between many contrasted pairs of sayings in the New
Testament itself, more verbal than real. But it is as strong a proof
as could be given of the power and universality in the eighteenth
century of the temper which Butler called "cool and reasonable," the
temper which hated and despised "enthusiasm," that such a man as
Johnson, a man, too, who owed his religious faith to Law's _Serious
Call_, could use such words without the slightest consciousness of
their needing explanation.

The fact is that Johnson never, even in his religion, left his open eye
or his common sense behind him: and common sense told him, what a
brighter light concealed from St. Francis but the history of his Order
was to show too plainly within half a century of his death, that
poverty is at least for ordinary men no assured school of the Christian
virtues. Johnson's attitude towards the poor, in fact, included the
whole of sympathy and understanding but not one tittle of sentiment.
They had the benefit of the greater part of his small income; he gave
constantly, both to those who {121} had claims on him and to those who
had none, really loving the poor, says Mrs. Thrale, "as I never yet saw
any one else do, with an earnest desire to make them happy," and
insisting on giving them, not merely relief, but indulgence and
pleasure. He wished them to have something more than board and
lodging, some "sweeteners of their existence," and he was not always
frightened if the sweeteners preferred were gin and tobacco. His very
home he made into a retreat, as Mrs. Thrale says with little
exaggeration, for "the lame, the blind, the sad and the sorrowful"; and
he gave these humble friends more than board and lodging, treating them
with