t. He cared nothing for architecture, and little for history.
Still less had his feeling anything to do with the commercial greatness
of London. He had a scholar's contempt for traders as people without
ideas fit for rational conversation. The man who scoffed at the
"boobies of Birmingham" as unworthy of notice in comparison with the
gownsmen of Oxford or even the cathedral citizens of Lichfield, whose
experience of commercial men made him declare that "trade could not be
{154} managed by those who manage it if it had much difficulty," was
not likely to have his imagination fired by talk about London as the
centre of the world's commerce. What he cared about was a very
different thing. He thought of London as the place in all the world
where the pulse of human life beat strongest. There a man could store
his mind better than anywhere else: there he could not only live but
grow: there more than anywhere else he might escape the
self-complacency which leads to intellectual and moral torpor, because
there he would be certain to meet not only with his equals but with his
superiors. These were grave grounds which he could use in an argument:
but a man needs no arguments in justification of the things he likes,
and Johnson liked London because it was the home of the intellectual
pleasures which to him were the only real pleasures, and which made
London for him a heaven upon earth. "He who is tired of London is
tired of life," he said on one occasion; and on another, when some one
remarked that many people were content to live in the country, he
replied, "Sir, it is in the intellectual as in the physical world; we
are told by natural philosophers that a body is at rest in the place
that is fit for it: they who are content to live in the country are fit
for the country." He was not one of them: {155} he wanted Charing
Cross and its "full tide of human existence," and thought that any one
who had once experienced "the full flow of London talk" must, if he
retired to the country, "either be contented to turn baby again and
play with the rattle, or he will pine away like a great fish in a
little pond, and die for want of his usual food." He was more than
once offered good country livings if he would take orders, but he knew
that he would find the "insipidity and uniformity" of country life
intolerable: and he stayed on to become the greatest of Londoners.
There is probably to this day no book, not a professed piece of
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