was tempted to
become unduly imperious. In the company of which Savage was a
distinguished member, one may guess that the conversational fervour
sometimes degenerated into horse-play. Want of arguments would be
supplied by personality, and the champion would avenge himself by
brutality on an opponent who happened for once to be getting the best of
him. Johnson, as he grew older and got into more polished society,
became milder in his manners; but he had enough of the old spirit left
in him to break forth at times with ungovernable fury, and astonish the
well-regulated minds of respectable ladies and gentlemen.

Anecdotes illustrative of this ferocity abound, and his best
friends--except, perhaps, Reynolds and Burke--had all to suffer in turn.
On one occasion, when he had made a rude speech even to Reynolds,
Boswell states, though with some hesitation, his belief that Johnson
actually blushed. The records of his contests in this kind fill a large
space in Boswell's pages. That they did not lead to worse consequences
shows his absence of rancour. He was always ready and anxious for a
reconciliation, though he would not press for one if his first overtures
were rejected. There was no venom in the wounds he inflicted, for there
was no ill-nature; he was rough in the heat of the struggle, and in such
cases careless in distributing blows; but he never enjoyed giving pain.
None of his tiffs ripened into permanent quarrels, and he seems scarcely
to have lost a friend. He is a pleasant contrast in this, as in much
else, to Horace Walpole, who succeeded, in the course of a long life, in
breaking with almost all his old friends. No man set a higher value upon
friendship than Johnson. "A man," he said to Reynolds, "ought to keep
his friendship in constant repair;" or he would find himself left alone
as he grew older. "I look upon a day as lost," he said later in life,
"in which I do not make a new acquaintance." Making new acquaintances
did not involve dropping the old. The list of his friends is a long one,
and includes, as it were, successive layers, superposed upon each other,
from the earliest period of his life.

This is so marked a feature in Johnson's character, that it will be as
well at this point to notice some of the friendships from which he
derived the greatest part of his happiness. Two of his schoolfellows,
Hector and Taylor, remained his intimates through life. Hector survived
to give information to Boswell, and T