took care that no animosity should be left rankling in the breast of his antagonist.  Of this defect he seems to have been conscious.  In a letter to Mrs. Thrale, he says, “Poor Baretti! do not quarrel with him; to neglect him a little will be sufficient.  He means only to be frank and manly and independent, and, perhaps, as you say, a little wise.  To be frank, he thinks, is to be cynical; and to be independent, is to be rude.  Forgive him, dearest lady, the rather, because of his misbehaviour, I am afraid, he learned part of me.  I hope to set him, hereafter, a better example.”  For his own intolerant and over-bearing spirit he apologized, by observing, that it had done some good; obscenity and impiety were repressed in his company.

It was late in life, before he had the habit of mixing, otherwise than occasionally, with polite company.  At Mr. Thrale’s he saw a constant succession of well-accomplished visiters.  In that society he began to wear off the rugged points of his own character.  He saw the advantages of mutual civility, and endeavoured to profit by the models before him.  He aimed at what has been called, by Swift, the “lesser morals,” and by Cicero, “minores virtutes.”  His endeavour, though new and late, gave pleasure to all his acquaintance.  Men were glad to see that he was willing to be communicative on equal terms and reciprocal complacence.  The time was then expected, when he was to cease being what George Garrick, brother to the celebrated actor, called him, the first time he heard him converse, “a tremendous companion.”  He certainly wished to be polite, and even thought himself so; but his civility still retained something uncouth and harsh.  His manners took a milder tone, but the endeavour was too palpably seen.  He laboured even in trifles.  He was a giant gaining a purchase to lift a feather.

It is observed, by the younger Pliny, that “in the confines of virtue and great qualities, there are, generally, vices of an opposite nature.”  In Dr. Johnson not one ingredient can take the name of vice.  From his attainments in literature, grew the pride of knowledge; and from his powers of reasoning, the love of disputation and the vain glory of superior vigour.—­His piety, in some instances, bordered on superstition.  He was willing to believe in preternatural agency, and thought it not more strange, that there should be evil spirits than evil men.  Even the question about second sight held him in suspense.  “Second sight,” Mr. Pennant tells us, “is a power of seeing images impressed on the organs of sight, by the power of fancy; or on the fancy, by the disordered spirits operating on the mind.  It is the faculty of seeing spectres or visions, which represent an event actually passing at a distance, or likely to happen at a future day.  In 1771, a gentleman, the last who was supposed to be possessed of this faculty, had a boat at sea, in a tempestuous night, and, being anxious for his freight, suddenly started up, and said his men would