The quality of Johnson’s incidental remarks may be inferred from one or two brief extracts.  Here is an observation which Johnson must have had many chances of verifying.  Speaking of Dryden’s money difficulties, he says, “It is well known that he seldom lives frugally who lives by chance.  Hope is always liberal, and they that trust her promises, make little scruple of revelling to-day on the profits of the morrow.”

Here is another shrewd comment upon the compliments paid to Halifax, of whom Pope says in the character of Bufo,—­

  Fed with soft dedications all day long,
  Horace and he went hand and hand in song.

“To charge all unmerited praise with the guilt of flattery, or to suppose that the encomiast always knows and feels the falsehoods of his assertions, is surely to discover great ignorance of human nature and of human life.  In determinations depending not on rules, but on reference and comparison, judgment is always in some degree subject to affection.  Very near to admiration is the wish to admire.

“Every man willingly gives value to the praise which he receives, and considers the sentence passed in his favour as the sentence of discernment.  We admire in a friend that understanding that selected us for confidence; we admire more in a patron that bounty which, instead of scattering bounty indiscriminately, directed it to us; and if the patron be an author, those performances which gratitude forbids us to blame, affection will easily dispose us to exalt.

“To these prejudices, hardly culpable, interest adds a power always operating, though not always, because not willingly, perceived.  The modesty of praise gradually wears away; and, perhaps, the pride of patronage may be in time so increased that modest praise will no longer please.

“Many a blandishment was practised upon Halifax, which he would never have known had he no other attractions than those of his poetry, of which a short time has withered the beauties.  It would now be esteemed no honour by a contributor to the monthly bundles of verses, to be told that, in strains either familiar or solemn, he sings like Halifax.”

I will venture to make a longer quotation from the life of Pope, which gives, I think, a good impression of his manner:—­

“Of his social qualities, if an estimate be made from his letters, an opinion too favourable cannot easily be formed; they exhibit a perpetual and unclouded effulgence of general benevolence and particular fondness.  There is nothing but liberality, gratitude, constancy, and tenderness.  It has been so long said as to be commonly believed, that the true characters of men may be found in their letters, and that he who writes to his friend lays his heart open before him.

“But the truth is, that such were the simple friendships of the Golden Age, and are now the friendships only of children.  Very few can boast of hearts which they dare lay open to themselves, and of which, by whatever accident exposed, they do not shun a distinct and continued view; and certainly what we hide from ourselves, we do not show to our friends.  There is, indeed, no transaction which offers stronger temptations to fallacy and sophistication than epistolary intercourse.