On his return to London his humane, forgiving dispositions were put to a pretty strong test by a liberty which Mr. Thomas Davies had taken, which was to publish two volumes, entitled “Miscellaneous and Fugitive Pieces,” which he advertised in the newspapers, “By the Author of the Rambler.”  In some of these Johnson had no concern whatever.  He was at first very angry, but, upon consideration of his poor friend’s narrow circumstances, and that he meant no harm, he soon relented.

Dr. Goldsmith died on April 4 of the following year, a year in which I was unable to pay my usual spring visit to London, and in which Johnson made a long autumn tour in Wales with Mr. and Mrs. Thrale.  In response to some inquiries of mine about poor Goldsmith, he wrote:  “Of poor, dear Goldsmith there is little to be told more than the papers have made public.  He died of a fever, made, I am afraid, more violent by uneasiness of mind.  His debts began to be heavy, and all his resources were exhausted.  Sir Joshua is of the opinion that he owed not less than L2,000.  Was ever poet so trusted before?”

This year, too, my great friend again came out as a politician, for parliament having been dissolved in September, and Mr. Thrale, who was a steady supporter of government, having again to encounter the storm of a contested election in Southwark, Johnson published a short political pamphlet, entitled “The Patriot,” addressed to the electors of Great Britain.  It was written with energetic vivacity; and except those passages in which it endeavours to vindicate the glaring outrage of the House of Commons in the case of the Middlesex election and to justify the attempt to reduce our fellow-subjects in America to unconditional submission, it contained an admirable display of the properties of a real patriot, in the original and genuine sense.

IX.—­Johnson’s Physical Courage and Fear of Death

The “Rambler’s” own account of our tour in the Hebrides was published in 1775 under the title of “A journey to the Western Islands of Scotland,” and soon involved its author, who had expressed his disbelief in the authenticity of Ossian’s poems, in a controversy with Mr. Macpherson.  Johnson called for the production of the old manuscripts from which Mr. Macpherson said that he had copied the poems.  He wrote to me:  “I am surprised that, knowing as you do the disposition of your countrymen to tell lies in favour of each other, you can be at all affected by any reports that circulate among them.”  And when Mr. Macpherson, exasperated by this scepticism, replied in words that are generally said to have been of a nature very different from the language of literary contest, Johnson answered him in a letter that opened:  “I received your foolish and impudent letter.  Any violence offered me I shall do my best to repel, and what I cannot do for myself the law shall do for me.  I hope I shall never be deterred from detecting what I think a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian.”