16.  And how comes it, then, that we see hale and even clever youths voluntarily bending their necks to this slavery; nay, pressing forward in eager rivalship to assume the yoke that ought to be insupportable?  The cause, and the only cause, is, that the deleterious fashion of the day has created so many artificial wants, and has raised the minds of young men so much above their real rank and state of life, that they look scornfully on the employment, the fare, and the dress, that would become them; and, in order to avoid that state in which they might live free and happy, they become showy slaves.

17.  The great source of independence, the French express in a precept of three words, ‘Vivre de peu,’ which I have always very much admired. ‘To live upon little’ is the great security against slavery; and this precept extends to dress and other things besides food and drink.  When DOCTOR JOHNSON wrote his Dictionary, he put in the word pensioner thus:  ‘PENSIONER—­A slave of state.’  After this he himself became a pensioner!  And thus, agreeably to his own definition, he lived and died ‘a slave of state!’ What must this man of great genius, and of great industry too, have felt at receiving this pension!  Could he be so callous as not to feel a pang upon seeing his own name placed before his own degrading definition?  And what could induce him to submit to this?  His wants, his artificial wants, his habit of indulging in the pleasures of the table; his disregard of the precept ‘Vivre de peu.’  This was the cause; and, be it observed, that indulgences of this sort, while they tend to make men poor and expose them to commit mean acts, tend also to enfeeble the body, and more especially to cloud and to weaken the mind.

18.  When this celebrated author wrote his Dictionary, he had not been debased by luxurious enjoyments; the rich and powerful had not caressed him into a slave; his writings then bore the stamp of truth and independence:  but, having been debased by luxury, he who had, while content with plain fare, been the strenuous advocate of the rights of the people, became a strenuous advocate for taxation without representation; and, in a work under the title of ’Taxation no Tyranny,’ defended, and greatly assisted to produce, that unjust and bloody war which finally severed from England that great country the United states of America, now the most powerful and dangerous rival that this kingdom ever had.  The statue of Dr. JOHNSON was the first that was put into St. PAUL’S CHURCH!  A signal warning to us not to look upon monuments in honour of the dead as a proof of their virtues; for here we see St. PAUL’S CHURCH holding up to the veneration of posterity a man whose own writings, together with the records of the pension list, prove him to have been ‘a slave of state.’