Honesty of heart, truth in the inward parts, was with Johnson the one
thing needful.
To him no fraud could be innocent; the security of human society
depended on truth and was weakened by a man whose words were at
variance with his practice.
"Every man" he said (and here John Bull spoke again) "has a right to
utter what he thinks truth and every other man has a right to knock him
down for it."
To stretch a point in _talking_, in the use of a conventional phrase,
did not matter. Common politeness, or the course of argument might
demand it. Did he not himself often 'talk for victory'?
What he insisted on was that men should not deceive themselves and
others by _thinking_ foolishly. "Clear your _mind_" he said "of cant."
"Such," to quote Boswell for the last time, "was SAMUEL JOHNSON."
Though he was the foremost man of letters of his generation, it is not
for his scholarship or his writings, but rather for his pluck and his
patriotism, his humour and his oddities, his blunt common-sense and his
large humanity, and, above all, for the expression of these qualities
in his talk, that he is best loved and remembered. For to appreciate
Johnson's talk one need not be literary; it is enough to be English.