"What then, sir, is the use of parliament ?" JOHNSON. Why, sir, parliament is a large council to the king; and the advantage of such a council is, having a great number of men of property concerned in the legislature, who, for their own in terest, will not consent to bad laws. And you must have observed, sir, the administration is feeble and timid, and cannot act with that authority and resolution which is necessary. Were I in power, I would turn out every man who dared to oppose me. Government has the distribution of offices, that it may be enabled to maintain its authority. Lord Bute took down too fast, without building up something new." BOSWELL. "Because, sir, he found a rotten building. The political coach was drawn by a set of bad horses; it was necessary to change them." JOHNSON. "But he should have changed them one by one."

On another occasion, he said, "The mode of government by one may be ill adapted to a small society, but is best for a great nation. The characteristic of our own government at present is imbecility. The magistrates dare not call the guards for fear of being hanged; the guards will not come, for fear of being given up to the blind rage of popular juries." [Tempora mutantur.]

Talking of different governments - JOHNSON. "The more contracted power is, the more easily it is destroyed. A country governed by a despot is an inverted cone. Government there cannot be so firm, as when it rests upon a broad basis gradually contracted, as the government of Great Britain, which is founded on the parliament, then is in the privycouncil, then in the king." BoswELL." Power, when

contracted into the person of a despot, may be easily destroyed, as the prince may be cut off. So Caligula wished that the people of Rome had but one neck, that he might cut them off at a blow." GENERAL OGLETHORPE. "It was of the senate he wished that. The senate, by its usurpation, controlled both the emperor and the people. And don't you think that we see too much of that in our own parliament ?"

No. XIV.

MORALS.

On this subject, he said, "The morality of an action depends on the motive from which we act. If I fling half a crown to a beggar with intention to break his head, and he picks it up and buys victuals with it, the physical effect is good; but, with respect to me, the action is very wrong. So, religious exercises, if not performed with an intention to please God, avail us nothing :- -as our Saviour says of those who perform them from other mo. tives, Verily they have their reward.'

Of a gentleman who was mentioned, he said, "I have not met with any man, for a long time, who has given me such general displeasure: he is totally fixed in his principles, and wants to puzzle other people." Boswell said his principles had been poisoned by a noted infidel writer, but that he was nevertheless a benevolent good man. JOHNSON. "We can have no dependence upon that instinctive, that constitutional goodness, which is not founded upon principle. I grant you, that such a

man may be a very amiable member of society. I can conceive him placed in such a situation, that he is not much tempted to deviate from what is right; and as every man prefers virtue, when there is not some strong incitement to transgress its precepts, I can conceive him doing nothing wrong. But if such a man stood in need of money, I should not like to trust him; and I should certainly not trust him with young ladies, for there there is always temptation. Hume, and other sceptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expense: truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to error. Truth, sir, is a cow, which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull. If I could have allowed myself to gratify my vanity at the expense of truth, what fame might I have acquired! Every thing, which Hume has advanced against Christianity, had passed through my mind long before he wrote. Always remember this —that, after a system is well settled upon positive evidence, a few partial objections ought not to shake it. The human mind is so limited, that it cannot take in all the parts of a subject; so that there may be objections raised against any thing. There are objections against a plenum, and objections against a vacuum; yet one of them must certainly be true.”

JOHNSON. "I love the university of Salamanca; for when the Spaniards were in doubt as to the lawfulness of their conquering America, the university of Salamanca gave it as their opinion, that it was not lawful." He spoke this with great emotion, and with that generous warmth, which dic

tated the lines in his London, against Spanish encroachment.

He talked of the heinousness of the crime of adultery, by which the peace of families was destroyed. He said, "Confusion of progeny constitutes the essence of the crime; and, therefore, a woman who breaks her marriage vow is much more criminal than a man who does it. A man, to be sure, is criminal in the sight of God; but he does not do his wife a very material injury, if he does not insult her if, for instance, from mere wantonness of appetite, he steals privately to her chambermaid. Sir, a wife ought not greatly to resent this. I would not receive home a daughter who had run away from her husband on that account. A wife should study to reclaim her husband by more attention to please him. Sir, a man will not, once in a hundred instances, leave his wife, and go to a harlot, if his wife has not been negligent of pleasing."

Here he discovered that acute discrimination, that solid judgment, and that knowledge of human nature, for which he was, upon all occasions, remarkable. Taking care to keep in view the moral and religious duty, as understood in our nation, he showed clearly, from reason and good sense, the greater degree of culpability in the one sex deviating from it than the other; and, at the same time, inculcated a very useful lesson as to the way to keep him.

Boswell asked him if it was not hard, that one -deviation from chastity should so absolutely ruin a young woman. JOHNSON. "Why no, sir; it is the -great principle which she is taught. When she has given up that principle, she has given up every no

tion of female honour and virtue, which are all included in chastity."

At a party at Mr. Dilly's, he, as usual, defended luxury: "You cannot spend money in luxury without doing good to the poor. Nay, you do more good to them by spending it in luxury—you make' them exert industry; whereas, by giving it, you keep them idle. I own, indeed, there may be more virtue in giving it immediately in charity, than in spending it in luxury; though there may be pride in that too. MISS SEWARD. "Is not this Mandeville's doctrine of Private Vices Public Benefits ?"", JOHNSON." The fallacy of that book is, that Mandeville defines neither vices nor benefits. He reckons among vices every thing that gives pleasure. He takes the narrowest system of morality-mo-. nastic morality-which holds pleasure itself to be a vice; such as eating salt with our fish, because it makes it better; and he reckons wealth as a public benefit, which is by no means always true. Pleasure, of itself, is not a vice. Having a garden, which we all know to be perfectly innocent, is a great pleasure. At the same time, in this state of being there are many pleasures vices, which, however, are so immediately agreeable, that we can hardly abstain from them. The happiness of heaven will be, that pleasure and virtue will be perfectly consistent. Mandeville puts the case of a man who gets drunk at an alehouse; and says it is a public benefit, because so much money is got by it to the public. But it must be considered, that all the good gained by this, through the gradation of alehouse-keeper, brewer, maltster, and farmer, is over-balanced by the evil caused to the man and his