' Johnson wrote to
Wesley on Feb. 6, 1776 (Croker's _Boswell_, p. 475), 'I have thanks to
return you for the addition of your important suffrage to my argument on
the American question. To have gained such a mind as yours may justly
confirm me in my own opinion. What effect my paper has upon the public,
I know not; but I have no reason to be discouraged. The lecturer was
surely in the right, who, though he saw his audience slinking away,
refused to quit the chair while Plato staid.'
[86] 'Powerful preacher as he was,' writes Southey, 'he had neither
strength nor acuteness of intellect, and his written compositions are
nearly worthless.' Southey's _Wesley,_ i. 323. See _ante_, ii. 79.
[87] Mr. Burke. See _ante_, ii. 222, 285, note 3, and iii. 45.
[88] If due attention were paid to this observation, there would be more
virtue, even in politicks. What Dr. Johnson justly condemned, has, I am
sorry to say, greatly increased in the present reign. At the distance of
four years from this conversation, 21st February, 1777, My Lord
Archbishop of York, in his 'sermon before the Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts,' thus indignantly describes
the then state of parties:--'Parties once had a _principle_ belonging
to them, absurd perhaps, and indefensible, but still carrying a notion
of _duty_, by which honest minds might easily be caught.
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