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my mind long before he wrote.’86 Johnson’s vehement rejection of Hume is thus to some extent the child of their proximity: ‘He would not allow Mr. David Hume any credit for his political principles, though similar to his own; saying of him, “Sir, he was a Tory by chance.” ‘87 So the areas of vigorous dissent – for instance, Johnson’s denial that beauty can be resolved into utility, which is an implicit reproof of Hume’s argument in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751)88 – need to be placed alongside areas of substantial (although unacknowledged by Johnson) agreement between the two men: on, for instance, the harmlessness of luxury,89 or the tendency to exaggerate the merit of antiquity at the expense of modernity,90 or why it was that more importance was rightly attached to female chastity than to male.91

The vigour of Johnson’s repudiation of Hume springs from his uneasy consciousness of partial closeness. It is a doubleness of relation which is wonderfully distilled into the central episode of this strand of the Life of Johnson, namely Johnson’s response to Boswell’s appalled but fascinated account of Hume’s persisting in rejecting the consolations of Christianity on his deathbed:

I mentioned to Dr. Johnson, that David Hume’s persisting in his infidelity, when he was dying, shocked me much. Johnson. ‘Why should it shock you, Sir? Hume owned he had never read the New Testament with attention. Here then was a man, who had been at no pains to inquire into the truth of religion, and had continually turned his mind the other way. It was not to be expected that the prospect of death would alter his way of thinking, unless God should send an angel to set him right.’ I said, I had reason to believe that the thought of annihilation gave Hume no pain. Johnson. ‘It was not so, Sir. He had a vanity in being thought easy. It is more probable that he should assume an appearance of ease, than that so very improbable a thing should be, as a man not afraid of going (as, in spite of his delusive theory, he cannot be sure but he may go,) into an unknown state, and not being uneasy at leaving all he knew. And you are to consider, that upon his own principle of annihilation he had no motive to speak the truth.’92

The complicating but submerged circumstance which enriches this moment beyond being merely a denial of Hume’s deathbed composure is the fact that in discrediting Hume’s unshaken irreligion Johnson employs a version of Hume’s own argument against miracles (namely, that it is always much more likely that men will lie in their own interest than that anything which falls outside the customary course of nature should occur).93 In reproving Hume, Johnson also echoed him. It is a moment which captures the passionate ambivalence underlying Johnson’s declarations of attachment or rejection, which typically emerged from a background of powerfully divided sentiments.94

The internal tension in Johnson’s opinions and character is nowhere more clear than in his politics. In recent years the subject of Johnson’s political beliefs has become freshly controversial, with Jonathan Clark and Howard Erskine-Hill arguing for a strong and enduring Jacobite commitment against those who see more nuance and equivocation in Johnson’s politics.95 There is no doubt that Johnson was raised in a milieu which was strongly Tory, even Jacobite.96 His father, Michael Johnson, was as Boswell tells us ‘a zealous high-churchman and royalist, and retained his attachment to the unfortunate house of Stuart, though he reconciled himself, by casuistical arguments of expediency and necessity, to take the oaths imposed by the prevailing power’.97 Staffordshire, the county where Johnson grew up, was a stronghold of Tory sentiment, and in 1712, when only three years old, Johnson, ‘the infant Hercules of toryism’, had heard that darling of the High Church faction Henry Sacheverell preach in Lichfield Cathedral when at the wildest height of his popularity.98 In his youth Johnson would inveigh against George II as ‘unrelenting and barbarous’ with such vehemence