shown by the Hanoverians, to what was looked upon as a defence of the proscribed family, that Hume was disposed to give up his assumed office of a writer of English history. Fortunately, he thought better of it, and completed a great work which is as unjustly abused as Carte’s is undeservedly forgotten. In this year, the first taste of the quality of Johnson’s political feelings is furnished by Boswell. At this period, Johnson was a thorough Jacobite. [Sidenote: _JACOBITE JOHNSON._] The highest praise which he could give to Dr. Panting, the Master of Pembroke (Johnson’s College), was to call him ‘a fine Jacobite fellow.’ The worst he could say of the Gilbert Walmsley, of Lichfield, whom he loved and honoured, was that ‘he was a Whig, with all the virulence and malevolence of his party.’ Boswell’s father pelted Johnson with the term which Johnson applied to Panting, as one of laudation, and spoke of him contemptuously as ‘that Jacobite fellow.’ The truth is, that if Johnson felt the principle of allegiance due to the Stuarts, he felt no love for the system which prevailed where the Stuarts found their best friends: ‘A Highland Chief, Sir, has no more the soul of a chief, than an attorney who has twenty houses in a street, and considers how much he can make by them.’ Johnson had but scant eulogy for a convert from Whiggery. To join the Tories was to ‘keep better company.’ In an honest Whig, the learned Jacobite had no belief; ‘Pulteney,’ he remarked, ‘was as paltry a fellow as could be. He was a Whig who pretended to be honest, and you know it is ridiculous for a Whig to pretend to be honest. He cannot hold it out.’ It would be difficult to say whether Cibber or George II. was the more hateful object to Johnson. He gibbeted both in the epigram he took care not to publish:―― Augustus still survives in Maro’s strain, And Spenser’s verse prolongs Eliza’s reign; Great George’s acts let tuneful Cibber sing; For Nature formed the Poet for the King. [Sidenote: _JOHNSON’S SYMPATHIES._] It was perhaps accidental that during the years 1745-6 Johnson’s literary work seems to have been almost suspended. ‘That he had a tenderness for that unfortunate house’ (of Stuart, said Boswell) ‘is well known, and some may fancifully imagine that a sympathetic anxiety impeded the exertion of his intellectual powers, but I am inclined to think that he was, during this time, sketching the outlines of his great philological work.’ It is not certain that Johnson was the author of the following lines, which appeared in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine,’ for April 1747, but his fond habit of repeating them, ‘by heart,’ is some proof of his sympathy with the Jacobites named therein; and their publication demonstrates that the Government respected hostile opinion when it was becomingly expressed. ON LORD LOVAT’S EXECUTION.