In June of the following year, 1784, Johnson made a remark which very reasonably struck Boswell ‘a good deal.’――‘I never,’ said Johnson, ‘knew a Nonjuror who could reason.’ On which observation and on the position of the Nonjurors and their Jacobite allegiance, generally, Boswell makes this comment:――‘Surely, he did not mean to deny that faculty to many of their writers,――to Hickes, Brett, and other eminent divines of that persuasion, and did not recollect that the seven Bishops, so justly celebrated for their magnanimous resistance to arbitrary power, were yet Nonjurors to the new Government. The nonjuring clergy of Scotland, indeed, who, excepting a few, have lately, by a sudden stroke, cut off all ties of allegiance to the House of Stuart, and resolved to pray for our present lawful Sovereign by name, may be thought to have confirmed this remark; as it may be said that the divine, indefeasible, hereditary right which they professed to believe, if ever true, must be equally true still. Many of my readers will be surprised when I mention that Johnson assured me he had never in his life been in a nonjuring meeting-house.’――Johnson’s disrespect for the reasoning powers of the Nonjurors was still less intense than his detestation of the Whigs. Of some eminent man of the party, he allowed the ability, but he added, ‘Sir, he is a cursed Whig, a _bottomless_ Whig, as they all are now.’ Walpole was satisfied that the Stuart race was effete, and that the family was incapable of exciting the smallest sensation in England. He could not, however, pass over an incident in ‘the other family.’ In allusion to the Prince of Wales and the Roman Catholic widow (of two husbands) whom he married,――Mrs. Fitzherbert, he says: 1786, ‘We have other guess matter to talk of in a higher and more flourishing race; and yet were rumour;――aye, much more than rumour, every voice in England――to be credited, the matter, somehow or other, reaches from London to Rome.’ Happily, no new ‘Pretender’ arose from this extraordinary union. [Sidenote: _A JACOBITE ACTRESS._]