You will find Johnson enthroned, Boswell at his ear, round him men like Reynolds and Burke, Richardson and Fielding and Goldsmith, Robertson and Gibbon, and occasionally drawn to the circle minnows like Beattie and a genius like Adam Smith.

Gray, studious in his college at Cambridge, is exercising his fastidious talent; Collins' sequestered, carefully nurtured muse is silent; a host of minor poets are riding Pope's poetic diction, and heroic couplet to death.

Outside scattered about is the van of Romance--Percy collecting his ballads; Burns making songs and verses in Scotland; the "mad" people, Smart and Chatterton, and above all Blake, obscurely beginning the work that was to finish in Wordsworth and Coleridge and Keats.
Of Johnson's set the most remarkable figure was Edmund Burke--"the supreme writer," as De Quincey called him, "of his century." His writings belong more to the history of politics than to that of literature, and a close examination of them would be out of place here.
His political theory strikes a middle course which offends--and in his own day offended--both parties in the common strife of political thinking.

He believed the best government to consist in a patriotic aristocracy, ruling for the good of the people.

By birth an Irishman, he had the innate practicality which commonly lies beneath the flash and colour of Irish forcefulness and rhetoric.