When Burke showed the old sage of Bolt Court over his fine house and pleasant gardens at Beaconsfield, _Non invideo equidem_, Johnson said, with placid good-will, _miror magis_.

They always parted in the deep and pregnant phrase of a sage of our own day, _except in opinion not disagreeing_.
In truth, the explanation of the sympathy between them is not far to seek.

We may well believe that Johnson was tacitly alive to the essentially conservative spirit of Burke even in his most Whiggish days.

And Burke penetrated the liberality of mind in a Tory, who called out with loud indignation that the Irish were in a most unnatural state, for there the minority prevailed over the majority, and the severity of the persecution exercised by the Protestants of Ireland against the Catholics exceeded that of the ten historic persecutions of the Christian Church.
The parties at Beaconsfield, and the evenings at the "Turk's Head" in Gerard Street, were contemporary with the famous days at Holbach's country house at Grandval.

When we think of the reckless themes that were so recklessly discussed by Holbach, Diderot, and the rest of that indefatigable band, we feel that, as against the French philosophic party, an English Tory like Johnson and an English Whig like Burke would have found their own differences too minute to be worth considering.