He was willing, he said, to love all mankind except an American.
Yet Dr.Johnson was the friend of Burke, and he found pleasure in an acquaintance with Wilkes.

Nor, in all his admiration for rank and fortune, is there a single element of meanness.

The man who wrote the letter to Lord Chesterfield need never fear the charge of abasement.

He knew that there was "a remedy in human nature that will keep us safe under every form of government." He defined a courtier in the _Idler_ as one "whose business it is to watch the looks of a being weak and foolish as himself." Much of what he felt was in part a revolt against the sentimental aspect of contemporary liberalism, in part a sturdy contempt for the talk of degeneracy that men such as Brown had made popular.
There is, indeed, in all his political observations a strong sense of the virtue of order, and a perception that the radicalism of the time was too abstract to provide an adequate basis for government.

Here, as elsewhere, Johnson hated all speculation which raised the fundamental questions.