JOHNSON. 59 



however, that, while he would not suffer Hume or Smith 

 to be introduced, he endured the intimate and familiar 

 society of some men very well known to have no great 

 reverence for religion or belief in its doctrines, but 

 whose rank and manners pleased him and as for mo- 

 rality, with all his high-sounding talk about its obliga- 

 tions in general, he both associated with persons whose 

 lives were notoriously profligate, and maintained opinions 

 of a somewhat loose nature upon some particular heads ; 

 such as underrating conjugal fidelity on the husband's 

 part. 



His alarm about the foundations of his belief, seemed 

 always to betoken some little misgivings some indica- 

 tion that he was most anxious to believe, and would fain 

 have a firmer faith than he had. When in a fit of gloom 

 among his Oxford friends, he was reminded, by way of 

 comforting him, that surely he had light and proof enough, 

 he said shortly and significantly, " I wish to have more." 

 His ever hankering after "more" was betrayed by his 

 strong disposition to believe in spirits, ghosts, appari- 

 tions. He never would suffer the possibility of these 

 to be rejected, or the belief in them to be treated with 

 the least contempt ; and though on such a subject he could 

 not be so dogmatical as was his wont upon other points 

 of faith, he yet always stood out most dogmatically for 

 the credit of human testimony ; strenuously contending 

 for it wherever gross improbability did not counteract its 

 effect nay, even willing to set it against no slight defect 

 of probability in the circumstances. It was plain that 

 this bias connected itself in his mind with the evidences 

 of Revelation ; for the general turn of his mind was to 

 regard reasonable probability, and to be somewhat over- 



