They were both big and stout (for Sam was now stout). They
were loud-voiced and dictatorial. They both drank a great deal,
but Ben, alas, drank wine overmuch, as was common in his day,
while Sam drank endless cups of tea, seventeen or eighteen it
might be at a sitting, indeed he called himself a hardened and
shameless tea-drinker. But, above all, their likeness lies in
the fact that they both dominated the literary men of their
period; they were kings and rulers. They laid down the law and
settled who was great and who little among the writers of the
day. And it was not merely the friends around Johnson who heard
him talk, who listened to his judgments about books and writers.
The world outside listened, too, to what he had to say, and you
will remember that it was he who utterly condemned Macpherson's
pretended poems of Ossian, "that pious three-quarters fraud"* of
which you have already read in chapter IV.
*A. Lang.
Johnson had always spent much of his time in taverns, and was now
more than ever free to do so.
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