Might I take you back to at the meeting of the Literary Club on the evening of Friday, April 7, 1775, which we know from Boswell’s Life of Johnson took place in a tavern amongst “numerous company”? Other than Dr. Samuel Johnson, the other people we know to have been present were Johnson’s friends Bennet Langton and the aristocrat Topham Beauclerk, as well as Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edward Gibbon. After discussing Addison’s supposed lack of grasp of Italian, the non-appearances of wolves in the poems of Ossian, the differences between the Irish and Erse languages, and the effect of singing the ballad of “Lilliburlero” on the Glorious Revolution, the conversation got around to the subject of Patriotism. In one of his most famous remarks, Johnson “suddenly uttered, in a strong determined tone,” the statement: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

Now, all conservatives know well the following sentence, written by Boswell in the Life, though it is never quoted in the books of quotations, or by the Left which sees patriotism as the mere handmaiden to her bastard sisters nationalism, hyper-nationalism, and Fascism. What Boswell wrote of Johnson’s remark was: “But let it be considered, that he did not mean a real and generous love of country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest.” As the conversation continued, Boswell said “that certainly all patriots were not scoundrels.” This is no more than