Omphalocarpa

"Let Johnson, House of Johnson, rejoice with

Omphalocarpa a type of bur,

God be gracious to Samuel Johnson."

So wrote Christopher Smart when the great man, whose famous biographer is being celebrated on television by Andrew Marr as I write, visited him in the asylum and pronounced him quite sane.

Smart saw the Realm of England not just as a branch of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, but even as one of the Seven Golden Candlesticks of the Glorified Lamb, although I should have to look up what he thought were the other six. What, dear reader, do you think should be the other six? And why?

Johnson would not have gone that far. But (as with Swift, Dryden and Pope) rumours of his Jacobitism have never gone away. And Blessed John Henry Newman certainly wrote that, "the special title of moralist in English literature is accorded by the public voice to Johnson, whose bias towards Catholicity is well known."

Johnson told Boswell that he thought Catholicism fundamentally different from other forms of Christianity, and certainly preferable to Presbyterianism, with Mass, Confession, Purgatory, prayers for the dead, invocation of the Saints, and so on, all more objectionable in practice than in principle, indeed in principle hardly objectionable at all.

Boswell records Johnson's saying that he would "be glad to be of a church where there are so many helps to get to heaven", and even that he "would be a Papist" were it not for "an obstinate rationality" which he hoped to be able to overcome "on the near approach of death", of which he had "a very great terrour".

How far did Henry VIII succeed in making the English - the House of Johnson, if you will - a great deal more Protestant than he himself ever was? How far, indeed?

"Let Johnson, House of Johnson, rejoice with

Omphalocarpa a type of bur,

God be gracious to Samuel Johnson."