The famous English man of letters and author of the Dictionary of the English Language is to be distinguished from the American of the same name. It is the English Johnson whose response to Berkeley was to kick a stone, saying ‘I refute him thus’, thereby revealing a complete misunderstanding of Berkeley’s thought. Johnson’s analytical capacities in philosophy (‘we know our will is free, and there’s an end on’t’) did not match the intensity of his moral and religious wrestlings, while his conviction that the infidel Hume could not have died in tranquillity is an unattractive instance of someone projecting his own fear of extinction onto others. However, his definition of a lexicographer as a harmless drudge is a consolation to his many followers.