“I Am Willing to Love All Mankind, Except an American"

"With a few exceptions--Walt Whitman called him an 'old Octopus'--Americans have been decidedly tolerant of Johnson’s bile, rarely taking his invective at face value. Instead we have looked past the bluster to the character of the man behind it. Without Johnson, America wouldn’t have had its own great dictionary--his collection of moral essays, 'The Rambler,' inspired a young Noah Webster to dedicate his life to pursuing 'a most exact course of integrity and virtue,' and to compiling his massive American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828."

Joshua Kendall in The Boston Globe marks the three-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Samuel Johnson.