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though all great geniuses are endowed with it. Hence we always think of Dante Alighieri, of Michael Angelo, of William Shakespeare, of John Milton; while of such men as Gibbon and Hume we merely recall the works, and think of them as the author of this or that." This holds more true of Samuel Johnson than even of the four mighty geniuses whom Lowell instances. It is in the pages of his friend and disciple that he lives for us as no other man has ever lived. Of all men he is best known. In his early manhood he set up an academy, and failed. The school which he founded in his later years still numbers its pupils by thousands and tens of thousands. "We are," said Sir Joshua Reynolds, "of Dr. Johnson's school. He may be said to have formed my mind, and to have brushed from it a great deal of rubbish. He qualified it to think justly." He still qualifies the mind to think; he still clears it of cant; he still brushes from it all that rubbish which is heaped up by affectation, false sentiment, exaggeration, credulity, and indolence in thinking. "All who were of his school," Reynolds added, "are distinguished for a love of truth and accuracy." "He taught me," wrote Boswell, "to crossquestion in common life." The great master still finds many apt scholars.

"He spoke as he wrote," his hearers commonly asserted. This was not altogether true. It might indeed be the case that "everything he said was as correct as a second edition"; nevertheless his talk was never so labored as the more ornate parts of his writings. Even in his lifetime his style was censured as "involved and turgid, and abounding with antiquated and hard words." Macaulay went so far as to pronounce it "systematically vicious." Johnson seems to have been aware of some of his failings. "If Robertson's style be faulty," he said, "he owes it to me; that is, having too many words, and those too big ones." As Goldsmith said of him, "If he were to make little fishes talk [in a fable], they would talk like whales." In the structure of his sentences he is as often at fault as in the use of big words. He praised Temple for giving a cadence to English prose, and he blamed Warburton for having "his sentences unmeasured." His own prose is too measured and has too much cadence. It is in his Ramblers that he is seen at his worst, and in his 'Lives of the Poets' at his best. In his Ramblers he was under the temptation to expand his words beyond the thoughts they had to convey, which besets every writer who has on stated days to fill up a certain number of columns. In the Lives, out of the fullness of his mind he gave far more than he had undertaken in his agreement with the booksellers. With all its faults, his style has left a permanent and a beneficial mark on the English language. It was not without reason that speaking of what he had done, he said: "Something perhaps I

have added to the elegance of its construction, and something to the harmony of its cadence." If he was too fond of words of foreign origin, he resisted the inroad of foreign idioms. No one could say of him what he said of Hume: "The structure of his sentences is French." He sturdily withstood "the license of translators who were reducing to babble a dialect of France." Lord Monboddo complained of his frequent use of metaphors. In this he was unlike Swift, in whose writings, it was asserted, not a single one can be found. If however he used them profusely, he used them as accurately as Burke; of whom, as he was speaking one day in Parliament, a bystander said, "How closely that fellow reasons in metaphors!" Johnson's writings are always clear. To him might be applied the words he used of Swift: "He always understands himself, and his readers always understand him." "He never hovers on the brink of meaning." If he falls short of Swift in simplicity, he rises far above him in eloquence. He cares for something more than "the easy and safe conveyance of meaning." His task it was not only to instruct, but to persuade; not only to impart truth, but to awaken "that inattention by which known truths are suffered to be neglected." He was "the great moralist." He was no unimpassioned teacher, as correct as he is cold. His mind was ever swayed to the mood of what it liked or loathed, and as it was swayed, so it gave harmonious utterance. Who would look to find tenderness in the preface to a dictionary? Nevertheless Horne Tooke, "the ablest and most malevolent of all the enemies of his fame," could never read Johnson's preface without shedding a tear. He often rose to noble heights of eloquence; while in the power of his honest scorn he has scarcely a rival. His letters to Lord Chesterfield and James Macpherson are not surpassed by any in our language. In his criticisms he is admirably clear. Whether we agree with him or not, we know at once what he means; while his meaning is so strongly supported by argument that we can neither neglect it nor despise it. He may put his reader into a rage, but he sets him thinking.

Of his original works, 'Irene' was the first written, though not the first published. It is a declamatory tragedy. He had little dramatic power, and he followed a bad model, for he took Addison as his master. The criticism which in his old age he passed on that writer's 'Cato' equally well fits his own 'Irene.' "It is rather a poem in dialogue than a drama, rather a succession of just sentiments in elegant language than a representation of natural affections, or of any state probable or possible in human life.” It was in his two imitations of Juvenal's Satires, 'London' and the Vanity of Human Wishes,' that he first showed his great powers. Pope quickly dis covered the genius of the unknown author. In their kind they are

masterpieces. Sir Walter Scott "had more pleasure in reading them than any other poetical composition he could mention." The last line of manuscript he sent to press was a quotation from the Vanity of Human Wishes.' Tis a grand poem," said Byron, "and so true! true as the truth of Juvenal himself." Johnson had planned further imitations of the Roman satirist, but he never executed them. What he has done in these two longer poems and in many of his minor pieces is so good that we may well grieve that he left so little in verse. Like his three contemporaries Collins, Gray, and Goldsmith, as a poet he died in debt to the world.

In the Rambler he teaches the same great lesson of life as in his serious poems. He gave variety, however, by lighter papers modeled on the Spectator, and by critical pieces. Admirable as was his humor in his talk,-"in the talent of humor," said Hawkins, "there hardly ever was his equal," - yet in his writings he fell unmeasurably short of Addison. His criticisms are acute; but it is when "he reasons of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come" that he is seen at his strongest.

'Rasselas, struck off at a heat when his mother lay dying, tells in prose what the Vanity of Human Wishes' tells in verse. It is little known to the modern reader, who is not easily reconciled to its style. At no time could it have been a favorite with the young and thoughtless. Nevertheless, as years steal over us, we own, as we lay it down with a sigh, that it gives a view of life as profound and true as it is sad.

His Dictionary, faulty as it is in its etymologies, is a very great performance. Its definitions are admirable; while the quotations are so happily selected that they would afford the most pleasant reading were it possible to read a heavy folio with pleasure. That it should be the work of one man is a marvel. He had hoped to finish it in three years; it took him more than seven. To quote his own words, "He that runs against time has an antagonist not subject to casualties." He was hindered by ill health, by his wife's long and fatal illness, and by the need that he was under of "making provision for the day that was passing over him." During two years of the seven years he was writing three Ramblers a week.

Of his Shakespeare, Macaulay said: "It would be difficult to name a more slovenly, a more worthless edition of any great classic." I doubt whether when he passed this sweeping judgment, he had read much more than those brief passages in which Johnson sums up the merits of each play. The preface, Adam Smith, no friend of Johnson's fame, described as "the most manly piece of criticism that was ever published in any country." In the notes the editor anticipated modern critics in giving great weight to early readings. Warburton,

in the audacity of his conjectural emendations, almost rivaled Bentley in his dealings with Milton. He floundered, but this time he did. not flounder well. Johnson was unwilling to meddle with the text so long as it gave a meaning. Many of his corrections are ingenious, but in this respect he came far behind Theobald. His notes on character are distinguished by that knowledge of mankind in which he excelled. The best are those on Falstaff and Polonius. The booksellers who had employed him did their part but ill. There are numerous errors which the corrector of the press should have detected, while the work is ill printed and on bad paper.

His four political tracts were written at the request of government. In one of them, in a fine passage, he shows the misery and suffering which are veiled from men's sight by the dazzle of the glory of war. In the struggle between England and her colonies he with Gibbon stood by George III., while Burke, Hume, and Adam Smith were on the side of liberty.

In his 'Journey to the Western Islands' he describes the tour which he made with Boswell in 1773. In this work he took the part of the oppressed tenants against their chiefs, who were, he wrote, "gradually degenerating from patriarchal rulers to rapacious landlords." His narrative is interesting; while the facts which he gathered about a rapidly changing society are curious. "Burke thought well of the philosophy of the book."

His last work was the Lives of the English Poets.' It was undertaken at the request of the chief London booksellers, "who had determined to publish a body of English poetry," for which he was to furnish brief prefaces. These prefaces swelled into Lives. "I have," he wrote, "been led beyond my intention, I hope by the honest desire of giving useful pleasure." For payment he had required only two hundred guineas. "Had he asked one thousand, or even fifteen hundred," said Malone, "the booksellers would doubtless readily have given it." In this great work he traveled over the whole field of English poetry, from Milton who was born in 1608 to Lyttleton who died in 1773. To such a task no man ever came better equipped. He brought to it wide reading, a strong memory, traditional knowledge gathered from the companions of his early manhood, his own long acquaintance with the literary world of London, and the fruits of years of reflection and discussion. He had studied criticism deeply, and he dared to think for himself. No man was ever more fearless in his judgments. He was overpowered by no man's reputation. His criticisms of Milton's 'Lycidas' and of Gray show him at his worst. Nevertheless they are not wholly without foundation. Lycidas,' great as it is, belongs to an unnatural school of poetry. It is a lament that never moved a single reader to XIV-519

tears. No one mourns over young Lycidas.

Blind as Johnson was to the greatness of the poem, he has surpassed all other critics in the splendor of the praise he bestowed on the poet. To the exquisite beauties of Gray, unhappily, he was insensible. His faults he makes us see only too clearly. We have to admit, however unwillingly, that at times Gray is "tall by standing on tiptoe," and does indulge in commonplaces "to which criticism disdains to chase him." Scarcely less valuable than Johnson's critical remarks are the anecdotes which he collected and the reflections which he made. In these Lives, and in his own Life as told by Boswell, we have given us an admirable view of literature and literary men, from the end of the age of Elizabeth to close upon the dawn of the splendor which ushered in the nineteenth century.

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Виквикани

FROM THE VANITY OF HUMAN WISHES'

ET observation, with extensive view,
Survey mankind, from China to Peru;

Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife,
And watch the busy scenes of crowded life;
Then say how hope and fear, desire and hate,
O'erspread with snares the clouded maze of fate,
Where wavering man, betrayed by venturous pride
To tread the dreary paths without a guide,

As treacherous phantoms in the mist delude,
Shuns fancied ills, or chases airy good;

How rarely reason guides the stubborn choice,

Rules the bold hand, or prompts the suppliant voice;
How nations sink, by darling schemes oppressed,
When vengeance listens to the fool's request.
Fate wings with every wish the afflictive dart,
Each gift of nature, and each grace of art;
With fatal heat impetuous courage glows,
With fatal sweetness elocution flows,
Impeachment stops the speaker's powerful breath,
And restless fire precipitates on death. .

Let history tell where rival kings command,
And dubious title shakes the maddened land.

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