the very uncouthness of his gestures, and the deep impressive tone of his voice. We learn not only what he said, but form an idea how he said it; and have, at the same time, a shrewd guess of the secret motive why he did so, and whether he spoke in sport or in anger, in the desire of conviction, or for the love of debate. It was said of a noted wag, that his bonmots did not give full satisfaction when published, because he could not print his face. But with respect to Dr. Johnson, this has been in some degree accomplished; and, although the present generation never saw him, yet he is, in our mind's eye, a personification as lively as that of Siddons in Lady Macbeth, or Kemble in Cardinal Wolsey.-SCOTT, SIR WALTER, 1823, Samuel Johnson.

Perhaps you do not know of my profound veneration for this surly sage; but I am such an admirer of his peculiar style of excellence, that I can easily endure defects that bring him within my reach, and save me the effort of standing on tiptoe to contemplate his gigantic mind.-GRANT, MRS. ANNE, 1823, Letters, May 15; Memoir and Correspondence, ed. Grant, vol. III, p. 2.

At length rose the Colossus of English Philology, Samuel Johnson; having secretly and unremittingly formed his style upon the basis of that of Sir Thomas Browne; a name, in every respect to be held in grateful remembrance. But JohnBut Johnson, as a philologist, is almost an original; and doubtless among the very foremost in the ranks of the literature of his country. And yet, I know not how it is, but, as years creep on, we do not read his pages with that devoted enthusiasm which we did in our College days: for where is the man, who, having turned his thirtieth year, peruses "Rasselas" or the "Rambler?" It is as a Colloquialist and Biographer that Johnson has scarcely a rival -especially when prejudices did not spread a film over those intellectual orbs, which were constructed to gaze uninjured upon the sun!-DIBDIN, THOMAS FROGNALL, 1824, The Library Companion, p. 608.

The judgments which Johnson passed on books were in his own time regarded with superstitious veneration; and in our own time are generally treated with indiscriminate contempt. They are the judgments

of a strong but enslaved understanding. The mind of the critic was hedged round by an uninterrupted fence of prejudices and superstitions. Within his narrow limits he displayed a vigour and an activity which ought to have enabled him to clear the barrier that confined him. . . . He was no master of the great science of human nature. He had studied, not the genus man, but the species Londoner. Nobody was ever so thoroughly conversant with all the forms of life, and all the shades of moral and intellectual character, which were to be seen from Islington to the Thames, and from Hyde-Park corner to Mile-end green. But his philosophy stopped at the first turnpike gate. Of the rural life of England he knew nothing; and he took it for granted that everybody who lived in the country was either stupid or miserable.-MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON, 1831, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Edinburgh Review, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays.

His imagination was not more lively than was necessary to illustrate his maxims; his attainments in science were inconsiderable, and in learning far from the first class; they chiefly consisted in that sort of knowledge which a powerful mind collects. from miscellaneous reading, a various intercourse with mankind. From the refinement of abstruse speculation he was withheld, partly, perhaps, by that repugnance to such subtleties which much experience often inspires, and partly also by a secret dread that they might disturb those prejudices in which his mind had found repose from the agitation of doubt. He was a most sagacious and severly pure judge of the actions and motives of men, and he was tempted by frequent detection of imposture to indulge somewhat of that contemptuous scepticism, respecting the sincerity of delicate and refined sentiments, which affected his whole character as a man and writer.-MACKINTOSH, SIR JAMES, 1835, Memoirs, ed. Mackintosh, vol. II, p. 166.

No man contemplates with greater tenderness than we do the frailties of Dr. Johnson; none respects more the sound parts of his moral system; or admires more the vigor of the elephantine step with which he sometimes tramples down insolent error and presumptuous sophistry. But let no young man, who wishes to write

well study his style.-EVERETT, EDWARD, 1835, Washington Irving, North American Review, vol. 41, p. 3.

Samuel Johnson, in some respects, stood entirely alone in Europe. In those years there was no one in Europe like him. Was a large minded man, an entirely sincere and honest man. Whatever may be our differences of opinion is here entirely insignificant; he must inevitably be regarded as the brother of all honest

men.

One who held this truth among the insincerities that lay around him, that, after all, "life was true yet, and he was a man to hold by that truth, and cling to it in the general shipwreck on the sea of Eternity. CARLYLE, THOMAS, 1838, Lectures on the History of Literature, p. 180.

His brilliant style has been the ambition of every schoolboy, and of some children of larger growth, since the days of the "Rambler. But the nearer they come to it, the worse. The beautiful is turned into the fantastic, and the sublime into the ridiculous.-PRESCOTT, WILLIAM HICKLING, 1839, Chateaubriand's Sketches of English Literature, North American Review, vol. 49, p. 334.

A love of hard and learned words prevailed throughout; and a fondness for balanced periods was its special characteristic. But there was often great felicity in the expression, occasionally a pleasing cadence in the rhythm, generally an epigrammatic turn in the language, as well as in the idea. Even where the workmanship seemed most to surpass the material, and the word-craft to be exercised needlessly and the diction to run to waste, there was never any feebleness to complain of, and always something of skill and effect to admire. The charm of nature was ever wanting, but the presence of great art was undeniable. Nothing was seen of the careless aspect which the highest of artists ever give their masterpieces,-the produce of elaborate but concealed pains; yet the strong hand of an able workman was always marked; and it was observed, too, that he disdained to hide from us the far less labour which he had much more easily bestowed. There is no denying that some of Johnson's works, from the meagerness of the material and the regularity of the monotonous style, are exceedingly little adapted to reading. They are flimsy, and they are dull; they are pompous, and,

though full of undeniable-indeed, selfevident-truths, they are somewhat empty; they are, moreover, wrapped up in a style so disproportioned in its importance, that the perusal becomes very tiresome, and is soon given up. This character belongs more especially to the "Rambler," the object of such unmeasured praises among his followers, and from which he derived the title of the Great Moralist.-BROUGHAM, HENRY LORD, 1845, Lives of Men of Letters of the Time of George III.

As a writer, he is the very incarnation of good sense; and as a man, he was an example of so high a degree of virtue, magnanimity, and self-sacrifice, that he has been justly placed by a profound modern speculator among the heroes of his country's annals. Johnson's style during the whole of his career was exceedingly peculiar and characteristic both in its beauties and defects, and when he arrived at eminence may be said to have produced a revolution in the manner of writing in English; and as this revolution has to a certain degree lasted till the present day, it will be well to say a few words on the subject. It is in the highest degree pompous, sonorous, and, to use a happy expression of Coleridge, hyper-latinistic; running into perpetual antithesis, and balancing period against period with an almost rhythmical regularity, which at once fills and fatigues the ear.

The prevailing defect of Johnson's style is uniformity: the combinations of his kaleidoscope are soon exhausted; his peal of bells is very limited in its changes; and there is necessarily, in so artificial a style, an air of pretention and ambitiousness, the sameness is more fatiguing than would be the snipped periods and tuneless meanness of a more unostentatious mode of expression. His mind, admira

bly adapted as it was for the scientific part of criticism, was impotent to feel or appreciate what is picturesque or passionate. He is like a deaf man seated at a symphony of Beethoven-a sense is wanting to him. ., . The character of Shakspeare's genius, given in the preface, is a noble specimen of panegyric; and it is singular to see how far the divine genius of the dramatist almost succeeds in overcoming all the prejudices of Johnson's age and education. As a moralist, as a painter of men and minds, Johnson has

done Shakspeare (at least as far as any man could) ample justice; but in his judgment of the great creative poet's more romantic manifestations he exhibits a callousness and insensibility which was partly the result of his education and of the age when he lived, and partly, without doubt, the consequence of the peculiar constitution of his mind-a mind which felt much more sympathy with men than with things, and was much more at home in the "full tide of London existence" than in the airy world of imagination-among the everyday crowds of Fleet Street, than in Prospero's enchanted isle, or the moonlit terraces of Verona.-SHAW, THOMAS B., 1847, Outlines of English Literature, pp. 242, 243, 244, 247, 248.

Dr. Johnson, gravely supporting an aristocratic public policy, while he powerfully and pathetically rebuked aristocratic private conduct. Let the name of Dr. Johnson never be mentioned among scholars without a sad respect; but is he, distinctively, the scholar in English history?— CURTIS, GEORGE WILLIAM, 1856, The Duty of the American Scholar, Orations and Addresses, ed. Norton. vol. 1, p. 11.

Doctor Johnson's written abstractions have little value; the tone of feeling in them makes their chief worth.-EMERSON, RALPH WALDO, 1856-84, English Traits, Works, Riverside ed., vol. V, p.

232.

Dr. Johnson's English style demands a few words. So peculiar is it, and such a swarm of imitators grew up during the half century of his greatest fame, that a special name Johnsonese-has been often used to donate the march of its ponderous classic words. Yet it was not original, and not a many-toned style. There were in our literature, earlier than Dr. Johnson's day, writers who far outdid their Fleet Street disciple in recruiting our native ranks with heavy-armed warriors from the Greek phalanx and the Latin legion. Of these writers Sir Thomas Browne was perhaps the chief. Goldy, as the great Samuel loved to call the author of the "Deserted Village," got many a sore blow from the Doctor's conversational sledge-hammer; but he certainly contrived to get within the Doctor's guard and hit him home, when he said, "If you were to write a fable about little fishes, Doctor, you would make the little

fishes talk like whales." Macaulay tells us that when Johnson wrote for publication, he did his sentences out of English into Johnsonese. COLLIER, WILLIAM FRANCIS, 1861, A History of English Literature, p. 349.

There is perhaps no subsequent prosewriter upon whose style that of Johnson has been altogether without its effect.CRAIK, GEORGE L., 1861, A Compendious History of English Literature and of the English Language, vol. II, p. 328.

His true genius lay in the masculine strength of his common sense; and in spite of his prejudices, of his dogmatism, of his frequent intolerance and occasional paradox-in spite, still more, of a style in prose strangely contrasting the cold severity of his style in verse-unfamiliar, inflated, artificially grandiose still that common sense has such pith and substance that it makes its way to every plain, solid understanding. And while all that John+ son owed to his more imaginative qualities has faded away from his reputation; while his poems are regarded but as scholastic exercises; while his tragedy is left un read; while the fables and tales scattered throughout his essays allure no popular imitation, and even "Rasselas" is less admired for its loftiness of purpose and conception than censured for its inappropriate dialogue or stilted diction, and neglected for the dryness of its narrative and the frigidity of its characters; while his ablest criticisms, composed in his happiest style, rarely throw light upon what may be called the metaphysics of imaginative art,-his knowledge of the world has a largeness and at times a depth which preserve authority to his opinions upon the general bearings of life and the prevalent characteristics of mankind-a knowledge so expanded, by its apprehension of generical truths, from mere acquaintanceship with conventional manners, and the sphere of the town life which enthralled his taste, that at this day it is not in capitals that his works are most esteemed as authoritative, but rather in the sequestered homes of rural bookreaders. To men of wit about town, a grave sentence from Johnson upon the philosophy of the great world would seem old-fashioned pedantry, where, to men of thought in the country, it would convey some truth in social wisdom too plain to

be uttered by pedants, and too solid to be laughed out of fashion by wits.-LYTTON, EDWARD BULWER LORD, 1863-68, Caxtoniana, Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol. III, p. 451.

Johnson neither in amplitude of literature nor exactness of scholarship could be deemed a match for Lessing; but they were alike in the power of readily applying whatever they had learned, whether for purposes of illustration or argument. They resemble each other, also, in a kind of absolute common-sense, and in the force with which they could plant a direct blow with the whole weight both of their training and their temperament behind it. As a critic Johnson ends where Lessing begins. The one is happy in the lower region of the understanding: the other can breathe freely in the ampler air of reason alone. Johnson acquired learning, and stopped short through indolence at a certain point. Lessing assimilated it, and accordingly his education ceased only with his life. Both had something of the intellectual sluggishness that is apt to go with great strength; and both had to be baited by the antagonism of circumstances or opinions, not only into the exhibition, but into the possession of their entire force. Both may be more properly called original men than, in the highest sense, original writers.-LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL, 1866-90, Lessing; Prose Works, Riverside ed., vol. II, p. 191.

In fact, his phraseology rolls always in solemn and majestic periods, in which every substantive marches ceremoniously, accompanied by its epithets; great, pompous words peal like an organ; every proposition is set forth balanced by a proposition of equal length; thought is developed with the compassed regularity and official splendour of a procession. Classical prose attains its perfection in him, as classical poetry in Pope. Art cannot be more consummate, or nature more forced. No one has confined ideas in more strait compartments; none has given stronger relief to dissertation and proof; none has imposed more despotically on story and dialogue the forms of argumentation and violent declamation; none has more generally mutilated the flowing liberty of conversation and life by antitheses and technical words. It is the completion and the excess, the triumph and the tyranny, of

oratorical style. We understand now that an oratorica) age would recognise him as a master, and attribute to him in eloquence the primacy which it attributed to Pope in verse.-TAINE, H. A., 1871, History of English Literature tr. Van Laun, vol. II, bk. iii, ch. vi, p. 188.

Johnson first taught literary men the lesson of self-reliance and independence. Of all men of genius he is the only typical Englishman in whose strength, as also in his weakness, we see the national character. He was absolutely free from meanness and jealousy; a mighty soul which disdained tricks and subterfuges. tricks and subterfuges. "Like the Monument," in his own language, he stood upright and never stooped; no human power could have torn him from his base. Yet in this strongest of natures there was the gentlest affection, and the deepest reverence and humility. The giant has a heart like a woman or a child.-JOWETT, BENJAMIN, 1871-72, Life by Abbott and Campbell, vol. II, p. 33.

Johnson wrote almost all his "Ramblers" just as they were wanted for the press; he sent a certain portion of the copy of an essay, and wrote the remainder while the earlier part was printing. When it was wanted, and he had fairly sat down to it, he was sure, he said, it would be done.-JACOX, FRANCIS, 1872, Authorship in the Act, Aspects of Authorship, p. 6.

Doctor Samuel Johnson was poet, dramatist, essayist, lexicographer, dogmatist, and critic, and, in this array of professional characters, played so distinguished a part in his day that he was long regarded as a prodigy in English literature. His influence has waned since his personality has grown dim, and his learning been superseded or over-shadowed; but he still remains, and must always remain, the most prominent literary figure of his age. His style is full-sounding and antithetic, his periods are carefully balanced, his manner eminently respectable and good; but his words, very many of them of Latin derivation, constitute what the later critics have named Johnsonese, which is certainly capable of translation into plainer Saxon English, with good results. As a critic, his word was law: his opinion was clearly and often severely expressed on literary men and literary subjects, and no great writer of his own or a past age escaped either his praise or his

censure. Authors wrote with the fear of his criticism before their eyes; and his pompous diction was long imitated by men who, without this influence, would have written far better English. But, on the other hand, his honesty, his scholarship, his piety, and his championship of what was good and true, as depicted in his writings, made him a blessing to his time, and an honored and notable character in the noble line of English authors.-COPPÉE, HENRY, 1872, English Literature, pp. 324, 330, 331.

ances are

The style of Johnson, deemed so admirable at the time, seems to us now intolerably artificial, pedantic, constrained, and ponderous. His periods are carefully considered and balanced, its proportionate length, emphasis, and weight of heavy words being given to each member: homely and familiar words and phrases, however apposite or expressive, are rejected as undignified; antithesis does duty for brilliancy, and an occasional reversal of the syntax for variety. Each point is handled in the style of a solemn argument: step by step the demonstration proceeds, often leading to a conclusion which would have been admitted upon statement. His uttertoo frequently elaborately dressed-up commonplaces; and a laborious paragraph is employed to evolve a thought which might have been more forcibly expressed in a single terse idiomatic phrase. Thus, his style has no freshness, no individual coloring; we feel that it is the result of a multitude of heterogeneous minds, all ground together in the mill of omnivorous learning. Johnson's criticisms are learned, carefully weighed, but deficient in insight. He had no faculty of entering into other men's natures, and justly appreciating views which he did not himself hold. He was an infatuated, though perfectly honest and disinterested, Tory; and his intense political bias often led him into absurd injustice. In his eyes Voltaire was merely an infidel and cynical buffoon, and Rousseau a miscreant deserving the gallows. Being absolutely destitute of the poetic faculty, he lacked the essential qualification for a critic of poetry; and, while sure to detect a fallacy in reasoning, or a blemish in morals, the finer spirit of poetry he could not appreciate. On the other hand, his writings are everywhere pervaded by a perfect love

of truth and justice, and an utter abhorrence of falsehood and fraud; by a pure morality, enforced with the strongest emphasis; by a warm admiration for all things good and noble; and by the sincerest spirit of Christian piety; all which qualities he exemplified in his own brave and blameless life. His style, ponderous and constrained as it now appears, was not without many good qualities.-JOHNSTON, RICHARD MALCOLM, AND BROWNE, WILLIAM HAND, 1872, English Literature, p. 229.

Robert Hall, in his early days, made Johnson a model, but soon gave him up, complaining of a want of fervour in his morality. Though profoundly convinced of the doctrines of Religion, he seldom dilates on her "august solemnities," or on the grandeur of her hopes and fears. What he keeps principally in view is the beneficial effect of religious belief on human conduct, laying down the law in sonorous dogmas. In the presence of objects that raise emotions of sublimity in other men, he was on the watch to lay hold of general rules. Instead of giving way to the æsthetic influence of the situation, he pondered on the causes of the moral value of them, and meditated dictatorial, high-sounding, general propositions.-MINTO, WILLIAM, 1872-80, Manual of English Prose Literature, p. 419.

A solid Doric column, chipped into outline and assigned position by circumstances, he nevertheless chiefly interests us by the rugged strength of his own native texture.-BASCOM, JOHN, 1874, Philosophy of English Literature, p. 206.

His prose writings are noted for their formality of style and vigor of thought. Like Addison, he has furnished an adjective descriptive of literary style; and to be "Johnsonian" is to be ponderous and grandiose. "Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia," an allegorical story from which we take our extracts, is perhaps the most familiar of his compositions to the general reader. Dr. Johnson was a man of vigorous intellect, acute and argumentative, but narrow in his views, dogmatic and positive in his assertions.-CATHCART, GEORGE R., 1874, The Literary Reader, p. 26.

He presented "common-sense" in the most prosaic sense of the word.SCHERR, J., 1874, A History of English Literature tr. M. V., p. 150.