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. "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.

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 utterances are too 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 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.

He was as good a moralist as a man can be who regards the ultimate foundations of morality as placed beyond the reach of speculation. "We know we are free, and there's an end on't" is the answer to the great metaphysical difficulty. He "refutes" Berkeley by kicking a stone. He thinks that Hume is a mere trifler, who has taken to "milking the bull" by way of variety. He laughs effectually at Soame Jenyns's explanation of the origin of evil; but leaves the question as practically insoluble, without troubling himself as to why it is insoluble, or what consequences may follow from its insolubility. Speculation, in short, though he passed for a philosopher, was simply abhorrent to him. He passes by on the other side, and leaves such puzzles for triflers. He has made up his mind once for all that religion is wanted, and that the best plan is to accept the established creed. And thus we have the apparent paradox that, whilst no man sets a higher value upon truthfulness in all the ordinary affairs of life than Johnson, no man could care less for the foundations of speculative truth. His gaze was not directed to that side. Judging in all cases rather by intuition than by logical processes, he takes for granted the religious theories which fall in sufficiently with his moral convictions. To all speculation which may tend to loosen the fixity of the social order he is deaf or contemptuously averse. The old insidious Deism seems to him to be mere trash; and he would cure the openly aggressive Deism of Rousseau by sending its author to the plantations. Indifference to speculation generates hearty contempt for all theories. He has too firm a grasp of facts to care for the dreams of fanciful Utopians; his emotions are too massive and rigid to be easily excited by enthusiasts. He ridicules the

That great Luminary of Learning, the English Lexiphanes. STODDARD, RICHARD HENRY, 1876, Lord Macaulay and His Friends, Harper's Magazine, vol. 53, p. 85.

No writer delivers moral maxims and dictatorial sentences with greater force, or lays down definitions with more grave precision. His critical acumen, setting aside personal and political prejudices, was likewise very great; but he is utterly averse to the easy and familiar, both in style and sentiment. His style formed an era in English composition. Its balanced pomp and antithetical clauses had with many an irresistible charm. However, the admiration for its exuberance of words of Latin etymology, and its sonorous rotundity of phrase, after having betrayed some writers into an injudicious imitation, has at length subsided; and the share of influence which remains, has certainly improved the general language.-JENKINS, O. L., 1876, The Student's Handbook of British and American Literature, p. 244.

One clever writer has lately attempted a defence of Dr. Johnson's pompous style, saying that the sage drew distinctions as he drew his breath, and that he could not express these distinctions without couching his diction in Latin-born phrases. The answer is most simple: he drew distinctions with equal subtility when he was talking, and he expressed them in the homeliest Teutonic. He has had his reward: his "Rambler" lies unread on our book-shelves; his talk, as recorded by Boswell, is perused every year by thousands of delighted students. Any writer of our day, who has a mind to be read a hundred years hence, should lay the lesson to heart.-OLIPHANT, T. L. KINGTON, 1878, The Old and Middle English, p. 589,

Johnson gained his reputation by his unrivalled power of concentrating his own forces, of defending himself against the aggression of outer influences, and striking a light in the process. Of course Johnson was a man of very strong general understanding. Had he not been so, he

could not have commanded the respect he did, for those who do not in a considerable degree understand others, will never be themselves understood. Still, admitting freely that it both takes a man of some character as well as insight, to understand distinctly what is beyond his own sphere, and a man of some insight as well as character, to teach others to understand distinctly what is within himself, it is clear that Johnson's genius lay in the latter, not in the former direction,-in maintaining himself against the encroachments of the world, and in interpreting himself to that world, not in enlarging materially the world's sympathies and horizons, except so far as he taught them to include himself. The best things he did of any kind were all expressions of himself.-HUTTON, RICHARD HOLT, 1878, Criticisms on Contemporary Thought and Thinkers, vol. I, p. 164.

Merely a man of keen perception and shrewd reasoning. BLACK, WILLIAM, 1879, Goldsmith (English Men of Letters), p. 95.

Johnson unites in his own style many of the opposite excellences exhibited by his predecessor and his friend. It was impossible that the bias of his strong character should be altogether concealed in his verse, and "London" in particular appears to have been largely inspired by personal motives like those which suggested to Pope his "Imitations of Horace." But the different genius of the two poets is seen in the selection of their respective originals. Pope was struck by the many superficial points of resemblance between. himself and the lively egotistical Horace, and seized eagerly on the opportunity of presenting his own virtues, friendships, and enmities to the public under a transparent veil of imitation. Johnson, on the contrary, who, as an unknown writer, could not hope to interest the public in his personal concerns, chose a general theme, and imitated the satirist whose denunciations of Roman vice offered, in many respects, an apt parallel to the manners of his own age. "The Vanity of Human Wishes" marks a calmer and more prosperous epoch in the poet's life, and its philosophical generalising spirit is an anticipation of Goldsmith's "Traveller." Johnson was now relieved from the immediate pressure of want; and in his second

"Imitation" he takes a wider survey of mankind; he suppresses all personal satire, and fetches the illustrations of his argument from distant times. The style of this poem is also completely different from that of "London:" in the latter he is ardent, animated, and colloquial, while in the "Vanity of Human Wishes" he speaks with the gravity of a moralist, making his periods swelling and sonorous, balancing his verses against each other, and equaling Pope himself in the condensation of his language. Nevertheless, the whole spirit of the composition, though professedly an imitation, is highly characteristic of the man: we see in it the melancholy gloom that darkened all his views of human existence, while at the same time the noble lines of the conclusion recall the language of those touching fragments of prayer which Boswell discovered among his papers and has preserved in his "Life." His Prologues are of the highest excellence; indeed it may be confidently affirmed that he is the best writer of prologues in the language. No man was ever so well qualified to strike that just mean between respectfulness and authority which such addresses to the public require. His sound critical power and elevated feeling are well exemplified in the "Prologue spoken at the opening of Drury Lane Theatre;" and there is true greatness of spirit in his Prologue to "Comus," in which he claims the liberality of the audience for Milton's granddaughter as a tardy redress for the injustice shown by the nation to the genius of the poet himself. His admirable independence of the character is perhaps even better seen in the Prologue to "A Word to the Wise," a play which at its first exhibition was damned in consequence of political prejudices against the author, but was revived after his death. Nothing can be better than the dignity with which Johnson, in this address, while reccognising the judicial authority of the audience, indirectly reproves them for their previous disregard of the laws of humanity by which all their verdicts ought to be determined.-COURTHOPE, W. J., 1880, English Poets, ed. Ward, vol. III, p. 246.

Johnson did more than any other one man in English letters to make literature a working profession-to take it out of the

hands of patrons, and make the dealings of author and publisher a substantial business relation. He was one of the first English authors who lived by his work, and the honest independence with which he inspired the profession, has been a help to authors ever since his time. His dictionary, too, was one of the great works of the century. While we can not help wishing that the Johnsonian tendency in language had been towards greater simplicity and not towards the introduction of so many Latin words, still we must see that he did a great work for language. In his time there was no standard dictionary-the best one very imperfect-and Johnson in arranging and defining the words of the language, brought it into order and gave it form. He singly and alone attempted to do for England what the French Academy did for France, and although it is a question whether it is not better to have so important a work done by a body of scholars rather than by one man alone, yet nobody in raising that question, will doubt the value and honesty of Samuel Johnson's labors.-RICHARDSON, ABBY SAGE, 1881, Familiar Talks on English Literature, p. 321.

He taught others to look, like himself, through all the fleeting accidents of life to that in which a man can really live, and there were none who came to know him without learning how pure a spring of love and tenderness kept the whole nature fresh within. Firmly attached to the established Church, Johnson was a stout Tory on the religious side of his life and held the First Georges in such contempt as, it may be said, their lives had duly earned for them. But no delusions of party feeling dimmed his sense of human brotherhood, and of the large interests of humanity. Negro slavery was to his mind so gross a wrong that he startled a polite company one day with a toast "to the next Insurrection of the Blacks." The political corruption of his time caused Johnson in his Dictionary, which appeared in 1755, to define "Pension" as "a grant made to any one without an equivalent,' and "Pensioner" as "a slave of state, hired by a stipend to obey his master." Johnson's power had grown with the time, and he so far shared the reaction against formalism in his style, that the English of his "Lives of the Poets"

differs distinctly from the English of his "Rambler."-MORLEY, HENRY, 1881, Of English Literature in the Reign of Victoria with a Glance at the Past, pp. 83, 85.

The most able criticism of the 18th century was Johnson's; he may be called in fact the first really systematic critic of English literature; for, although his remarks on other authors are scattered all about his own miscellaneous writings, it may be confidently stated that he made criticism his profession, and earned his living by it. He is an important link in the chain of English prose writers, for he is the first author whose whole thoughts were turned to the works of his predecessors.-FLETCHER, C. R. L., 1881, The Development of English Prose Style, p. 19.

His

In morals and criticism, it will ever be to his praise that he has assailed all sentimentalism and licentiousness. wit, eloquence, and logic were always enlisted on the side of revealed religion, to deepen and extend, in heart and practice, the human faith in God. In the fields of Literature, which were now beginning to be cultivated on all sides, he did more than any of his contemporaries to create a pure and invigorating atmosphere. His balanced pomp of antithetic clauses soon had for others, as it had for him, an irresistible charm, and caused a complete revolution, for a time, in English style. Unhappily, it was too often imitated by inferior writers, who had not the glow to kindle the massive structure -little fishes talking like whales. There has been no English prose writer, onward to the present day, whose style has not been influenced by that of Johnson.WELSH, ALFRED H., 1883, Development of English Literature and Language, vol. II, p. 178.

I never for an instant compared Johnson to Scott, Pope, Byron, or any of the really great writers whom I loved. But I at once and forever recognized in him a man entirely sincere, and infallibly wise in the view and estimate he gave of the common questions, business, and ways of the world. I valued his sentences not primarily because they were symmetrical, but because they were just, and clear; it is a method of judgment rarely used by the average public, who ask from an author always, in the first place, arguments in favour of their own opinions, in