elegant terms; and are just as ready with their applause for a sentence of Macaulay's, which may have no more sense in it than a blot pinched between doubled paper, as to reject one of Johnson's, telling against their own prejudice, -though its symmetry be as of thunder answering from two horizons. I hold it more than happy that, during those continental journeys, in which the vivid excitement of the greater part of the day left me glad to give spare half-hours to the study of a thoughtful book, Johnson was the one author accessible to me. No other writer could have secured me, as he did, against all chance of being misled by my own sanguine and metaphysical temperament. He taught me carefully to measure life, and distrust fortune; and he secured me, by his adamantine commonsense, for ever, from being caught in the cobwebs of German metaphysics, or sloughed in the English drainage of them. -RUSKIN, JOHN, 1885, Præterita, vol. I, p. 416.

There is hardly any among the great men of history who can be called so emphatically and distinctively "a man of letters," undoubtedly none who has won so high a personal position and so large a contemporary influence by sheer strength of pen. The literary life is not generally considered to be especially favorable to the cultivation of piety; and Johnson's peculiar circumstances were not of a kind to make it more favorable in his case than usual. He was poor, neglected, struggling during a great part of his career against the heaviest odds. His natural disposition was by no means such as to predispose him to religion. He was afflicted from childhood with a hypochondriac and irritable humor; a proud domineering spirit, housed in an unwieldy and. disordered body; plagued by inordinate physical appetites; inclined not unnaturally to rely with overconfidence upon the strength and accuracy of his reasoning powers; driven by his impetuous temper into violent assertion and bitter controversy; deeply wounded by his long years of obscurity, and highly elated by his final success, he was certainly not one whom we would select as likely to be a remarkably religious man. Carlyle had less to embitter him. Goethe had no more to self-deify him. And yet, beyond

a doubt, Samuel Johnson was a sincere, an humble, and, in the main, a consistent Christian.-VAN DYKE, JR., HENRY J., 1886, A Sturdy Christian, Andover Review, vol. 5, p. 491.

Among Johnson's numerous writings the ones best entitled to remembrance are, perhaps, his "Dictionary of the English Language," 1755; his moral tale, "Rasselas," 1759; the introduction to his "Edition of Shakspere," 1765; and his "Lives of the Poets," 1781. Johnson wrote a sonorous, cadenced prose, full of big Latin words and balanced clauses. . . There is more of this in Johnson's "Rambler" and "Idler" papers than in his latest work, the "Lives of the Poets." In this he showed himself a sound and judicious critic, though with decided limitations. His understanding was solid, but he was a thorough classicist, and his taste in poetry was formed on Pope. He was unjust to Milton and to his own contemporaries, Gray, Collins, Shenstone, and Dyer. He had no sense of the higher and subtler graces of romantic poetry, and he had a comical indifference to the "beauties of nature." When Boswell once ventured to remark that poor Scotland had, at least, some "noble, wild prospects," the doctor replied that the noblest prospect a Scotchman ever saw was the road that led to London.-BEERS, HENRY A., 1886, An Outline Sketch of English Literature, pp. 200, 201.

The unfading interest in Dr. Johnson is one of the good signs of English character. Men do not read his books, but they never cease to care about him. It shows what hold the best and broadest human qualities always keep on the heart of man. This man, who had to be coaxed into favor before a request could be asked, and whose friends and equals were afraid to remonstrate with him except by a roundrobin, was yet capable of the truest delicacy, the purest modesty, the most religious love for all that was greater and better than himself. But the great value of him was his reality. He was a perpetual protest against the artificialness and unreality of that strange eighteenth century in which he lived.-BROOKS, PHILLIPS, 1886-94, Biography, Essays and Addresses, p. 433.

Johnson has never been highly estimated as a critic, and on this point he

has hardly received fair consideration. His hasty remarks, uttered in the heat of controversy, have been handed down as the result of deliberate judgment, but his literary instincts were more correct than has generally been imagined. Personal feelings undoubtedly often influenced his opinions, and he was unwilling to allow praise to writers of whose principles he disapproved. He could see little merit in the vigorous irony of Swift, and would never acknowledge him to be the author of "The Tale of a Tub!" but there is scarcely any writer from whom Johnson quoted so often in his dictionary. .

On the other hand, he spoke too favourably of writers whose personal characters he respected. Beattie he loved, and he mentioned his writings in terms which now appear ludicrous. He was under obligations to Richardson, and thought highly of the moral tendency of his works, which in consequence he immensely over-rated, but he admitted that anybody who read Richardson's novels for the sake of the story would be compelled to hang himself, and forgot the fact that it is exactly for the sake of the story that novels are generally read, and that, however excellent may be the sentiment, the reader of a work of

fiction will soon close the volume if there is no amusement in the plot.—GRANT, FREDERICK RICHARD CHARLES, 1887, Life of Samuel Johnson, pp. 154, 155.

His sagacious words and suggestions are likely to last with the literature of the language, for they embody great living truths and principles which are and must continue superior to the changes which affect and rule in the minor affairs of life.-SAUNDERS, FREDERICK, 1887, The Story of Some Famous Books, p. 94.

Johnson was never designed to be a successful periodical essayist. He had a better field in biography, lexicography and general criticism. He was far more than a miscellaneous essayist, and in this respect was the superior of Addison. Such critics as DeQuincey are led to speak in high terms of Johnson's style not so much on the basis of his periodical work as on that of his entire work as an author and commentator.-HUNT, THEodore W., 1887, Representative English Prose and Prose Writers, p. 320.

The hold that Johnson has on the esteem of mankind, after the lapse of a century,

proves that he was no unreal giant, but a hater of shams, and ever striving after the eternal verities, although unquestionably indebted to Boswell for his highest fame. He could not endure undeserved praise, and knew well enough that his tragedy of "Irene" added neither to his literary fame nor to the sum of his real merits. When a gentleman by the name of Pot was reported as having said that it "was the finest tragedy of modern times," Johnson at once replied, "If Pot says so, Pot lies;" and that verdict the public has never reversed. Goldsmith really touched Johnson in his most vulnerable point when he said, "He makes his little fishes talk like whales."-MORRILL, JUSTIN S., 1887, Self-Consciousness of Noted Persons, p. 106.

Johnson has contributed many imperishable sayings to the English language. Unfortunately, in literary matters he had a divided life. Macaulay has exaggerated the contrast between Johnson talking at his ease in the club or at Mrs. Thrale's tea-table, and Johnson penning "Ramblers" in the study. Still, there was a difference. Talk was to the Doctor the wine of life; it stirred his pulses, quickened his powerful but rather sluggish intellect, brought out his humour, drove off his besetting melancholy. Alone in Bolt Court, with blue devils, his pen lagged, and he produced, with some profoundly interesting work, a good deal of lumber. Though he raised the tone of the essay, he disimproved its form, as the masterly hand of Addison left it. The "Ramblers" and "Idlers," for instance, are, on the whole, failures, for want of the salt of personality which make the club talks successes. "Rasselas" is almost charming, but it resembles a theatrical performance by Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Crummles and Company. One was all Crummles; the other is all Johnson. Pakuah, Imlac, Rasselas, and the rest, all wear knee-breeches and buckles; their speech bewrayeth them. Here and there, especially in the "Idlers," there is a lively personal touch worthy of the Spectator"; and weighty satire and vigorous criticisms of life are never wanting.

As

a critic Johnson is excellent-intelligent, shrewd, knowing—and his worth may be well gauged by comparing him with his contemporaries, and even with the critical school of the earlier years of the

nineteenth century. He has been abused for his mistakes. What critic is without them? What about the Edinburg Reviewers? How many of Francis Jeffrey's literary verdicts remain? . .

will Carlyle's historical criticism be worth. fifty years hence? What are Mr. Froude's worth now? Of Johnson, it may be said. that as he produced the best dictionary in an age when philology was in its infancy, so he was the best literary critic of an age when there was very little criticism to speak of. Look at the stuff which passes for literary judgments with Horace Walpole, who was always sneering at Johnson's "tasteless pedantry!" Johnson was, in fact, a good deal better than his age and his prejudices.-MASSINGHAM, H. W., 1890, Some Johnson Characteristics, The Gentleman's Magazine, vol. 268, pp. 160, 161.

When the coffin was lowered into the grave, one able to read the outward signs of coming change might have seen buried with it the whole of the eighteenth century literature, as Johnson understood literature, and not to speak of frivolous productions such as those of Fielding and Smollett, who had also gone before. After Johnson's name in the list of English poets, scholars, and essayists may be drawn a thick black line such as in railway guides they use to indicate that here the train stops. Johnson's train of literature, which started merrily with Pope, Addison, Steele, and a glorious company of wits, had been running slowly of late, and has now come to a final stop. Not only was the old order changing, as happens continually, by the laws of being, but it was completely dead, and its successor as yet was not born. There was to be no more literature of the old school: nothing worth reading on the old lines was to be published; and the world must wait until the new men should begin their work with new thoughts, new ways of looking at things, and new forms of expression.-BESANT, SIR WALTER, 1891, Over Johnson's Grave, Harper's Magazine, vol. 82, p. 927

Johnson, in addition to his other great achievements, was capable of making colossal errors without the slightest help from others.-LOUNSBURY, THOMAS R., 1892, Studies in Chaucer, vol. 1, p. 149.

There was an intellectual dress, as it

were, put on by the man of genius of those times. It hung loosely upon Goldsmith's irregular frame. It sat close, well-fitting and fashionable upon Addison, but Samuel Johnson's mighty limbs almost burst its seams and betrayed at every movement the giant who wore it.-CRAWFORD, F. MARION, 1893, The Novel, What Is It? p. 101.

While he wrote some strong and quotable verse, full of vigorous and telling rhetoric, he is pre-eminently a prose writer in an age of prose. The uninspired and practical temper of his time found prose rather than poetry its natural medium.

While Johnson thus stands as the bulwark of the old order, both by his own work and by his critical verdicts on that of others, all about him new agitations were already rife. Absolute as was his literary dictatorship, his throne was reared on the verge of that revolution which begins the modern period of our literary history.-PANCOAST, HENRY S., 1893, Representative English Literature, pp. 318, 319.

Johnson's paragraph is remarkably short. In the "Rambler" there are but 2.32 sentences to the paragraph; the two rises to three in "Rasselas." The fewness of the sentences per paragraph and the high percentage (27 per cent.) of paragraphed sentences are phenomena not due in either case to dialogue. Johnson was exceedingly particular that each paragraph should form an integer; beyond this he cared not how few the sentences. His favourite order is loose, with a large share of deductive paragraphs. He loves a short introductory sentence, and when the chance permits he likes to make this sentence a generalization far wider than can be substantiated from the subsequent details. In the matter of proportion by varying short sentences with long, Johnson in his later work is by no means weak. Even in the earlier works the percentage of sentences of less than 15 words is considerable-9 per cent. in "Rambler" and "Rasselas," while the "Lives" shows 16 per cent. of simple sentences.-LEWIS, EDWIN HERBERT, 1894, The History of the English Paragraph, p. 116.

To attempt the Johnsonian period without a familiar knowledge of the Latin tongue is to practice diving before learning to swim; thereafter there is life to

be saved at sea. RALEIGH, WALTER, 1894, The English Novel, p. 260.

Johnson's weighty and impressive style suits well with a subject of moral grandeur such as not seldom employed his pen; but it grows monotonous, and becomes even ludicrous, when applied on occasions of ordinary or trifling importance. It was to this uniform pomposity of style that Goldsmith alluded when he said that Dr. Johnson would make little fishes talk like whales. But while Johnson's style of writing is overloaded with long words from the Latin, and ponderous with rolling sentences, his speech presented a contrast in pithy and pointed idiomatic Saxon English. He was to his century what Dryden had been to the seventeenth- a literary dictator whose verdict was final. The moral integrity of Johnson gave weight to his decisions.-ROBERTSON, J. LOGIE, 1894, A History of English Literature, p. 217.

Perhaps a little over-fond of trumpeting; loving so much his long sonorous roll of Ciceronian vocables.-MITCHELL, DONALD G., 1895, English Lands Letters and Kings, Queen Anne and the Georges, p. 98.

In style alone, we may justly claim that he is the vertebrate column of our prose. He could not accomplish the impossible. Once more I venture to express the conviction that the highest conceivable perfection of English prose was possible only to the Elizabethans, and that when the task passed unaccomplished from their hands, the hopes of it vanished beyond recall. But what Johnson could do, he did with consummate power. To him it was left to establish a code, to evolve order out of disorderly materials, to found a new ideal of style in absolutely logical precision, adding to that precision dignity and eloquence of force. To ascribe to him a slavish propensity to cumbrous and pedantic sesquipedalianism is to mistake the travesty for the original. dictatorship in literature, based on native strength, was most unquestioned in the sphere of style; and it is not too much to say that all that is best in English prose since his day is his debtor in respect of not a few of its highest qualities, above all in respect of absolute lucidity, unfailing vigour, and saving common sense. CRAIK, HENRY, 1895, ed., English Prose, Introduction, vol. IV, p. 10.

His

What, then, was Johnson's method? and what its practical application? The method is nothing if not magisterial. It takes for granted certain fixed lawswhether the laws formulated by Aristotle, or by Horace, or the French critics, is for the moment beside the question-and passes sentence on every work of art according as it conforms to the critical decalogue or transgresses it. The fault of this method is not, as is sometimes supposed, that it assumes principles in a subject where none are to be sought; but that its principles are built on a miserably narrow and perverted basis. That there are principles of criticism that the artist's search for beauty must be guided by some idea, is obvious enough. It can be questioned only by those who are prepared to deny the very possibility of criticism; who would reduce the task both of critic and of artist to a mere record of individual impressions. It need hardly be said that the very men who are most ready to profess such a doctrine with their lips, persistently and rightly, give the lie to it in their deeds. No creative work, no critical judgment, either is or can be put forward as a mere impression; it is the impression of a trained mind—that is, of a mind which, instinctively or as a conscious process, is guided by principles or ideas. So far, then, as he may be held to have borne witness to the need of ideas, Johnson was clearly in the right. It was when he came to ask, What is the nature of those ideas, and how does the artist or the critic arrive at them? that he began to go astray. Throughout he assumes that the principles of art and that, not only in their general bearing (proportion, harmony, and the like), but in their minuter details-are fixed and invariable. To him they form a kind of case-law, which is to be extracted by the learned from the works of a certain number of "correct writers," ancient and modern; and which, once established, is binding for all time both on the critic and on those he summons to his bar. In effect, this was to declare that-beauty can be conceived in no other way than as it presented itself, say, to Virgil or to Pope. It was to lay the dead hand of the past upon the present and the future.

Yet again. In the hands of Johnsonand it was a necessary consequence of his

critical method-poetry becomes more and more a mere matter of mechanism. As has already been said, Johnson is nothing if not a hanging judge; and it is just where originality is most striking that his sentences are the most severe. VAUGHAN, C. E., 1896, ed., English Literary Criticism, Introduction, pp. lvi, lviii, lix.

The gradual tendency of the century had more and more come to be concentrated upon attention to common-sense, and in Johnson a character was developed, of noble intelligence, of true and tender heart, of lambent humour, in whose entire philosophy every impulse was subordinated to that negative virtue. Johnson became, therefore, the leading intellect of the country, because displaying in its quintessence the quality most characteristic of the majority of educated men and women. Common-sense gave point to his wit, balance to his morality, a Tory limitation to his intellectual sympathy. He keeps the central path; he is as little indulgent to enthusiasm as to infidelity; he finds as little place in his life for mysticism as for coarse frivolity. Vita fumus, and it is not for man to waste his years in trying to weigh the smoke or puff it away; bravely and simply he must labour and acquiesce, without revolt, without speculation, in "all that human hearts endure." This virile hold upon facts, this attitude to conduct as a plain garment from which the last shred of the Shaftesbury gold-lace optimism had been torn, explains the astounding influence Johnson wielded during his lifetime. His contemporaries knew him to be thoroughly honest, profoundly intelligent, and yet permeated by every prejudice of the age. They loved to deal with facts, and no man had so large a stock of them at his disposal as Johnson.-GOSSE, EDMUND, 1897, Short History of Modery English Literature, p. 249.

Thus, inured in life-long struggles, fortified in spirit by a robust faith, exalted in mind by the loftiest expression of Greek philosophy, Johnson was one of those few who are numbered among the immortals

while still in this life: even as that other great Englishman and greatest of modern men, whom the world has just mourned with you, but whom immortality now claims as one of her noblest ornaments.

GENNADIUS, J., 1898, Dr. Johnson as a
Grecian, Johnson Club Papers, p. 48.

Johnson's style is formal, balanced, and Latinized, and his manner is rather oracular. He influenced English prose greatly for fifty years. His writing now

"Neglected and deserted lie,

As they were not of nature's company.' But he is full of good sense, often expressed in apt and forcible language. His range of thought is limited and insular, he is a typical eighteenth-century writer,

-a good deal of a Philistine, but a great deal of a man.-JOHNSON, CHARLES F., 1900, Outline History of English and American Literature, p. 279.

Some wits of the day said that he used long words to make his "Dictionary" a necessity. If we read much of Johnson, we are in danger of imitating him unconsciously. A critic in the latter part of the nineteenth century, describing Johnson's style, says: "He delivers himself with severe majestical dignity and vigorous authoritative brevity." This critic was unconsciously writing Johnsonese. In the second place, Johnson loved formal balance so much that he used too many antitheses. Many of his balancing clauses are out of place or add nothing to the As a rule, Johnson's prose is too abstract and general, and it awakens too few images.-HALLECK, REUBEN POST, 1900, History of English Literature, pp. 299, 300.

sense.

All true Johnsonians treat with an amused contempt the statement so freely circulated in newspapers that nobody nowadays reads Johnson's writings. People are, of course, free to read what they like, and (if they like) not to read at all. Some of us keep books, other poultry. One man drives a motor car, whilst his brother is perhaps an amateur photographer. All the tastes are respectable. But if it so happens that you are fond of English literature, you will be a reader of Johnson, and from his works, whether in prose or verse, you will be infected and become possessed with a perception of a strong character, and a constant habit of mind presented in the pages of Boswell and Burney and Thrale, and indeed all the other sources of our knowledgeRELL, AUGUSTINE, 1901, Do We Know Dr. Johnson, Outlook, vol.

914.

-BIR

Really 69, p.