subtlety in thinking and reasoning was profound; and all these talents were adorned with an elocution that was irresistible." His constitutional energy was prodigious, appearing in the wild excesses of his dissolute youth, no less than in his hard work and complicated intrigues as a Minister of State. The most striking feature of his style is splendour of declamation. All his works, philosophical as well as political, are written in a declamatory strain, and read like elaborate speeches. Not only have the words an oratorical glow and vehemence, but the general structure is the structure of spoken rather than of written style. The dedication of his 'Dissertation on Parties,' addressed to Sir Robert Walpole, is an extreme example:

"Let me now appeal to you, sir. Are these designs which any man, who is born a Briton, in any circumstances, in any situation, ought to be ashamed or afraid to avow? You cannot think it. You will not say it. That never can be the case, until we cease to think like freemen, as well as to be free. Are these designs in favour of the Pretender? I appeal to the whole world; and I scorn with a just indignation to give any other answer to so shameless and so senseless an objection. No; they are designs in favour of the constitution; designs to secure, to fortify, to perpetuate that excellent system of government. I court no other cause; I claim no other

merit.

Here not only the vehement eloquence, but the short sentences, the pointed balance, the repetition of the leading word (as in "designs"), the figures of interrogation and exclamation-all belong to oratory. We meet some or all of these characteristics in every page. Although, however, in almost every page we

meet with the short oratorical sentence familiar to readers of Macaulay, his sentences are not in general so short as in the above extract. On the contrary, he is rather famous for long sentences-remarkable on this ground, that the conclusion of the predicate is put off by one clause after another, and yet these clauses are so admirably placed that there is seldom the least confusion. The structure of these long sentences is all the more simple, that very often the latter part is a paraphrase or extension in apposition to some word in the former part. Thus

"How different the case is, on the other side, will appear not only from the actions, but from the principles of the Court party, as we find them avowed in their writings; principles more dangerous to liberty, though not so directly, nor so openly levelled against it, than even any of those, bad as they were, which some of these men value themselves for having formerly opposed.'

This structure is also oratorical To call Bolingbroke a splendid

1 In singling out certain features of Bolingbroke's style as oratorical, I do not mean to imply that these are confined to oratory. I call them oratorical because they are such as occur in nearly every Parliamentary speech of the eighteenth century, and because they are peculiarly fitted to spoken address.

declaimer is to give him little more than half his due. He is also a wit; and at every turn he electrifies the reader with some felicitous stroke of brevity, or happy adjustment of words to his meaning.

To enumerate all the miscellaneous writers of this time would be as much out of place in the present work as to enumerate all that have written to newspapers or magazines within the nineteenth century. A great many periodicals, weekly, bi-weekly, or daily, some continued for a few weeks, some for one or two years, were published contemporaneously with, and after the decease of, Defoe's 'Review'; Steele's 'Tatler,' 'Spectator,' and 'Guardian'; and Swift's 'Examiner.' A long list is given in the beginning of vol. iv. of Drake's Essays on Steele, Addison, and Johnson. The names that we meet with are such as-The Re-Tatler'; 'The Female Tatler'; 'The Tory Tatler'; The Grumbler'; 'The Medley' (conducted by an accomplished man, Mr Maynwaring); "The Lay Monastery' (conducted by the poet Sir Richard Blackmore); "The Censor' (conducted by Lewis Theobald, the annotator of Shakspeare); 'The Free-thinker' (supported by Ambrose Phillips, the friend of Addison, and George Stubbs, a scholarly elegant recluse clergyman); "The Plain Dealer' (started by Aaron Hill); 'The Intelligencer' (by Dr Sheridan, the friend and biographer of Swift). Most of the periodicals of the day were political; others diversified politics with literature, on the plan of the 'Review'; and some consisted of a few numbers directed against an object of aversion in literature, manners, or even commerce. Periodicals were the fashion, most of them very short-lived. A periodical sheet was started to vent an opinion that, in the present day, would be expressed in a letter, or a series of letters, to a daily newspaper; and expired either when the author had exhausted the idea, or when the public had received enough and refused to purchase

more

THE great "Moralist" and "Lexicographer" was the son of a respectable bookseller in Lichfield, where he was born on the 18th of September. The mistress of a dame's school there praised him as the best scholar she ever had. After five years at a higher school in Lichfield, one year at the school of Stourbridge, and two years loitering at home, he was sent, at the age of nineteen, to Pembroke College, Oxford. He was too desultory to confine himself to the studies of the place, and continued in the library of the college the wide miscellaneous reading he had practised in his father's shop. Yet his fluent command of Latin procured him marked attention. A Latin hexameter version of Pope's 'Messiah,' which he executed as a Christmas exercise, was considered so good that Pope is said to have declared that posterity would be in doubt which was the original and which the translation. Owing to poverty, he left Oxford in 1731 without taking a degree. Too constitutionally irregular to settle down to a profession, he lived at home for several months; acted for several months as an usher; lived with a friend in Birmingham; translated for a Birmingham bookseller 'Lobo's Journey to Abyssinia' (pub. in 1735); returned to Lichfield; married Mrs Porter of Birmingham, a widow with £800; and set up a boarding-school near Lichfield. Finally, the school not succeeding, he removed to London in 1737, and for the next quarter of a century maintained himself by his pen.

Had he been born a generation sooner, and gone to London in

the reign of Queen Anne, he might have been retained as a partywriter, and well rewarded. Bolingbroke or Harley might have employed him to abuse Marlborough or browbeat the 'Freeholder.' But in 1737 party-writers were not in demand. The man of letters might possibly meet with a wealthy patron, but his trust was chiefly in the booksellers, who were beginning to compete for the favour of the public with periodicals, editions, translations, and every sort of compilation that was likely to sell. There was plenty of employment, though at a low rate of remuneration, for men of ability; and had Johnson possessed ordinary business habits and industry, he might have lived comfortably. During the first ten years of his London life he wrote chiefly for Cave, the publisher of the 'Gentleman's Magazine' (established in 1731), composing prefaces, lives of eminent men, abridgments, and miscellaneous papers. He succeeded William Guthrie as writer of the Parliamentary Debates (which were forbidden to be reported, but which Cave introduced into his Magazine as the proceedings of the Senate of Lilliput, sending men to the House to bring away what they could remember, and getting a clever man to compose speeches according to their reports). In 1738 he published his poem "London." In 1747 his fame was well established, and he was engaged by a combination of London booksellers for £1575 to prepare his famous Dictionary. In 1750, before this was completed, he began the work that raised his fame to its full height, a periodical under the title of 'The Rambler.' This he carried on single-handed twice a-week for two years. In 1753 he made several contributions to 'The Adventurer.' The Dictionary was completed in 1755; and, to grace his name on the title-page, the University of Oxford presented him with the degree of M.A. Thereafter he continued his multifarious writings for a livelihood. In 1756 he wrote several reviews and other papers for the newly started Literary Magazine.' From 1758 to 1760 he wrote the papers known as 'The Idler' for Payne's 'Universal Chronicle.' In 1759 he wrote 'Rasselas.'

The year 1762 relieved him from his quarter of a century of literary drudgery, bringing him from Government an annual pension of £300. From that date he wrote comparatively little; his chief productions were the Notes to his edition of Shakspeare, 1765; his 'Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland,' and Taxation no Tyranny,' 1775; and the last and best of his works, 'The Lives of the Poets,' prefixed as detached Prefaces to an edition of the English Poets, 1779-81. After being made independent by the pension, he spent a great part of his time in social enjoyment, becoming the conversational oracle of a circle of distinguished literary friends. In 1763 he met Boswell, to whose painstaking record he is mainly indebted for the perpetua

tion of his fame. In 1764 he founded the Literary Club (still existing), which met every Monday at the Turk's Head. In 1765 he made the acquaintance of the Thrales; dined with them frequently; and finally came to be considered as a member of their family. At his own house in Bolt Court, where Boswell found him on his return from the Hebrides, he charitably kept a number of humble dependants-Mrs Williams, Mrs Desmoulins, Dr Robert Levett, Black Frank, and a cat called Hodge. Among the intimate associates of his latter years were Burke, Goldsmith, Gibbon, Topham Beauclerk, Langton, Sir John Hawkins, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Murphy. He died in his house in Bolt Court.

"He is,

Johnson's appearance was far from prepossessing. indeed," says Miss Burney, "very ill-favoured. He has naturally a noble figure, tall, stout, grand, and authoritative; but he stoops horribly; his back is quite round, his mouth is continually opening and shutting as if he were chewing something; he has a singular method of twirling his fingers and twisting his hands; his vast body is in constant agitation, see-sawing backwards and forwards; his feet are never for a moment quiet; and his whole great frame looks often as if it were going to roll itself quite voluntarily from its chair to the floor." One of his cheeks was disfigured by the marks of scrofula; and his face showed the peculiar nervous twitching known as St Vitus's Dance. His gait was rolling and clumsy; he seemed to be struggling with fetters. Along with the scrofulous taint, he had inherited from his father a disposition to melancholy, which came upon him in cruel fits. During these gloomy seasons he was more imperious and irritable than Swift. He had inherited, also, a deep-rooted indolence and a hatred of regular work. His ambition, his desire to excel, was not alone sufficient to overcome this constitutional indolence. He needed to be "well whipt" at school, and when grown to manhood he did little more than enough to keep himself and his wife from starving. England gave him but "fourpence-halfpenny aday," if she gave him no more, chiefly because he was too lazy to work for more.

His intellectual powers must not be judged by what he produced. He was indolent not in the sense of dozing away his time without thinking or reading, but in the sense of being averse both to productive exertion and to regular application. In his father's shop at Lichfield, in the college library at Pembroke, and in arranging the vast Harleian library of books and pamphlets, he was thoroughly in his element; ranging with luxurious pleasure from book to book, and insatiably storing up miscellaneous knowledge. Partly in consequence of thus reserving his strength, he was capable of intense concentration when he did apply his mind to production.