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In dashing off a definition, a criticism, or a general precept, he seized with great force upon the leading features. In these moments of intense concentration, he had the power of doing in a wonderfully short time what Lord Brougham describes as seizing the kernel and leaving the husk. This habit of making short work with a subject gives his writings their most distinctive character. The bold comprehensive grasp, right usually in the main, has always deeply impressed the admirers of force. On the other hand, his hardihood in making untenably sweeping assertions, his inevitable omission of many considerations in the course of his intense but hurried survey, has severely tried the patience of the lovers of delicate accuracy.

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His naturally powerful reason was a good deal clouded by various prejudices. He would believe no good either of republican or of infidel. He did injustice to Milton; he abused Bolingbroke without reading him; and Boswell mentions his having uttered about Hume a remark too gross to be committed to paper. hated and ridiculed the French and the Scotch, and refused to be persuaded that anybody could live happily out of London. In these things, as in many others, he showed gross egotism and want of sympathy. Swift was not more overbearing nor more intolerant of contradiction. He had a peculiar horror of death, and if anybody was said to feel differently, he at once pronounced them either mad or mendacious. He was a humane, warm-hearted man, at least towards cases of extreme distress brought on by no fault of the sufferer; he opened his house as a retreat for several “infirm and decayed" persons; amused himself with their quarrels, and patiently endured their caprices. He had a few strong attachments. But even in his displays of benevolence and kindly affection, you see his natural love of domineering; he allowed nobody but himself to praise his favourites, and he treated them roughly when they deviated from his ideal of propriety. He was frequently humorous at his own expense, but he would allow nobody else to take liberties with him; he made boisterous mirth at the expense of certain of his friends, but he would not endure that the slightest air of ridicule should be thrown upon any of his own sayings or doings. Often in his writings he enforced the "vanity of human wishes." His 'Rasselas' is virtually a sermon on the impossibility of finding perfect happiness in this world; one of its professed objects is the benevolent achievement of damping the ardour of youth. Yet when anybody else ventured to complain in his presence, he was ready to avow that the world is a very enjoyable world, and to denounce all complaints as mere sentimental whining.

Though renowned as a biographer, he was far from being carried away by hero-worship. He is rather chary than enthusiastic

in his allowance of merit, and scatters without mercy any air of romance or exaggeration that may have been gathered about an eminent name by the zeal of admirers. When Sir Thomas Browne, whom Johnson is said to have admired and imitated, declares that "his life has been a miracle of thirty years; which to relate were not history, but a piece of poetry, and would sound like a fable," -Johnson remarks somewhat sarcastically that "self-love, cooperating with an imagination vigorous and fertile as that of Browne's, will find or make objects of astonishment in every man's life."

Opinions. In politics Johnson was a bigoted Tory. He could not repress his political leanings even in writing the definitions for his Dictionary. When writing the Parliamentary Debates for Cave, he "took care that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it." He wrote little in direct support of the Tories. After he received his pension he conceived himself bound to do something, and composed a few pamphlets-The False Aların,' 'The Falkland Islands,' 'The Patriot,' and 'Taxation no Tyranny.' In these he stated his views of true liberty and true patriotism, and maintained that the English Parliament had a right to tax the Americans without their consent.

Naturally a pious man, he was a bigoted Churchman. He hated Dissenters as "honestly" as he hated Whigs, infidels, French, and Scotchmen.

Though called the Great Moralist, he expounded nothing that could be called an ethical system. He simply applied strong good sense to the common situations of life. His first principles were understood, not stated.

The merits of his literary criticisms were the result of his good sense, their defects the result of his narrow sympathies and fragmentary knowledge. He seldom or never erred on the side of extravagant praise. He admired the wonderful powers of Shakspeare, defended the violation of the "unities," and the mixture of comedy with tragedy; but, along with the great dramatist's virtues he enumerated considerable failings-occasional "tumour, meanness, tediousness, and obscurity," wearisome narration, and the introduction of frigid conceits and quibbles, to the ruin of true sublimity and pathos. His tendency was to banish from poetry everything that would not be approved of by sober reason. In some points his principles of criticism were better than his practice. He laid down that "in order to make a true estimate of the abilities and merits of a writer, it is always necessary to examine the genius of his age and the opinions of his contemporaries." But this was a perfection-height of critical qualification that indolence would not suffer himself to attain. He wrote his notes on Shakspeare without

having read a single one of the contemporary dramatists. He had plenty of time, but he preferred to indulge his appetite for social talk and desultory reading. Sometimes, too, he laid down principles that he broke habitually in his own composition. He satirised plays "where declamation roars and passion sleeps"; yet his own Irene' belongs to the category. He condemned the practice of filling out the sound of a period with unnecessary words. It is but fair to say that in later life he recognised his own faults. On one occasion, when some person read his Irene' aloud, he left the room, saying he did not think it had been so bad; and in his 'Lives of the Poets' he tried hard to work himself out of the sonorous grandiloquence of the 'Rambler.'

ELEMENTS OF STYLE.

Vocabulary.-Johnson's memory for words, and consequent command of language, was amazing. In this respect he stands in the very first rank. One might suppose, from what is usually said concerning the great preponderance of Latin words in his diction, that he failed in command of homelier language; but this is a mistake. His 'Rambler' is highly Latinised; but in his Preface to Shakspeare, 1768, we trace the beginnings of a homelier style. In his 'Lives of the Poets' the style is not so Latinised as the average style of the present day. The proportion of Latin words is not above half as great as in a leader of the 'Times.' He is often studiously homely, and shows a perfect command of homely diction. Perhaps the less pompous diction of his latest productions is partly a result of his great practice in conversation. As we have just said, he was conscious of the blemish in his 'Rambler,' and endeavoured to amend.

As an example of studied variety of expression, take the following comparison between punch and conversation :

"The spirit, volatile and fiery, is the proper emblem of vivacity and wit; the acidity of the lemon will very aptly figure pungency of raillery and acrimony of censure: sugar is the natural representative of luscious adulation and gentle complaisance; and water is the proper hieroglyphic of easy prattle, innocent and tasteless."

Sentences and Paragraphs.—The often-remarked mannerism of Johnson's sentences does not consist in one particular, but in the combination of several.

In

(1.) The frequent use of the balance structure. He employs liberally all the arts of balance both in sound and in sense. the Lives of the Poets' he is much less elaborate and sonorous in his balances than in the 'Rambler.' In the following sentence from the Rambler' there are five different balances :

"It is easy to laugh at the folly of him who refuses immediate ease for

distant pleasure, and instead of enjoying the blessings of life, lets life glide away in preparations to enjoy them; it affords such opportunities of triumphant exultation, to exemplify the uncertainty of the human state, to rouse mortals from their dream, and inform them of the silent celerity of time, that we may believe authors willing rather to transmit than examine so advantageous a principle, and more inclined to pursue a track so smooth and so flowery, than attentively to consider whether it leads to truth.

In the Lives of the Poets' there are few sentences of such sonorous amplitude. In this later work balances are numerous; but, on the whole, it may be said that there the cadence is more varied, and that we have a greater proportion of curt, short sentences and balances, in the following emphatic form :—

"Observation daily shows that much stress is not to be laid on hyperbolical accusations and pointed sentences, which even he that utters them desires to be applauded rather than credited."

Such balances as the following are very common"If his jests are coarse, his arguments are strong;" ""too judicious to commit faults, but not sufficiently vigorous to attain excellence;" "his figures neither divert by distortion, nor amaze by exaggeration;" "however exalted by genius, or enlarged by study."

(2.) Short comprehensive sentences. These appear plentifully in all his works, but, partly from the nature of the subject, are especially plentiful in the Lives of the Poets.' The following short passage is a fair illustration :

:

"In the poetical works of Swift, there is not much upon which the critic can exercise his powers. They are often humorous, almost always light, and have the qualities which recommend such compositions, easiness and gaiety. They are, for the most part, what their author intended. The diction is correct, the numbers are smooth, and the rhymes exact. There seldom occurs a hard-laboured expression, or a redundant epithet; all his verses exemplify his own definition of a good style; they consist of 'proper words in proper places.'

(3.) One of the most striking mannerisms in Johnson's composition belongs strictly to the paragraph-to the arrangement of sentences rather than the arrangement of clauses. He has a habit of abruptly introducing a general principle before the particular circumstances that it applies to. We have remarked this as a peculiarity in Macaulay's style. If Johnson did not originate this form of composition, he was at least the first to bring it into prominence. After him it was extensively adopted. Macaulay is hitherto his most celebrated imitator.

The following passage concerning Cowley is an example of his abrupt introduction of general principles. It exemplifies also a cognate practice of abruptly bringing in a person or thing con trasted or compared with the subject of the discourse :

"In the year 1647, his Mistress' was published; for he imagined, as he declared in a preface to a subsequent edition, that 'poets are scarcely

thought freemen of their company, without paying some duties, or obliging themselves to be true to love.'

"This obligation to amorous ditties owes, I believe, its orginal to the fame of Petrarch, who, in an age rude and uncultivated, by his tuneful homage to his Laura, refined the manners of the lettered world, and filled Europe with love and poetry. But the basis of all excellence is truth: he that professes love ought to feel its power. Petrarch was a real lover, and Laura doubtless deserved his tenderness. Of Cowley we are told by Barnes, who had means enough of information, that, whatever he may talk of his own inflammability, and the variety of characters by which his heart was divided, he in reality was in love but once, and then never had resolution to tell his passion.

"This consideration cannot but abate in some measure the reader's esteem for the works and the author. To love excellence is natural; it is natural likewise for the lover to solicit reciprocal regard by an elaborate display of his own qualifications. The desire of pleasing has in different men produced actions of heroism, and effusions of wit; but it seems as reasonable to appear the champion as the poet of an airy nothing,' and to quarrel as to write for what Cowley might have learned from his master Pindar to call the dream of a shadow.""

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To make up what is called the "Johnsonian manner," "Johnsonese," we must take not only these striking peculiarities of sentence-structure, but certain other peculiarities, especially a peculiar use of the abstract noun, and vigorous comprehensive brevity. Macaulay's sentence-structure is modelled in a considerable degree upon Johnson's, yet the resemblance is not at first so striking, because Macaulay is a concrete and diffuse writer, whereas Johnson is extremely abstract and condensed.

Figures of Speech. — Similitudes. Our author's prose is not ornate. He studies condensed expression rather than embellishment or illustration. None of our great prose writers is so sparing of similitudes. In the 'Rambler' there are pages that contain hardly a single metaphor.

The few similitudes that he does use are in harmony with the general loftiness of his style. Thus, Imlac is represented as saying to Rasselas

"The world, which you figure to yourself smooth and quiet as the lake in the valley, you will find a sea foaming with tempests, and boiling with whirlpools; you will be sometimes overwhelmed by the waves of violence, and sometimes dashed against the rocks of treachery."

Again, writing of the subversion of the Roman Empire by the Northern barbarians, he says that had America then been discovered, and navigation sufficiently advanced, "the intumescence of nations would have found its vent, like all other expansive vio lences, where there was least resistance.”

Allegory. There are several allegories in the 'Rambler' on the model of the allegories in the 'Spectator.' One in the 'Rambler' on "Wit and Learning" is the model of Dr Campbell's allegory on "Probability and Plausibility," examined minutely in the Ap

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