either rank do in reality illustrate each other. For instance the affectation of high life appears more glaring and ridiculous from the simplicity of the low; and again, the rudeness and barbarity of this latter strikes with much stronger ideas of absurdity, when contrasted with, and opposed to, the politeness which controls the former. Besides, to say the truth, the manners of our historian will be improved by both these conversations; for in the one he will easily find examples of plainness, honesty, and sincerity; in the other of refinement, elegance, and a liberality of spirit; which last quality I myself have scarce ever seen in men of low birth and education.

Nor will all the qualities I have hitherto given my historian avail him, unless he have what is generally meant by a good heart, and be capable of feeling. The author who will make me weep, says Horace, must first weep himself. In reality, no man can paint a distress well which he doth not feel while he is painting it; nor do I doubt, but that the most pathetic and affecting scenes have been writ with tears. In the same manner it is with the ridiculous. I am convinced I never make my reader laugh heartily but where I have laughed before him; unless it should happen at any time, that instead of laughing with me he should be inclined to laugh at me. (From the Same.)

SAMUEL JOHNSON

[Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield in 1709, and after a desultory education in various schools, entered at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1728, but left in 1731, without taking his degree. After endeavouring for a time to gain his living as a schoolmaster, he came to London, and spent some years of exceeding hardship and direst poverty as a bookseller's hack. In 1735 he published a translation of Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia, and for some time contributed to the pages of the Gentleman's Magazine, writing the Debates in the Senate of Lilliput, which were intended to represent the speeches actually delivered, but not then reported, in the House of Commons. In 1738 he published London, an imitation of the third Satire of Juvenal; in 1749, his second conspicuous poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes, an imitation of the tenth Satire; and in the same year appeared Irene, a tragedy, which was brought out by his friend David Garrick, but was entirely unsuccessful. He had before this projected the Dictionary, the chief monument of that strenuous literary toil which he occasionally exerted, though naturally detesting it; and the work was accomplished in 1755. Meantime he had written the Rambler, a periodical series of essays from 1750 to 1752; had contributed to the Adventurer, and projected an edition of Shakespeare. In 1758 he wrote the Idler, another series of periodical essays; and in 1759, in feverish haste and under the pressure of poverty, he produced Rasselas. The grant of a pension of £300 a year soon after relieved him of the burden of poverty: he had achieved the rank of undisputed dictator in the world of letters, not only by his wide, though discursive, learning, but also by the force of his imposing personality and his conversational supremacy; and he became more and more averse to labour, both from constitutional bias and social occupation. intervened by many pamphlets in the political controversies of the day, and in 1780 completed the Lives of the Poets,-that one of his works which has stirred most of controversy, and has at the same time compelled most of admiration; written with the ease and vigour of one who drew only from his own resources of wide reading, bold and incisive critical faculty, and abundant humour, and who scorned the humbler methods of careful and minute research. He died in London in 1784.]

He

JOHNSON stands out pre-eminently as the one man for whom biography has done more than she has done for any other. By her help he is no mere name in literary history, but a personal

friend and aquaintance, whose strength and whose weakness we know by heart; whose picture is impressed upon us down to the smallest details with a vivid force. The powerful personality of the man, and the perfection of the portrait, have obscured the fame that properly belongs to him as an author; and the popular notion of his work is based upon little more than a superficial tradition, which is rarely corrected by any real familiarity with his writings. Johnson is conceived as a man of a pedantic turn of mind, cumbrous in his ideas and inflated in his diction; the slave of convention, the enemy of humour, dictatorial in argument, without tolerance for the graces of simplicity, and lacking all keenness of critical insight. It would be hard to conceive any picture more unlike the truth. Johnson rightly despised the easy triumph of paradox and eccentricity. He saw just as the best of the previous generation had seen-that excellence in literature must be based on form, and that its advances, to be sure, must be secured by rigid adherence to rule. The masters of English prose in the Augustan age had all of them protested against anarchy in literature, and with all their variety, they had been careful to claim for themselves no right to set convention at defiance. Dryden, Swift, and Addison had never permitted themselves to forget that English prose had to obey a certain law that was fixing on it more and more of order and regularity. They had, it is true, by their genius, breathed into that order and regularity their own force, and directness, and easy familiarity. But these last were the supreme effect of their own individual genius neither the impetuous flow of Dryden's prose, nor the easy lissomeness of Swift's, nor the delicate conversational tone of Addison's, could repeat or perpetuate themselves in English prose, and establish a common model for all time. What was necessary in the generation when Johnson wrote, was some commanding authority that might set a standard of prose style, that might establish its laws beyond all gainsaying, and that by the force of its own virility might compel obedience. This was just what Johnson did. It was hardly possible that this work could be done without occasional austerity. Prose that aimed at a certain formal sequence, that preserved an equable balance of clause against clause, that imposed a certain uniformity in the use of pronouns, and that sought to impress by clear and forcible antithesis, could not avoid formality. The mannerisms are apt to assume undue prominence, and lend themselves to imitation

and to parody. The popular impression ends there. It fancies that it has caught the trick of Johnson's style when it has. adopted a certain arrangement of pronouns, when it has marshalled the sentences in well-drilled parallels of antithetical clauses, when it has sprinkled the whole with sesquipedalian words, and given an air of pedantic solemnity to the treatment of the subject. This is to miss all that is really characteristic in Johnson's style. Our debt to him is twofold. In the first place, he preserved us against the inevitable triviality and feebleness that would have come from the imitation of Addison's prose by the ordinary writer, who had not the secret of Addison's genius, Had not such a dictator as Johnson arisen, English prose would inevitably have dwindled into decay, pleasing itself all the while with the fancy that it was repeating the subtle and inimitable achievements of the preceding generation. In the next place, he set a model which could be safely followed, and which was secure for a generation at least, against the intrusion of slipshod banality. For more than a generation after his death, the impression of his sovereignty remained; and it is not too much to say that no competent writer of prose since Johnson's day, has not, in spite of all diversities of genius, and in spite even of earnest resistance to his sway, owed much of such rhythm, and balance, and lucidity as he has attained, to the example and the model set by Johnson. In some of the authors who might least of all be supposed to accept his dictatorship, it will be interesting to trace examples of this unconscious influence, in the later pages of this selection.

When we turn to an examination of Johnson's own style, we shall find that its characteristics are very different from those of the parody which lives in the popular estimation. No man could better discard long words, and use more pithy English when he chose, than could Johnson. "Wit is that which he who hath never found it wonders how he missed;" such a sentence shows that Johnson could express himself tersely when it suited him to do so. Often the long words and the formal expression are adopted of a set purpose, which is humorous much more than pedantic. No man could assume a manner of greater ease and directness, and no one could achieve with more perfect art that most difficult of literary manœuvres, the introduction of a convenient but entirely irrelevant digression. We have only to turn over a few pages of the Lives of the Poets to see how a stinging