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more of poetry, he would have written better, or ever risen above mediocrity in the efforts of poetical talent. Of those higher qualifications of imagination and sensibility, which every true poet must possess, he was, as well as Johnson, utterly destitute; but he had not, like Johnson, a mind stored with a rich fund of poetical images, or a nice perception of harmony in sound, or melody in versification. His translations are merely the productions of a school-boy, and such productions as many a school-boy would be ashamed to own. seems to have possessed no ear attuned to the harmony of numbers-no fondness for the music of rhyme, or the march of periods. In this department of genius, therefore, he was utterly inferior to Johnson, who, if he did not possess the fine eye and highest exaltation of a poet, could clothe every subject he descanted upon with sonorous grandeur of verse, and gorgeous accompaniments of fancy.

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"In the beauty of style, and the ornaments of language, Johnson, it is well known, was most immeasurably superior. His writings have given an increase of correctness and purity, a transfusion of dignity and strength to our language, which is unexampled in the annals of literature, and which corrected, in their influence on our dialect, the diffused tameness of Addison, and the colloquialism of Swift. Whatever nearer approaches have been made to perfection in our language, have all been established on the foundation of his writings; and, perhaps, it would not be exceeding the bounds of justice to affirm, that more is due to him in the refinement of the English tongue, than to any man in any language or in any country, with the single exception of Cicero. If his own style itself is not the best model in our language, it is from it certainly that the best model must be formed; and whoever shall in the end attain that summit of perfection, it will be from the copious

fountain of Johnson that his materials must be supplied. Of the graces and elegancies of diction, Warburton, on the contrary, had no conception,-his thoughts were turned out in the dress which lay nearest to his hand; and often their multiplicity was too great to allow him time to find for each a proper and suitable covering of expression. To harmony in the structure of cadences, or splendour in the finishing of sentences, he was utterly void of pretension, and was, moreover, totally destitute of the power of selection or choice of words. Yet he cannot justly be accused of neglect or contempt of the beauties of style, for no one altered more incessantly, or altered to less purpose, than Warburton. In one of his letters he acknowledges, that there are many thousand corrections and alterations merely of language in the second edition of his Julian; and, to my own knowledge, there are no less than 20,000 verbal corrections in the several editions of his Divine Legation, almost every one of which has no other effect than to render that worse which before was bad. He compared himself, in his alterations, to the bear who licks into form its shapeless offspring; but, with little felicity of comparison, for his alterations, though they always bring down and reduce to tameness the original nervous force of the expression, have seldom the effect of adding to its elegance or removing its infirmities. Very different, in this respect, was Johnson's character in writing, who is, like Shakspeare, hardly ever known to have altered or corrected his productions after publication; and whose mastery of diction was such, that it immediately brought, at his command, the best and most appropriate language which his subject required. The answering powers of his expression were always exactly proportioned to the demand of his thought: there is never any incongruity of this kind perceptible in his writings; what he thought strongly, he could express forcibly

and well; and what he had once written became fixed, and fixed, because it was impossible for alteration to improve, or correction to amend it. The greatest fault, perhaps, in his style, is the want of flexibility-the want of variety adapted for every varying occasion; it was too uniform to alter-it was too stiff to bend-its natural tone was too high to admit of a graceful descentthe same was the expression, and the same the pompousness of language, whether he descanted as a moralist, or complained as an advertiser; whether he weighed in his balance the intellects of Shakspeare and Milton, or denounced, with threats of punishment, against the person or persons, unknown, who had pirated a paper of his Idler. In Warburton's diction, which was uniformly faulty, it is needless to expatiate on any particular faults; we may, however, mention, that it was overrun with foreign idioms, and exotic phraseology, and that it particularly abounds in Gallicisms, which almost disgrace every sentence. In both, the style doubtless took its tincture from the peculiar complexion of their minds; and while in the one it swelled into majestic elegance and dignified strength, in the other it broke out into uncouth harshness and uncultivated force.

"In extent of learning, in profundity and depth of erudition, Warburton may justly claim the superiority. Nothing more illustrates the different characters of these great men, than the different manner in which their reading was applied. In Johnson, acquired learning became immediately transmuted into mind-it immediately was consubstantiated with its receiver; it did not remain dormant, like a dull and inert mass in the intellect, unaltered and unalterable, but entered, if I may use the expression, into the very core and marrow of the mind, and became a quality and adjunct of the digestive power; it was instantaneously concocted into intellectual chyle-his mind had more the quality of a

grinding engine than a receiver; every particle it absorbed became instinct with vital life-like the power of flame it consumed all approximating substances. In Warburton, the power of digestion was certainly disproportioned to the insatiability of appetite,-what he could not retain, he was therefore obliged immediately again to eject, and he did again eject it, but not in its received and original state, but altered in its outward form and semblance, and mouldered up into some glittering and fantastical hypothesis, some original and more alluring shape, as different from its first condition as is the crawling caterpillar from the butterfly which expands its golden wings in the air. The defects of his digestive faculty were amply supplied by his power of assimilation, which, spider-like, had the faculty of weaving innumerable webs and phantasms out of the matter which was presented to it, and disguising and recasting into some other outward appearance those morsels which were too hard to retain, and too ponderous to swallow. Such, indeed, was the voracity of his appetite, that he refused nothing which offered itself; and the wide gulf of his intellectual appetite often reminds us of the boa constrictor, after it has swallowed the rhinoceros, as it lies in gorged and torpid fulness, stretched out in all its giant-length on the ground. This difference in the perception and application of knowledge was distinguishable in every production of these great men; it is perceptible from their earlier works to their latest; and being occasioned by the peculiar construction and formation of their mental faculties, it formed the character of their minds; and, therefore, continued, without receiving alteration, from their first years of authorship to their last. In Johnson, therefore, learning, when received, might more properly be called knowledge, it was stripped of its superfluous and unnecessary parts— it was winnowed of its chaff, and deposited in the re

ceptacles of thought, while, in Warburton, it was like clay thrown into a mould ready prepared for it, for the purpose of forming materials for building up to their measureless height the countless edifices of his fancy.

"In that practical knowledge of, and insight into human nature, which forms the chief qualification for the moralist and the writer on men and manners, Johnson was greatly superior to Warburton. The former had acquired his knowledge in the tutoring school of adversity; and the long and dreary probation he had to serve before he attained to competence and success, had given him a sound and piercing view into life and human nature; while the haughtiness of the latter formed a kind of circle about him, which prevented his mingling with the crowd, and deriving, by universal converse and acquaintance, an universal and comprehensive knowledge of man. He was also a more prejudiced and less unbiassed spectator of mankind, continually referring their causes of action, not to the acknowledged principles of experience, but to some preconceived and ready-fashioned theory of his own, with which he made every deduction to square in and quadrate, and to whose decision he referred the settlement of all the various anomalies and phenomena which distract the inquirer into human nature. Otherwise was the knowledge of Johnson formed: he was no speculatist in his views of mankind; what he had learned, he learned from practical experience; commented upon with extraordinary acuteness and penetration of discernment; and what he had once learned, his judgment was too sound to permit him to warp, and his love of truth too great to allow him to conceal:

"In private life, the character of Warburton was distinguished by the same kind of bold openness and unshrinking cordiality; the same livid warmth in his enmities and friendships; and the same impatient haugh

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