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he says, that we should be reduced to babble a dialect of France.

The reasons, however, which Johnson has himself assigned for the adoption of so many Latin polysyllables, are harmony and precision. "Where common words," he remarks, "were less pleasing to the ear, or less distinct in their signification, I have familiarized the terms of philosophy, by applying them to known objects and popular ideas; but have rarely admitted any word not authorized by former writers."* "Difference of thoughts," he observes in another place, ❝ will produce difference of language: he that thinks with more extent than another, will want words of larger meaning; he that thinks with more subtilty, will seek for terms of more nice discrimination."t

Had our author been writing on abstruse or scientific subjects, the use of Latin derivatives, and recondite philosophical terms, would readily, for the sake of minute precision, have been acceded to; but when composing popular essays, addressed to the unlearned as well as the learned, to the female as well as the male sex, English received words, of sufficient distinctness of signification and smoothness of sound, might certainly have been discovered without much labour or + Idler, No. 70.

*Rambler, No. 208.

research. To Johnson, who, while publishing his Ramblers, was at the same time busily engaged in the compilation of his Dictionary, the powers, the strength and melody of English words, must have been accurately familiar; he knew that our language, in its native wealth, had not sunk beneath our most sublime and energetic writers; and he has himself declared, that "few ideas would be lost to mankind, for want of English words, in which they might be expressed." In a periodical publication, therefore, the business of which is not to discuss the niceties of the casuist, but to direct the practice of common life,t surely, our great lexicographer would have shewn more judgment by an exquisite selection of terms purely and radically English, than by the intrusion of so many exotics, so many abstract substantives of Latin derivation.

"

It is not the occasional use of technical terms and foreign words, that we have reason to blame in the Rambler; it is the general tenor of the style that demands censure; the characteristic of which is, that every page, and almost every sentence, though the work was intended for popular instruction, is replete with abstract substantives taken from a learned language, and therefore unintelligible to mere English readers. To point * Preface to his Dictionary. + Vide Idler, No. 70.

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out any of these gigantic strangers were superfluous; nothing more is required than to open the volume.

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Next to the obscurity arising from this uniform preference of Latin derivatives, is the monotony with which it envelopes every character and subject introduced into the work. Each rank, age, sex, and occupation, speaks a similar language; a language, too, so far removed from simplicity, as frequently to throw an air of burlesque over what was intended to be serious and monitory. "All the correspondents of the Rambler," observes Mr. Burrowes, 66 seem infected with the same literary contagion, and the Johnsonian distemper "appears" to have been equally communicated to all. Thus Papilius talks of garrulity, erratic industry, and heterogeneous notions, dazzling the attention with sudden scintillations of conceit.' 'Victoria passes through the cosmetic discipline, covered with emollients, and punished with artificial excoriations.' Misocapelus tells of his 'officinal state, adhesions of trade, and ambulatory projects; and Hypertatus describes the 'flaccid sides of a foot-ball swelling out into stiffness and extension,' and talks of concentration of understanding, barometrical pneumatology,' and tenuity of a defecated air.' In such writings the hand of the master must be

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immediately perceived; the existence of the imaginary correspondents cannot even for a moment be believed; and the Rambler stands convicted of an ineffectual and unnecessary attempt to raise his own consequence by forging letters to himself.

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"The second occasion on which this fault is equally glaring, is where ordinary, or perhaps mean, subjects become necessary to be treated of; and a few instances from our author may well warrant my asserting that on such occasions, as he himself says less deservedly of Dr. Young,burlesque cannot go beyond him.' Thus a calamity which will not admit being complained of, is, in Johnson's language, such as will not justify the acerbity of exclamation, or support the solemnity of vocal grief:' to deny and to profess, are to pronounce the monosyllables of coldness and the sonorous periods of respectful profession: when the skillet is watched on the fire, we see it simmer with the due degree of heat, and snatch it off at the moment of projection: for sun-set, we read the gentle coruscations of declining day;' and for washing the face with exactness, we have, washing with oriental scrupulosity. Mean and vulgar expressions cannot have a more powerful recommendation, than that one of the ablest

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writers in the English language could only thus avoid them."

The Grammatical Inaccuracies of Johnson are but few; he was indeed, in the year 1750, by many degrees, the most correct writer that had then appeared in the language; and his example has had such influence on our literature, that scarcely an author of any authority is now to be found who is liable to censure for deficiencies with regard to grammar. It is, however, necessary, in proportion to the reputation which a writer has obtained, that his faults of this kind, although trivial, be accurately pointed out, in order to prevent inferior candidates for fame adopting the blemishes together with the beauties of genius. Nearly all the deviations from correct grammar that are discoverable in the pages of the Rambler, may be reduced to three heads; namely, the substitution of the imperfect tense for the perfect participle; the substitution of the indicative for the subjunctive mood, and the use of the plural verb with the disjunctive conjunction. Of these anomalies, I shall present the reader with a few instances in the order in which they have been enumerated.

*

1. Rambler, N° 1. "We are not condemned to

Essay on the Style of Dr. Johnson. Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. 1, for 1787.

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