difficult undertaking; they have, however, so much power, that they will not suffer him to lie quite at rest, and though they do not make him sufficiently useful to others, they make him at least weary of himself.

"Mr. Sober's chief pleasure is conversation; there is no end of his talk or his attention; to speak or to hear is equally pleasing; for he still fancies that he is teaching or learning something, and is free for the time from his own reproaches.

"But there is one time at night when he must go home, that his friends may sleep; and another time in the morning, when all the world agrees to shut out interruption. These are the moments of which poor Sober trembles at the thought. But the misery of these tiresome intervals, he has many means of alleviating. He has persuaded himself that the manual arts are undeservedly overlooked; he has observed in many trades the effects of close thought, and just ratiocination. From speculation he proceeded to practice, and supplied himself with the tools of à carpenter, with which he mended his coal-box very successfully, and which he still continues to employ as he finds occasion.

"He has attempted at other times the crafts of the shoemaker, tinman, plumber, and potter; in all these arts he has failed, and resolves to qualify

But his

himself for them by better information. daily amusement is chemistry. He has a small furnace, which he employs in distillation, and which has long been the solace of his life. He draws oils, and waters, and essences, and spirits, which he knows to be of no use; sits and counts the drops as they come from his retort; and forgets that whilst a drop is falling, a moment flies

away.

"Poor Sober! I have often teazed him with reproof, and he has often promised reformation; for no man is so much open to conviction as the Idler, but there is none on whom it operates so little. What will be the effect of this paper I know not; perhaps he will read it, and laugh, and light the fire in his furnace; but my hope is, that he will quit his trifles, and betake himself to rational and useful diligence."

To these specimens of character and humour may be added No 39, the Bracelet, the last paragraph of which contains some very severe political satire and allusions; N° 47, the City-Wit; N° 49, Marvel's Journey, an excellent example of solemn irony; Nos. 60 and 61, Dick Minim the critic; Nos. 62 and 64, Tim Ranger's account of the vanity of riches; N° 71, Dick Shifter's rural excursion; Nos. 78 and 83, the Club; and No 100, the Good Sort of Woman.

The great, however, the prevailing excellence of the Rambler, depends upon its moral and religious tendency; upon the vigour and originality of style and manner with which it inculcates the purest precepts of practical virtue. An entire system of ethics, and many of the most important duties of christianity, may be readily drawn from the pages of this work.

It would be difficult indeed to discover, in our language, any production where the vices and the virtues are depicted with equal eloquence, with equal distinctness and force of colouring. The workings of the human heart, the principles which usually influence the mind of man, were, to a great degree, laid bare to the comprehensive intellect of Johnson. Few, like him, have been able to detect the various disguises which guilt assumes, in order to conceal, not only from the view of others, but from itself, its own turpitude and horror; and few, if any, like him, have clothed in such pointed, nervous, and splendid diction, the persuasives to mutual forgiveness, to active benevolence, and unostentatious piety.

The natural bias of our author's mind, and the privations to which he had been subjected for the greater portion of his life, almost unavoidably inclined him to dwell upon the serious and even awful circumstances of existence. This has given

a severer and more didactic tone to his essays than will be found in any other periodical work, and at first indeed considerably checked its popularity; a feature of which he was very sensible, and to which he has himself alluded in the concluding essay of the Rambler. "As it has been my principal design," he remarks, "to inculcate wisdom or piety, I have allotted few papers to the idle sports of imagination. Some, perhaps, may be found, of which the highest excellence is harmless merriment; but scarcely any man is so steadily serious as not to complain, that the severity of dictatorial instruction has been too seldom relieved, and that he is driven by the sternness of the Rambler's philosophy to more cheerful and airy companions."

A more weighty, however, and to a certain extent, a well-founded charge, has been brought against the Rambler, for representing human life under a more gloomy and melancholy aspect than the real state of our existence can warrant. this tendency he was himself so much aware, that in N° 109 he has ridiculed with good-humoured pleasantry his own desponding cast of temper.

Of

This clouded view of life, and the consequent exaggeration of its infelicities, arose, in a great measure, from that morbid melancholy, which, as we have already related, very early broke in upon

the happiness which he might otherwise have enjoyed. Solitude, poverty, and neglect contributed, likewise, to aggravate the defect of constitution, and both gave origin to the following gloomy creed: "that life is miserable we all feel to hope happiness and immortality is equally vain. Our state may, indeed, be more or less embittered, as our duration may be more or less contracted: yet the utmost felicity which we can ever attain, will be little better than alleviation of misery, and we shall always feel more pain from our wants than pleasure from our enjoyments.'

To the passage distinguished by italics in this quotation, there are few, I trust, who can give credit; for, though great or long-continued happiness be unattainable in our present state of existence, the comforts and enjoyments of life are surely something more than the mere negation of misery. But Johnson, in fact, instead of painting the sum of good and evil, as it is apportioned to the million, was too often engaged in depicting his own feelings; and those, unhappily for himself, were frequently the result of diseased association. With due allowance, however, for the sombre tinting originating from this source, and which he has generally taken care to alleviate by the consolatory prospects of another and a better Rambler, No. 165.