who shared his early hardships, we should probably find that what we call his singularities of manner were, for the most part, failings which he had in common with the class to which he belonged. He eat at Streatham Park, as he had been used to eat behind the screen at St. John's Gate,2 when he was ashamed to show his ragged clothes. He eat as it was natural that a man should eat, who, during a great part of his life, had passed the morning in doubt whether he should have food for the afternoon. The roughness and violence which he showed in society were to be expected from a man whose temper, not naturally gentle, had been long tried by the bitterest calamities,- by the want of meat, of fire, and of clothes; by the importunity of creditors; by the insolence of booksellers; by the derision of fools; by the insincerity of patrons; by that bread which is the bitterest of all food; by those stairs which are the most toilsome of all paths; by that deferred hope which makes the heart sick.

3

Through all these things the ill-dressed, coarse, ungainly pedant had struggled manfully up to eminence

1 Streatham Park. Johnson's a man very happy t'other day.'friends, the Thrales, lived at Streat-How could that be?' says Harte; ham.

2 St. John's Gate. The allusion to St. John's Gate, where Mr. Cave the publisher resided, is explained in the following note to Boswell's Johnson: "Soon after Savage's Life was published, Mr. Harte dined with Edward Cave, and occasionally praised it. Soon after, meeting him, Cave said, 'You made

'nobody was there but ourselves.' Cave answered by reminding hin that a plate of victuals was sent behind a screen, which was to Johnson, dressed so shabbily that he did not choose to appear; but on hearing the conversation, he was highly delighted with the encomiums on his book."

3 those stairs. What figure?

and command. It was natural, that in the exercise of his power, though his heart was undoubtedly generous and humane, his demeanor in society should be harsh and despotic. For severe distress he had sympathy, and not only sympathy but munificent relief. But for the suffering which a harsh world inflicts upon a delicate mind, he had no pity; for it was a kind of suffering which he could scarcely conceive. He would carry home on his shoulders a sick and starving girl from the streets. He turned his house into a place of refuge for a crowd of wretched old creatures who could find no other asylum; nor could all their peevishness and ingratitude weary out his benevolence. But the pangs of wounded vanity seemed to him ridiculous, and he scarcely felt sufficient compassion even for the pangs of wounded affection. He had seen and felt so much of sharp misery, that he was not affected by paltry vexations; and he seemed to think that everybody ought to be as much hardened to those vexations as himself.

He was angry with Boswell for complaining of a headache, with Mrs. Thrale for grumbling about the dust on the road or the smell of the kitchen. These were, in his phrase, "foppish lamentations," which people ought to be ashamed to utter in a world so full of sin and sorrow. Goldsmith crying because The Good-natured Man 2 had failed, inspired him with no

1 Boswell. biographer.

Johnson's famous | catastrophe. On the evening of the first performance, Goldsmith, 2 The Good-natured Man. This to use his own expression, suffered play by Goldsmith, when placed on "horrid tortures," and ended by the stage in 1768, had a run of only bursting into tears, and swearing ten nights, and narrowly escaped a ❘ that he never would write again.

pity. Though his own health was not good, he detested and despised valetudinarians. Pecuniary losses, unless they reduced the loser absolutely to beggary, moved him very little. People whose hearts had been softened by prosperity might weep, he said, for such events; but all that could be expected of a plain man was not to laugh. He was not much moved even by the spectacle of Lady Tavistock dying of a broken heart for the loss of her lord. Such grief he considered as a luxury reserved for the idle and the wealthy. A washerwoman, left a widow with nine small children, would not have sobbed herself to death.

The judgments which Johnson passed on books were, in his own time, regarded with superstitious veneration, and in our time are generally treated with indiscriminate contempt. They are the judgments of a strong but enslaved understanding. The mind, of the critic was hedged round by an uninterrupted fence of prejudices and superstitions. His whole code of criticism rested on pure assumption, for which he sometimes quoted a precedent or an authority, but rarely troubled himself to give a reason drawn from the nature of things.

He took it for granted that the kind of poetry which flourished in his own time, which he had been accustomed to hear praised from his childhood, and which he had himself written with success, was the best kind of poetry. In his biographical work he has repeatedly laid it down as an undeniable proposition, that during the latter part of the seventeenth century, and the earlier part of the eighteenth, English poetry had been

in a constant progress of improvement. Waller,1 Denham, Dryden, and Pope had been, according to him, the great reformers. He judged of all works of the imagination, by the standard established among his own contemporaries. Though he allowed Homer to have been a greater man than Virgil, he seems to have thought the Eneid a greater poem than the Iliad.5 Indeed, he well might have thought so; for he preferred Pope's Iliad to Homer's. He could see no merit in our fine old English ballads, and always spoke with the most provoking contempt of Percy's fondness for them. Of the great original works of imagination which appeared during his time, Richardson's novels alone excited his admiration. He could see little or no merit in Tom Jones, in Gulliver's Travels, or in Tristram Shandy. To Thomson's Castle of Indolence, he vouchsafed only a line of cold commendation. Gray was, in his dialect, a barren rascal. Churchill was a blockhead. The contempt which he felt for the trash

1 Waller. Edmund Waller (16051687), one of the metaphysical school of poetry admired by Johnson. Pope has this allusion to him:

3 Dryden. See pages 105, 106. 4 Eneid. Who was its author? 5 Iliad. Who was its author? 6 Percy. Dr. Thomas Percy (1728-1811) distinguished himself

"Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught by his publication of a great colto join lection called Reliques of English The varying pause, the full resound- Poetry, which rendered immense ing line,

service by showing the beauty and

The long majestic march, the energy power of many of the early ballads,

divine."

2 Denham. Sir John Denham (1615-1668) was another poet much commended in his day, and forgotten in ours.

songs, and other metrical pieces.

7 "a barren rascal." What a verdict to pass on the author of the Elegy written in a Country Churchyard!

of Macpherson1 was indeed just; but it was, we suspect, just by chance. He was undoubtedly an excellent judge of compositions fashioned on his own principles; but when a deeper philosophy was required, when he undertook to pronounce judgment on the works of those great minds which "yield homage only to eternal laws," his failure was ignominious. He criticised Pope's Epitaphs excellently; but his observations on Shakespeare's plays and Milton's poems seem to us, for the most part, as wretched as if they had been written by Rymer himself, whom we take to have been the worst critic that ever lived.

Johnson, as Mr. Burke most justly observed, appears far greater in Boswell's books than in his own. His conversation appears to have been quite equal to his writings in matter, and far superior to them in manner. When he talked, he clothed his wit and his sense in forcible and natural expressions. As soon as he took his pen in his hand to write for the public, his style became systematically vicious. All his books are written in a learned language, in a language which nobody hears from his mother or his nurse; in a language in which nobody ever quarrels, or drives bargains, or makes love; in a language in which nobody ever thinks.

It is clear that Johnson himself did not think in the dialect in which he wrote. The expressions which came

1 trash of Macpherson. James Macpherson, a Scotch doctor (17381796), published during Johnson's time two poems reputed to be translations from Gaelic originals by a certain " Ossian, son of Fingal."

Johnson pronounced these forgeries; but a more favorable view of Macpherson is now held.

2 When he talked ... vicious. Point out the antithetical terms. 8 dialect. Give a synonym.