himself and the truth. He has what Rousseau calls 'that rarest kind of philosophy which consists in observing what we see every day1;' and he looks at it just as steadily whether it gives him pleasure or pain. He belongs to the most accurate class of the observers of human nature, for he never confounds what is with what ought to be. Happiness is not, he maintains, the unfailing consequence of virtue. 'We do not always suffer by our crimes; we are not always protected by our innocence".' He never throws the veil of the poet or the moralist over the evils of life. He will not allow either his hopes or his fears to fool his reason. He 'lays no flattering unction to his soul.' He may be suspended over the abyss of eternal perdition only by the thread of life3;' but great though is his terror he cannot cheat himself. The most that he can do is to turn his mind from constantly dwelling on mortality. 'The whole of life,' he said, 'is but keeping away the thoughts of death;' but when he does think his 'obstinate rationality 5' will not allow him to flatter his soul. That there is no Hell he would have admitted was a matter for argument, though in all likelihood he would have refused to allow it to be argued in his presence. But that there is a hell, and that it need not be the constant object of our terror, he would have 'passionately and loudly"> denied. To the evils of this life he refuses to shut his eyes. Poverty he steadily maintains is a great evil. He likes Crabbe's Village because the poet never varnishes rustic vice and rustic misery, but

'paints the cot

As truth will paint it, and as bards will not?.

He dislikes all affectation, all 'studied behaviour.' He is the great lexicographer, the great moralist, the 'Guide,

Philosopher, and Friend',' 'the majestic teacher of moral and religious wisdom,' 'awful, melancholy, and venerables'; yet 'his throne of felicity is a tavern chair'.' He never acts up to a part. 'I never considered,' he says, 'whether I should be a grave man, or a merry man, but just let inclination for the time have its course.' In Fleet-street, in the silence of the night, he bursts into such a fit of laughter that he has to cling to a post for support. At Langton he lays himself on the ground, and has a roll down a steep hill'. In a stage-coach he at once begins to talk without reserveR. 'Great Kings,' he said, 'were always social".' He, 'the monarch of literature,' was as social as the greatest among them. 'Let a man,' he says, 'be aliis laetus, sapiens sibi. You may be wise in your study in the morning, and gay in company at a tavern in the evening. Every man is to take care of his own wisdom and his own virtue, without minding too much what others think1o' He was the most humorous of men, 'incomparable at buffoonery,' full of 'fun and comical humour, and love of nonsense.' His 'laugh was irresistible 11' 'He gives you,' says Garrick, 'a forcible hug, and shakes laughter out of you, whether you will or no12? He spends a whole night in festivity at a tavern, to do honour to an authoress's 'first literary child.' He orders 'a magnificent hot apple-pie and has it stuck with bay-leaves.' He 'invokes the muses by some ceremonies of his own invention, and encircles her brows with a crown of laurel.' At five in the morning 'his face still shines with meridian splendour.' He 'rallies the company to partake of a second refreshment of coffee,' and it is near eight

12

5 Ib. i. 470.

8 Ib. iv. 284.

2 Ib. i. 201.

11 Пb. ii. 262 n. 2.

8 Ib. ii. 262. • Ib. ii. 262.

9 Ib. i. 442. 12 Ib. ii. 231.

o'clock

o'clock before he goes home to bed'. He gets up at three on a summer morning 'to have a frisk' with those young dogs, Beauclerk and Langton, and joins in drinking 'a bowl of that liquor called Bishop which he had always liked". With this entire absence of all 'studied behaviour' he combines the most 'inflexible dignity of characters' Perhaps there never was a man more entirely free from what is known in this age as 'snobbishness.' In the days of his poverty his clothes might be little better than a beggar's, and his chairs might have lost a leg; but no external circumstances ever prompted him to make an apology, or to seem even sensible of their existence1.' He reproaches Mrs. Thrale with her 'despicable dread of living in the Borough"."

It is this freedom from affectation which gives such weight and such interest to his criticisms. He has none of 'the cant of those who judge poetry by principles rather than perception®. He is never afraid to speak what he holds to be the truth, however great may be the author whom he reviews. When George III asked Miss Burney whether 'there was not sad stuff in Shakespeare,' he added:-'I know it is not to be said, but it's true. Only it's Shakespeare, and nobody dare abuse him"." There was no author whom Johnson dared not criticise with honest boldness. 'A quibble,' he writes, "was to Shakespeare the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it' No one has bestowed loftier praise on Milton than Johnson, no one has done him more 'illustrious justice". He speaks of him as 'that poet whose works may possibly be read when every other monument

of British greatness shall be obliterated'.' Yet of Paradise Lost he writes, 'None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and over-burdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions. This truth, if it be a truth, most men would have hidden from themselves, and all other critics would have hidden from the world. Nowhere does his dislike of affectation show itself more strongly than when he finds it among authors. Whether it takes the form of allegories, or visions, or pastorals, whether it shows itself in the idle attempt to revive a diction which has become obsolete, it equally meets with his scorn. In every shape he attacks it as 'a fashion by which idleness is favoured and imbecility assisted". His criticisms are often wanting in insight, but they are at all events his own. Among the servile herd of imitators he is never found.

He is no lover of singularity. "There is in human nature,' he says, 'a general inclination to make people stare, and every wise man has himself to cure of it, and does cure himself ".' He is not ashamed to own his natural feelings. Carlyle says of him that he 'prized Fame as the means of getting him employment and good wages; scarcely as anything more "." Johnson would never have said this of himself, for it was not true. On the contrary he describes fame as that 'which no man, however high or mean, however wise or ignorant, was yet able to despise"? 'The applause of a single human being is of great consequence' he said, when a letter was read to

1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, i. 230.

3 The Rambler, No. 121.

2 Works, vii. 135.

✦ 'O imitatores, servum pecus.' Horace i. Epistles xix, 19.

5 Boswell's Life of Johnson, ii. 74.

6 Carlyle's Miscellanies, ed. 1872, iv. 114.

"The Rambler, No. 151.

him that was highly in his praise 1. Praise from those who were entitled to give it was as pleasant to him as it is to all 'He loved it,' says Boswell, 'when it was brought

men.

to him; but was too proud to seek for it 2.'

He makes us see 'the shame of imposing words for ideas upon ourselves or others 3. He clears our mind of cant. We may talk foolishly, but we are not to think foolishly*. To use Sir Joshua Reynolds's striking words; 'he brushes the rubbish from our minds 5.' Against no kind of cant is he severer than against 'the cant of sensibility"? We do not feel for the distresses of others as we feel for our own. 'It would be misery to no purpose". Who 'eats a slice of plum-pudding the less because a friend is hanged 9 ?' We are not to be duped' by those who lay claim to this excess of sympathy. You will find these very feeling people are not very ready to do you good. They pay you by feeling"! He distinguishes between 'inexcusable lies and consecrated lies.' The news arrives of some great battle lost. 'Every heart,' we read, 'beats, and every eye is in tears. Now we know that no man eats his dinner the worse, but there should have been all this concern; and to say there was may be reckoned a consecrated lie 1o? Perhaps he nowhere better exhibits his rough common sense than in these frequent appeals to appetite as a measure of feeling. Author though he is, he has no respect for the cant of authors' in their affected contempt of critics. He attacks the 'despicable cant of literary modesty 12' He scorns Pope for feigning a 'contempt of his own poetry 13,' and Swift for his 'affectation of