when the manner, though vicious, is natural. Few readers, for example, would be willing to part with the mannerism of Milton or of Burke. But a mannerism which does not sit easy on the mannerist, which has been adopted on principle, and which can be sustained only by constant effort, is always offensive. And such is the mannerism of Johnson.

The characteristic faults of his style are so familiar to all our readers, and have been so often burlesqued, that it is almost superfluous to point them out. It is well known that he made

less use than any other eminent writer of those strong plain words, Anglo-Saxon or Norman-French, of which the roots lie in the inmost depths of our language; and that he felt a vicious partiality for terms which, long after our own speech had been fixed, were borrowed from the Greek and Latin, and which, therefore, even when lawfully naturalised, must be considered as born aliens, not entitled to rank with the king's English. His constant practice of padding out a sentence with useless epithets, till it became as stiff as the bust of an exquisite, his antithetical forms of expression, constantly employed even where there is no opposition in the ideas expressed, his big words wasted on little things, his harsh inversions, so widely different from those graceful and easy inversions which give variety, spirit, and sweetness to the expression of our great old writers, all these peculiarities have been imitated by his admirers and parodied by his assailants, till the public has become sick of the subject.

Goldsmith said to him, very wittily and very justly, "If you were to write a fable about little fishes, doctor, you would make the little fishes talk like whales." 1 No man surely ever had so little talent for personation as Johnson. Whether he wrote in the character of a disappointed legacy-hunter or an empty town fop, of a crazy virtuoso or a flippant coquette, he wrote in the same pompous and unbending style. His speech, like Sir Piercy Shafton's Euphuistic eloquence, bewrayed him under every disguise. Euphelia and Rhodoclea talk as finely as Imlac the poet, or Seged, Emperor of Ethiopia.2 The gay Cornelia describes her reception at the country-house of her relations, in such terms as these: "I was surprised, after the civilities of my first reception, to find, instead of the leisure and tranquillity which a rural life always promises, and, if well conducted, might always afford, a confused wildness of care, and a tumultuous hurry of diligence, by which every face was clouded, and every motion agitated." 2 Rambler, Nos. 42, 46, 62.

Boswell, ii., 231 (year 1773).

3 Ibid., No. 51.

The gentle Tranquilla informs us, that she "had not passed the earlier part of life without the flattery of courtship, and the joys of triumph; but had danced the round of gaiety amidst the murmurs of envy and the gratulations of applause, had been attended from pleasure to pleasure by the great, the sprightly, and the vain, and had seen her regard solicited by the obsequiousness of gallantry, the gaiety of wit, and the timidity of love." 1 Surely Sir John Falstaff himself did not wear his petticoats with a worse grace. The reader may well cry out, with honest Sir Hugh Evans, "I like not when a 'oman has a great peard: I spy a great peard under her muffler." 2

We had something more to say. But our article is already too long; and we must close it. We would fain part in good humour from the hero, from the biographer, and even from the editor, who, ill as he has performed his task, has at least this claim to our gratitude, that he has induced us to read Boswell's book again. As we close it, the club-room is before us, and the table on which stands the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons for Johnson. There are assembled those heads which live for ever on the canvass of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of Burke and the tall thin form of Langton, the courtly sneer of Beauclerk and the beaming smile of Garrick, Gibbon tapping his snuff-box and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up, the gigantic body, the huge massy face, seamed with the scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the grey wig with the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the "Why, sir!" and the "What then, sir?" and the "No, sir!" and the "You don't see your way through the question, sir!"

What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man! To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion. To receive from his contemporaries that full homage

Rambler, No. 119.

* Merry Wives of Windsor," act iv., scene 2.

AUTHOR'S FOOTNOTE.-It is proper to observe that this passage bears a very close resemblance to a passage in the Rambler (No. 20). The resemblance may possibly be the effect of unconscious plagiarism.

3 Christopher Nugent, died in 1775, a physician and Burke's father-in-law, was one of the original members of the Literary Club, and, being a Roman Catholic, took an omelette at the Friday dinners (Boswell, i., p. 477; Mrs. Piozzi, Anecdotes, p. 122).

which men of genius have in general received only from posterity! To be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries! That kind of fame which is commonly the most transient is, in his case, the most durable. The reputation of those writings, which he probably expected to be immortal, is every day fading; while those peculiarities of manner and that careless table-talk the memory of which, he probably thought, would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.

WE

JOHN HAMPDEN

DECEMBER, 1831

NOTE ON THE ESSAY

E see in this essay the boldness with which Macaulay deserted his nominal subject to write about something which was to him more interesting or of which he had more knowledge. He drops Lord Nugent as quickly as courtesy will allow, and even passes lightly over the personal history of Hampden in order to set forth once more his general conception of the conflict between Charles I. and his Parliaments. Much that he had already said in his review of Hallam's Constitutional History he repeats here with little change of form and less of substance. The reader scarcely needs to be reminded that Macaulay had not made a minute study of the period, concerning which he only knew what could be found in books published down to that time, or that he interpreted its history too much according to the political sympathies and antipathies of the nineteenth century. This bias has induced him to overrate the political insight even of such a man as Hampden, and still more Hampden's power to master the forces which then convulsed England. We have no reason to think that Hampden foresaw the Revolution settlement in Church and State. We have every reason to doubt whether a man capable of such prevision would have gained the ear of his contemporaries. We may say with much plausibility that Hampden, like Pym, died at a moment happy for his own reputation. The immediate duty appointed to him, the difficult and dangerous duty of making a firm stand against the rapidly encroaching authority of the Crown, Hampden had performed with a temper, a dignity, a disinterestedness, a serene courage which place him in the foremost rank of great Englishmen, and ensure for him the respect and gratitude of men in all ages and countries who value rational freedom and the reign of law. The rest was to be brought about by time, by experience, by the exhaustion of hostile parties, by the slow diversion of the human mind to other than theological interests. So far as Macaulay fails to hit the mark he errs not in honouring Hampden as a public man, but in ascribing to Hampden too many of the ideas of modern liberalism. The best corrective will be found in Professor Gardiner's laborious studies of the Long Parliament and in Mr. Firth's admirable "Life of Hampden" in the Dictionary of National Biography.