not sorrowed over the miserable failings of some of the Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt, This uniformity in the main of character heightens still more the contrast which exists in the minor parts. It not only heightens it but it renders it far more pleasing. The most striking quality in Johnson was his wisdom, his knowledge of the whole art of life. Gibbon describes 'the majestic sense of Thurlow ?? If common sense can be thought of as invested with majesty, it is seen in all its stateliness much more in the dictionary-maker than in the great Lord Chancellor. But mere common sense would never have made Johnson all that he is to us. Benjamin Franklin had more common sense than the frame of any single man seems capable of containing or supporting. But who loves common sense when it stands alone? It must be dashed by the failings of men of like affections with ourselves. It must at times be crossed by the playful extravagances of a wayward humour. It must be joined not with a cold and calculating selfishness, but with a tenderness and a pity for those whose want of it has brought them to misery. No one understood better than Johnson the art by which we arrive at such happiness as life admits of; no one felt more compassion for those who, through the infirmity of will, failed to practise this art. It is perhaps this union of the strongest common sense and a real tenderness of heart that more than anything else endears him to men who are wide as the poles asunder. Macaulay did 1 Samson Agonistes, 1. 1721. 2 Gibbon's Miscellaneous Works, i. 222. not not delight in him more than did Carlyle, and Mr. Ruskin, I believe, would set him scarcely below the high level on which he is placed by the Master of Balliol. He Round about his common sense and his tenderness, and mingled with them in endless variety, his humour and his wit are ever playing. If he ever wearies us it is when he has a pen in his hand. When he speaks we wish that he could have gone on speaking for ever. He is wholly free from all affectation, all cynicism, all moroseness, all peevishness. is as far removed from the savageness of Swift, as from the querulous irritability of Carlyle. He never snarls and he never whines. He is never 'guilty of sullenness against nature'.' Life, he holds, is unhappy, it must be unhappy. But what of that? Something can be done to make it happier, and that something we must each one of us steadily do. The worst thing of all is to sit down and whine. It is of small things that life is made up, and it is in these small things, and in them alone, that we can find such happiness as we are allowed here on earth to attain. He would never have cried with Swift Vive la bagatelle, nor would he have applauded a life of conscious and intentional trifling. We are to attend to trifles, or those things which are accounted trifles, because it is of them, in all their variety and their multitude, that human existence is composed. 'Small sands the mountain, moments make the year, And trifles life'.' He accepts life as it is; 'he takes existence on the terms on which it is given to him. He never expects from life more than life can afford. He always refuses to hide from himself the real state of things. He puts up no screen between 1 Milton, quoted in Johnson's Dictionary under Sullenness. 2 Young, Love of Fame, satire vi. 3 Boswell's Life of Johnson, iii. 58. himself 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 life;' 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, 1 Morley's Life of Cobden, i. 308. • Ib. iv. 299. 2 Works, iv. 121. • Boswell's Life of Johnson, ii. 93. 7 Ib. iv. 175. 8 lb. i. 470. Philosopher, Philosopher, and Friend',' 'the majestic teacher of moral and religious wisdom", awful, melancholy, and venerable"; 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 reserve. '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 think1.' 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 no1?? 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 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 existence.' 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 |