times deficient in strength, yet always musical. His essays, in general, are on the surface of life; if ever original, it was in pieces of humour. Sir Roger de Coverly and the Tory Fox-hunter need not to be mentioned. Johnson had a fund of humour, but he did not know it: nor was he willing to descend to the familiar idiom and the variety of diction which that mode of composition required. Addison possessed an unclouded imagination, alive to the first objects of nature and of art. He reaches the sublime without any apparent effort. When he tells us, "If we consider the fixed stars as so many oceans of flame, that are each of them attended with a different set of planets; if we still discover new firmaments and new lights that are sunk farther in those unfathomable depths of ether, we are lost in a labyrinth of suns and worlds, and confounded with the magnificence and immensity of nature;" the ease with which this passage rises to unaffected grandeur, is the secret charm that captivates the reader. Johnson is always lofty; he seems, to use Dryden's phrase, to be o'er-informed with meaning, and his words do not appear to himself adequate to his conception. He moves in state, and his periods are always harmonious. His Oriental Tales are in the true style of Eastern magnificence, and yet none of them are so much admired as the Visions of Mirza. In matters of criticism, Johnson is never the echo of preceding writers. He thinks and decides for himself. If we except the essays on the Pleasures of Imagination, Addison cannot be called a philosophical critic. His moral essays are beautiful; but in that province nothing can exceed the Rambler, though Johnson used to say, that the Essay on the Burdens of Mankind (in the Spectator, No. 558) was the most exquisite he had ever read. Talking of himself, Johnson said, Topham Beauclerk has wit, and everything comes from him with ease; but when I say a good thing, I seem to labour."

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When we compare him with Addison, the contrast is still stronger. Addison lends grace and ornament to truth; Johnson gives it force and energy. Addison makes virtue amiable; Johnson represents it as an awful duty. Addison insinuates himself with an air of modesty; Johnson commands like a dictator; but a dictator in his splendid robes, not labouring at the plough. Addison is the Jupiter of Virgil, with placid serenity talking to Venus:

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'Vultu, quo cœlum tempestatesque serenat." Johnson is Jupiter tonans; he darts his lightning and rolls his thunder in the cause of virtue and piety. The language seems to fall short of ideas; he pours along, familiarizing the terms of philosophy with bold inversions and sonorous periods; but we may apply to him what Pope has said of Homer: "It is the sentiment that swells and fills out the diction, which rises with it, and forms itself about it; like glass in the furnace, which grows to a greater magnitude as the breath within is more powerful and the heat more intense."

It is not the design of this comparison to decide between these two eminent writers. In matters of taste every reader will choose for himself. Johnson is always profound, and, of course, gives the fatigue of thinking. Addison charms while he instructs; and writing, as he always does, a pure, an elegant, and idiomatic style, he may be pronounced the safest model for imitation.

The essays written by Johnson in the Adventurer may be called a continuation of the Rambler. The Idler, in order to be consistent with the assumed character, is written with abated vigour, in a style of ease and unlaboured elegance. It is the Odyssey after the Iliad. Intense thinking would not become the Idler. The first number presents a well-drawn portrait of an idler, and from that character no deviation could be made. Accordingly, Johnson forgets

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his austere manner, and plays us into sense. still continues his lectures on human life, but he adverts to common occurrences, and is often content with the topic of the day.

"Rasselas," says Sir John Hawkins, "is a specimen of our language scarcely to be paralleled; it is written in a style refined to a degree of immaculate purity, and displays the whole force of turgid eloquence." One cannot but smile at this encomium. Rasselas is undoubtedly both elegant and sublime. It is a view of human life, displayed, it must be owned, in gloomy colours. The author's natural melancholy, depressed, at the time, by the approaching dissolution of his mother, darkened the picture. A tale that should keep curiosity awake by the artifice of unexpected incidents, was not the design of a mind pregnant with better things. He who reads the heads of the chapters will find that it is not a course of adventures that invites him forward, but a discussion of interesting questions; Reflections on Human Life; the History of Imlac, the Man of Learning; a Dissertation upon Poetry; the Character of a wise and happy Man, who discourses with energy on the government of the passions, and, on a sudden, when Death deprives him of his daughter, forgets all his maxims of wisdom and the eloquence that adorned them, yielding to the stroke of affliction with all the vehemence of the bitterest anguish. It is by pictures of life and profound moral reflection that expectation is engaged and gratified throughout the work. The History of the Mad Astronomer, who imagines that, for five years, he possessed the regulation of the weather, and that the sun passed from tropic to tropic by his direction, represents in striking colours the sad effect of a distempered imagination. It becomes

the more affecting when we recollect that it proceeds from one who lived in fear of the same dreadful visitation; from one who says emphatically

"Of the uncertainties in our present state, the most dreadful and alarming is the uncertain continuance of reason." The inquiry into the cause of madness, and the dangerous prevalence of imagination, till in time some particular train of ideas fixes the attention, and the mind recurs constantly to the favourite conception, is carried on in a strain of acute observation; but it leaves us room to think that the au thor was transcribing from his own apprehensions. The discourse on the nature of the soul gives us all that philosophy knows, not without a tincture of superstition.

The Dictionary does not properly fall within the province of this essay. He who reads the close of the preface without acknowledging the force of the pathetic and sublime, must have more insensibility in his composition than usually falls to the share of a man. The work itself, though in some instances abuse has been loud, and in others malice has endeavoured to undermine its fame, still remains the MOUNT ATLAS of English literature.

"Though storms and tempests thunder on its brow,
And oceans break their billows at its feet,
It stands unmoved, and glories in its height."

That Johnson was eminently qualified for the office of a commentator on Shakspeare, no man can doubt; but it was an office which he never cor dially embraced. The public expected more than he had diligence to perform; and yet his edition has been the ground on which every subsequent commentator has chosen to build. The general observations at the end of the several plays, with great elegance and precision, give a summary view of each drama. The preface is a tract of great erudi tion and philosophical criticism.

Johnson's political pamphlets, whatever was his motive for writing them, whether gratitude for his pension, or the solicitation of men in power, did not

support the cause for which they were undertaken. They are written in a style truly harmonious, and with his usual dignity of language. When it is said that he advanced positions repugnant to the common rights of mankind, the virulence of party may be suspected. It is perhaps true, that in the clamour raised throughout the kingdom, Johnson overheated his mind; but he was a friend to the rights of man, and he was greatly superior to the littleness of spirit that might incline him to advance what he did not think and firmly believe. On the subject of the Falkland Islands, the fine dissuasive from too hastily involving the world in the calamities of war, must extort applause even from the party that wished, at that time, for the scenes of tumult and commotion. It was in the same pamphlet that Johnson offered battle to JUNIUS; a writer who, by the uncommon elegance of his style, charmed every reader. Junius fought in the dark; he saw his enemy and had his full blow, while he himself remained safe in obscurity. But let us not, said Johnson, mistake the venom of the shaft for the vigour of the bow. The keen invective which he published on that occasion promised a paper war between two combatants who knew the use of their weapons. But Junius, whatever was his reason, never returned to the field.

The account of his journey to the Hebrides, or Western Isles of Scotland, is a model for such as shall hereafter relate their travels. The author did not visit that part of the world in the character of an antiquary, to amuse us with wonders taken from the dark and fabulous ages; nor as a mathematician, to measure a degree, and settle the longitude and latitude of the several islands. Tse who expected such information expected wh intended. In every work regard th Johnson went to see men and marers, life, and the progress of civilization.

was never riter's end. modes of His remarks