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 470 Essay on

��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 his ideas ; he pours along, familiarizing the terms of philosophy x, 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 2 .'

It is not the design of this comparison to decide between those two eminent writers. In matters of taste every reader will chuse for himself 3. 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 4. 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 5. Intense thinking would not become the IDLER. The first number presents a well- drawn portrait of

1 ' When common words were less the style of Addison and Johnson, pleasing to the ear, or less distinct in and to depreciate, I think very un- their signification, I have familiar- justly, the style of Addison as nerve- ized the terms of philosophy by ap- less and feeble, because it has not the plying them to popular ideas.' Ram- strength and energy of that of John- bler, No. 208. son.' Life, i. 224. Macaulay wrote

2 Pope's Homer's Iliad, ed. 1760, in 1856: 'On the question of pre- i. Preface, p. 20. cedence between Addison and John-

3 Johnson wrote in 1781 : 'Who- son, a question which seventy years ever wishes to attain an English ago was much disputed, posterity style, familiar but not coarse, and ele- has pronounced a decision from which gant but not ostentatious, must give there is no appeal. 3 Misc. Works, his days and nights to the volumes ed. 1871, p. 381.

of Addison.' Works, vii. 473. Haw- 4 Life, i. 255. kins, in 1787 (p. 270), said: 'The 5 ' The Idler may be described as characteristics of Mr. Addison's style a second part of the Rambler, some- are feebleness and inanity.' Four what livelier and somewhat weaker years later Boswell wrote : ' It has than the first part.' Macaulay's Misc. of late been the fashion to compare Works, p. 383.

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