Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/36

 two hundred years that have passed since Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield have given him a secure and unique position in the affections of his countrymen. He has almost become the tutelary genius of the English people. He embodies all that we most admire in ourselves. When we pretend to laugh at our national character, we call it John Bull; when we wish to glorify it, we call it Samuel Johnson. There have been greater writers among the English, but none of them would be so readily accepted as a public trustee. The supremacy of Shakespeare is not to be challenged, but Shakespeare is too great, too catholic, and, when all is said, too unintelligible, to stand for the typical Englishman. Moreover, Shakespeare is first of all a poet; his business is a kind of universal sympathy; and we do not know how to count on the man who exercised a faculty so illimitable and so chameleon-like. Johnson was an author almost by accident; it is the man who is dear to us, the man with all his dogmatic prejudices, his stoical courage, his profound melancholy, his hatred of sentimental palliatives, his fits of narrowness, his tenderness to all human frailty. If he has had less reputation than he deserves as a writer, it is because he has overshadowed his own fame. His success with the pen is like the success of a personal friend; it