Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/37

Rh pleases us, and enables us to vindicate our affection in the presence of those who have not yet learned to love him. As for ourselves, we know that he was capable of this, and more than this. He writes noble prose, but we read between the lines to find a more intimate delight. The splendid confident march of a reasoned paragraph is less to us than the traces we detect in it of our boon-fellow and teacher, with his exuberances and petulances and impulses of love and hate.

It is a wonderful triumph of character, and we feel it to be as creditable to us as to Johnson himself. If a purely literary history were made of the story of his life, the esteem in which he is held, amounting almost to idolatry, would indeed be difficult to explain. His greatest work, The Lives of the Poets, was produced, with pain and reluctance, when he was seventy years of age. In his early years, when he sought the notice of the public, he wrote two satires in verse, grave indeed and full of a sad sincerity, but not altogether unlike the imitative literary exercises of an admirer of Juvenal. Then followed a tale of anonymous essays, prefaces, and translations, sufficient for their purpose, not rescued and reprinted until the close of the eighteenth century. The Dictionary, great work though it be, might have been successfully carried through by a merely mechanical genius. The Rambler was never popular; for every one reader that it found Addison’s Spectator found sixty. The Idler was hardly more successful. Rasselas, that most melancholy of fables, and the Journey to the Western Hebrides, that most ceremonious of diaries, enjoyed what can only be called a success of esteem. In short, no one of Johnson’s works marked a sudden or decisive