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34 conquest of the public, unless it were the Dictionary, which was a laborious piece of compilation. Yet their effect was cumulative; their author went on living and talking and writing in London, until by a slow and insensible process he was recognized as the greatest man of his time. Superstition began to attach to his sayings and doings. He had never made any advances to the public; and the public, which is like a cat in its devotion to those who ignore it, came to him and fawned on him. The tribute was paid, not to his success in pleasing, but to his careless strength. The public, after all, is a shrewd critic of its worshippers and sectaries. When a man studies it and flatters it, it is pleased, but not deceived. It knows itself to be the patron of its most zealous suitors, and treats them with a certain proprietary kindness. No one ever dared to approach Johnson in this fashion; he never had a patron, he never went a yard out of his way to court public approbation, for twenty years he held on without complaint, until in the end he dominated and enslaved the opinion that he had not sought to conciliate. Some writers are great by their power of self-expression; they distil themselves in a book, and give away all their secrets. A small man can produce a great book if he knows how to put almost the whole of himself into it. What remains is a mere husk, to disappoint admirers of the book who seek for a more personal contact with its author. Rousseau, whom Johnson held to be a very bad man, might be regarded in another light as a very empty man, the wasted matrix of a very remarkable book. Johnson was great by his reserves; the best of him was withheld from literature; his books were mere outworks. Behind those ramparts his life was passionately private, so that