Reign of
George III.

In 1760 George III. ascended the throne with a firm determination to be himself the chief of his ministers and the leader of his Parliaments. As he was an ardent Tory, he forced the Whigs out of office, - even those who, like the Cavendishes and Bentincks, had helped to place his family on the throne, and made his tutor, a Scotchman named Bute, prime minister. Bute signalized his brief term of power by alienating all parties through his arbitrary attempts at absolute government, and was succeeded in less than a year by George Grenville. Daily the unpopularity of the king and his ministers increased; for the nation could not bear to see its representatives dominated by the narrow-minded ministers of a narrower-minded king. When in 1762 the impudent and disreputable John Wilkes was arrested for publishing attacks on the government, the nation made of him a sort of idol in spite of his vices; and under the battle-cry of "Wilkes and Liberty" defeated the government in several elections. Finally Grenville and North, by their subservience to the king, plunged the country into war with the American colonies, and the disasters which followed brought the Whigs once more into power.

JOHNSON'S LITERARY IDEALS (DEDUCED FROM HIS CRITICAL WRITINGS) AND CRITICAL ESTI

MATES OF HIS ACHIEVEMENTS.

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1. Poetry. Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason. . . . History must supply the writer with the rudiments of narration; morality must teach him the exact bounds, and different shades, of vice and virtue ; from policy, and the practice of life, he has to learn the discriminations of character, and the tendency of the passions; and physiology must supply him with illustrations and images. To put these materials to poetical use, is required an imagination capable of painting nature, and realizing fiction. Nor is he yet a poet till he has attained the whole extension of his language, distinguished all the delicacies of phrase, and all the colors of words, and learned to adjust their different sounds to all the varieties of metrical moderation. (Life of Milton.)

The never-failing vigor and compression of Johnson, united with very correct and splendid versification, have justly given him a high station in the third class of English poets. (Drake.)

Whose verse may claim grave, masculine and strong,
Superior praise to the mere poet's song. (Cowper.)

He was a poet of no mean order. His resonant lines, informed as they often are with the force of their author's character, take possession of the memory, and suffuse themselves through one's entire system of thought. (Birrell.) Any infusion of sensibility would have ruined . . . the manly simplicity, the dignified reticence, the transparent sincerity, of Johnson's austere and moving verses. (Millar.)

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Satire. All truth is valuable, and satirical criticism may be considered as useful when it rectifies error and improves judgment; he that refines the public taste is a public benefactor. (Life of Pope.) Young's species of satire is between those of Horace and Juvenal; and he has the gayety of Horace without his laxity of numbers, and the morality of Juvenal with greater variation of images. His distichs have the weight of solid sentiment, and his points the sharpness of resistless truth. (Life of Young.)

Tennyson admired Johnson's grave earnestness, and said that certain of his couplets, for these qualities and for their "high moral tone," were not surpassed in English satire. (Tennyson.) What his satires lose in vindictiveness they gain in dignity and weight. No performances of the kind indicate so strong an impetus of moral and intellectual force behind their sonorous and majestic language. (Millar.) Imitation. - Imitation is a kind of middle composition between translation and original design, which pleases when the thoughts are unexpectedly applicable, and the parallels lucky. . . . But the comparison requires knowledge of the original, which will likewise often detect strained applications. The work will be generally uncouth and party-colored; neither original nor translated, neither ancient nor modern. (Life of Pope.)

London is to me one of those few imitations that have all the ease and all the spirit of an original. (Gray.) London is the best imitation of the original that has appeared in our language, being possessed of all the force and satirical resentment of Juvenal. (Goldsmith.) To have shown so much genius and so much ingenuity at one and the same time, to have been so original even in imitation, places him in the highest order of minds. (Wilson.)

2. Drama. — Of Cato it has been not unjustly determined, that it is rather a poem in dialogue than a drama, rather a succession of just sentiments in elegant language, than a representation of natural affections, or of any state probable or possible in human life. . . . Its success has introduced or confirmed among us the use of dialogue too declamatory, of unaffecting elegance, and chill philosophy. (Life of Addison.)

For years the power of Tragedy declined;

From bard to bard the frigid caution crept,
Till Declamation roar'd, while Passion slept.

(Prologue, Drury Lane, 1747.)

When Johnson writes tragedy, "declamation roars and passion sleeps; " when Shakespeare wrote, he dipped his pen in his own heart. (Garrick.) The passage which Garrick quoted exactly describes, and emphatically condemns, the very species of tragedy of which Irene was an extreme example. . . . No more perfect description can be found of Irene than in his strictures upon Cato [quoted above]. (Elwin.)

3. Fiction. The works of fiction are such as exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind. ... For this reason, these familiar histories may perhaps be made of greater use than the solemnities of professed morality, and convey the knowledge of vice and virtue with more efficacy than axioms and definitions. (Rambler.)

Rasselas takes its place among the minor classics of our tongue. The charm of the book is its humanity, the sweetness and wholesomeness of the long melancholy episodes, the wisdom of the moral reflections and disquisitions. (Gosse.) The agents are speaking puppets, without distinctive attributes. (Elwin.) The book is never dull. It is penetrated with a sane and delightful humor; it exposes a hundred fashionable sophistries; it inculcates an impregnable and enduring wisdom. (Millar.)

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4. Essays. — The Tatler and the Spectator adjusted the unsettled practice of daily intercourse by propriety and politeness; and exhibited the characters and manners of the age. They superadded literature and criticism, and taught, with great justness of argument and dignity of language, the most important duties and sublime truths. All these topics were happily varied with elegant fictions and refined allegories, and illuminated with different changes of style and felicities of invention. (Life of Addison.)