literature, society, philosophy, the state of departed souls, the probability of the reappearance of the dead, etc. The scene is laid in the East, but the characters talk exactly as Johnson had talked in the club for twenty years. Its gloomy eloquence, born of a saddening experience and a sombre imagination, sometimes rises to the height of poetry, as in the apostrophe to the river Nile:

'Answer, thou great Father of waters! thou that rollest thy floods through eighty nations, to the invocations of the daughter of thy native king. Tell me if thou waterest through all thy course a single habitation from which thou dost not hear the murmurs of complaint.'

Lives of the Poets (1781), his greatest work; pronounced by Byron to be 'the finest critical work extant,' and by Macaulay to be as entertaining as any fairy tale.' A serious defect is the injustice done to some of our greatest masters. He accepted blank verse under protest; the drum-and-fife music of rhyme was his delight. The higher order of imaginative poetry, moreover, was too ethereal for his rugged, ponderous grasp.

He was

Style.-Heavy, antithetical, rolling, and pompous. classical in prose, as Pope in poetry; and gave to all subjects the same balanced, artificial tone. Its peculiar character is derived, not so much from the use of unfamiliar words, as from the ponderous quality of his mind. 'Dr. Johnson,' said Goldsmith, 'if you could make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales.' Weighty thoughts, he maintained, required weighty words. He was a whale. Here is a portrait of 'Squire Bluster:

He is weighty without followers; he is magnificent without witnesses; he has birth without alliance, and influence without dignity. His neighbors scorn him as a brute; his dependants dread him as an oppressor; and he has the gloomy comfort of reflecting that if he is hated, he is likewise feared.'

This is the manner in which he attempts to destroy that immortal enigma,-Junius. Mark the exact poise of ideas, and the correspondence of considerations:

Junius burst into notice with a blaze of impudence which has rarely glared upon the world before, and drew the rabble after him as a monster makes a show. When he had once provided for his safety by impenetrable secrecy, he had nothing to combat but truth and justice, enemies whom he knows to be feeble in the dark. Being then at liberty to indulge himself in all the immunities of invisibility,-out of the reach of danger, he has been bold; out of the reach of shame, he has been confident. As a rhetorician, he has had the art of persuading when he seconded desire; as a reasoner, he has convinced those who had no doubt before; as a moralist, he has taught that virtue may disgrace; and as a patriot, he has gratified the mean by insults on the high. Finding sedition ascendant, he has been able to advance it; finding the nation combustible,

he has been able to inflame it. Junius is an unusual phenomenon, on which some have gazed with wonder and some with terror; but wonder and terror are transitory passions. He will soon be more closely viewed, or more attentively examined; and what folly has taken for a comet, that from his flaming hair shook pestilence and war, inquiry will find to be only a meteor formed by the vapors of putrefying democracy, and kindled into flames by the effervescence of interest struggling with conviction; which, after having plunged its followers into a bog, will leave us inquiring why we regard it.'

Rank. By the weight of his thoughts, the immense stores of his reading and observation, the power and brilliancy of his conversation, the central figure in the second half of the eighteenth century. Chesterfield proposed to assign him, on every word in the language, the authority of dictator. He was the law of criticism, and the arbiter of style.

Character.- Conservative in politics and religion. He was called the Hercules of Toryism, and declared that the first Whig was the devil. He thought Rousseau to be the prince of felons, and could hardly settle the proportion of iniquity between him and Voltaire. He was not afraid to be thought antiquated, could give respectful audience to the peeping and chatter of ghosts, and went to a church, at one o'clock in the morning, to interrogate a tormented spirit that had promised to give a token of her presence there by a knock upon her coffin.

For severe distress, he had pity; but for the suffering which a harsh word inflicts, he had none. He could carry home on his shoulders a sick and starving girl from the streets, turn his house into a refuge for homeless ingrates; but all that could be expected of him in the presence of wounded sensibilities was, as a rule, not to laugh. Poh, ma'am,' he exclaimed to Mrs. Carter, who is the worse for being talked of uncharitably?' But we do not forget how he had lived.

A Christian from conviction, the service of God was the actuating principle of his life. If he was intolerant in matters of opinion, it was because spiritual interests were his supreme

concern.

A stranger to artifice, he could neither personate another nor disguise himself. His characters always move with an elephant tread. Garrick remarked of the females that they were only Johnsons in petticoats. A deliberate, cautious manner was the normal movement of his mind. He will not marry till he has weighed the virtues and vices in antithesis, reduced them to an equation, and found the value of the unknown quantity:

'I lived in a state of celibacy beyond the usual time. In the hurry, first of pleasure and afterward of business, I felt no want of a domestic companion; but becoming weary of labor, I soon grew weary of idleness, and thought it reasonable to follow the custom of life, and to seek some solace of my cares in female tenderness, and some amusement of my leisure in female cheerfulness.

The choice which is long delayed is commonly made at last with great caution. My resolution was to keep my passions neutral, and to marry only in compliance with my reason. I drew upon a page of my pocket-book a scheme of all female virtues and vices, with the vices which border on every virtue, and the virtues which are allied to every vice. I considered that wit was sarcastic, and magnanimity imperious; that avarice was economical, and ignorance obsequious, and having estimated the good and evil of every quality, employed my own diligence and that of my friends to find the lady in whom nature and reason had reached that happy mediocrity which is equally remote from exuberance and deficiency.'

As an author, he loved strong moral painting. He saw more knowledge of the heart in a page of Richardson than in all Fielding. The end of writing,' he says, 'is to instruct.' The end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing; hence his criticism of Shakespeare:

'He sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose. . . . His precepts and axioms drop casually from him; he makes no just distribution of good or evil, nor is always careful to show in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked.'

His mind was analytic rather than comprehensive. His thoughts on national manners are the thoughts of one who saw little-only London. Everybody who lives in the country is either stupid or miserable. When he judged compositions fashioned on his own principles, the canons of the artificial school, he succeeded splendidly; when a deeper philosophy was required, to estimate those which yield 'homage only to eternal laws,' he failed ignominiously. His powers appeared to the best advantage in the free methods of conversation. When he talked, his wit and sense were forcible, natural; when he wrote, they were fettered and artificial. It was in spirited, personal intercourse, that his arguments were weapons, and Goldsmith could say of him, 'There's no getting along with Johnson; if his pistol misses fire he knocks you down with the butt of it.' Writing to Mrs. Thrale from the Hebrides, he says: When we were taken up stairs, a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on which one of us was to lie.' Published, this incident was translated, 'out of one of the beds on which we were to repose, started up, at our entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from the forge.' 'The Rehearsal,' he said, 'has not wit enough to keep it sweet';

then, after a pause, 'It has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction.'

In a word, a man of powerful mind, of surly independence, of stern integrity, of deep piety, of offensive manners, and eccentric habits; generous, reverent, and sincere,- an illustrious blending of narrowness and strength, of noble and of boorish traits.

Influence. In morals and criticism, it will ever be to his praise that he has assailed all sentimentalism and licentiousness. His wit, eloquence, and logic were always enlisted on the side of revealed religion, to deepen and extend, in heart and practice, the human faith in God. In the fields of literature, which were now beginning to be cultivated on all sides, he did more than any of his contemporaries to create a pure and invigorating atmosphere.

His balanced pomp of antithetic clauses soon had for others, as it had for him, an irresistible charm, and caused a complete revolution, for a time, in English style. Unhappily, it was too often imitated by inferior writers, who had not the glow to kindle the massive structure-little fishes talking like whales. There has been no English prose writer, onward to the present day, whose style has not been influenced by that of Johnson.

The reputation of his writings is every day fading, but his peculiarities are immortal.

Let us remember that Johnson came to London in what was for authors a period of famine; that, all unknown, ill-dressed, and ungainly, he began his long, toilsome ascent in squalor and misery; that he pressed forward amid calamities, and hopes deferred, eating behind a screen because he was ashamed to show his ragged clothes; that he emerged at length from garrets and cellars into the society of the polished and the opulent the last survivor of a race of hacks; that in his old age, such men as Burke, Gibbon, Fox, Goldsmith, and others, yielded to him, in literature, a quiet supremacy. Surely here was a man who, in one sense the product of his 'environment,' was yet a final law to much that was around him.

SECOND TRANSITION PERIOD.

CHAPTER IV.

FEATURES.

The resemblance between fashions in literature, and heresies in religion, holds good in several points; most of them, as they passed away, left something behind them. But there is this difference, that in literature nothing was ever retained except the little that was good.-Southey.

Politics.-The death of George II terminated the ministerial ascendancy of Pitt, as well as the undisputed supremacy of the Whig party. After about ten years of feeble government and party anarchy, there was formed a Tory ministry of commanding strength, whose dominion, with an unimportant interval, became as absolute as that of the Whigs had ever been, and lasted without break to the end of the century. In 1783 the younger Pitt, second son of Lord Chatham, began his long and eventful career as Prime Minister.

The reaction was aided by the personal character of the king, who, without taste or education, was narrow and ignorant. Despotic, as well as superstitious, he steadily resisted the spirit of reform. But no man can stop the march of destiny. The result, in a few years, was a nation convulsed by faction, a throne assailed by the fiercest invective, a House of Commons hated and despised. So complete had been the change in political affairs, that, when a bill was introduced to tax the Americans without even the form of asking their consent, not the least difficulty was found in passing a measure which no minister of the preceding reign had been bold enough to propose. The policy of the government bore its legitimate fruit-the American Revolution, which emphasized the questions of right, and embodied the spirit of the age, in the memorable sentence:

'Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.'

The fire started in the Colonies kindled those latent tendencies