and the audience, almost as
well as if we had been there; and that, unconsciously, is the superb art of
this matchless biographer.

When Johnson died the opportunity came for which Boswell had been watching
and waiting some twenty years. He would shine in the world now, not by
reflection, but by his own luminosity. He gathered together his endless
notes and records, and began to write his biography; but he did not hurry.
Several biographies of Johnson appeared, in the four years after his death,
without disturbing Boswell's perfect complacency. After seven years' labor
he gave the world his _Life of Johnson_. It is an immortal work; praise is
superfluous; it must be read to be appreciated. Like the Greek sculptors,
the little slave produced a more enduring work than the great master. The
man who reads it will know Johnson as he knows no other man who dwells
across the border; and he will lack sensitiveness, indeed, if he lay down
the work without a greater love and appreciation of all good literature.

LATER AUGUSTAN WRITERS. With Johnson, who succeeded Dryden and Pope in the
chief place of English letters, the classic movement had largely spent its
force; and the latter half of the eighteenth century gives us an imposing
array of writers who differ so widely that it is almost impossible to
classify them. In general, three schools of writers are noticeable: first,
the classicists, who, under Johnson's lead, insisted upon elegance and
regularity of style; second, the romantic poets, like Collins, Gray,
Thomson, and Burns, who revolted from Pope's artificial couplets and wrote
of nature and the human heart[197]; third, the early novelists, like Defoe
and Fielding, who introduced a new type of literature. The romantic poets
and the novelists are reserved for special chapters; and of the other
writers--Berkeley and Hume in philosophy; Robertson, Hume, and Gibbon in
history; Chesterfield and Lady Montagu in letter writing; Adam Smith in
economics; Pitt, Burke, Fox, and a score of lesser writers in politics--we
select only two, Burke and Gibbon, whose works are most typical of the
Augustan, i.e. the elegant, classic style of prose writing.

EDMUND BURKE (1729--1797)

To read all of Burke's collected works, and so to understand him
thoroughly, is something of a task. Few are equal to it. On the other hand,
to read selections here and there, as most of us do, is to get a wrong idea
of the man and to join either in fulsome p