the case in the Ramblers, which being called for at short and stated
intervals, were sometimes composed in such haste, that he had not
leasure even to read them before they were printed; nor can we wonder at
the dissatisfaction he expressed some years afterwards, when he
exclaimed that he thought they had been better. In the Idler there is
more brevity, and consequently more compression.

When Johnson trusts to his own strong understanding in a matter of which
he has the full command, and does not aim at setting it off by futile
decorations, he is always respectable, and sometimes great. But when he
attempts the ornamental, he is heavy and inelegant; and the awkwardness
of his efforts is more perceptible from the hugeness of the body that is
put in motion to produce them. He is like the animal whom Milton
describes as making sport for our first parents in Paradise--

--Th' unwieldy elephant,
To make them mirth, used all his might.

It is a good beast for carrying a burden or trampling down a foe, but a
very indifferent one at a lavolta or a coranto.

His swelling style is readily counterfeited. Our common advertisements
have amply revenged themselves for his ridicule of their large promises
in the Idler, by clothing those promises in language as magnificent as
his own. It is much less easy to catch the subtle graces of Addison. At
the conclusion of the Rambler, he boasts that "he has laboured to refine
our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial
barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations."

The result of his labour is awkward stateliness and irksome uniformity.
In his dread of incongruous idioms he writes almost without any idiom at
all.

He has sometimes been considered as having innovated on our tongue by
introducing big words into it from the Latin: but he commonly does no
more than revive terms which had been employed by our old writers and
afterwards fallen into disuse; nor does he, like them, employ even these
terms in senses which scholars only would be likely to understand.

At the time of writing the Dictionary, he had a notion that our language
"for almost a century had been departing from its original Teutonic
character, and deviating towards a Gallic structure and phraseology,
from which it ought to be our endeavour to recall it by making our
ancient volumes the ground-work of style, admitting among the additions
of later times, only such as may su