tles on History, he has made in the quantity of the
word Olorus, the name of the father of Thucydides; but from a casual
mistake of this sort, no decisive inference can be drawn.

There is little knowledge of human life and character to be gained from
his writings. He had seen mankind chiefly through the medium of books,
and those such as did not represent them very faithfully to him, that
is, in ordinary plays and novels. Indeed he appeared to consider the
real affairs of life in which he was concerned much in the light of a
romance, and himself and his friends as so many personages acting in it,
all meeting with marvellous adventures at every turn, and all endowed
with admirable qualities, to which their petty frailties served only as
foils. It is impossible in reading his memoirs to avoid smiling at the
importance he attaches to very ordinary occurrences. I am not sure
whether it was not this propensity that led him to magnify his own
distresses in living with his first wife. That lady I well recollect to
have been lively and elegant in her manners, and much addicted to
literary pursuits, of which she gave a proof in translating Madame de
Lambert's Essay on Friendship. Her excessive zeal for her husband's
reputation as an author, he has bantered with some humour in the play of
the Mausoleum, where Mrs. Rumble, the wife of a poet is introduced:

Who crows o'er her husband's poetical eggs.

The character of Rumble in the same play appeared so evidently designed
for Johnson, though the author disclaimed that intention, that Boswell,
when he read it on its first coming out, at Anna Seward's, exclaimed,
"It is we. It is we." Trope, who

Talks in a high strutting style of the stars,
Of the eagle of Jove, and the chariot of Mars,

was meant for Mason; and by Facil,

Whose verse is the thread of tenuity,
A fellow distinguish'd by flippant fatuity,
Who nonsense and rhyme can incessantly mingle,
A poet--if poetry's only a jingle,

he intended to represent himself.

The name of Facil was but too appropriate. The slender thread of his
verse was hastily and slightly spun.

His comedies are adapted to the entertainment of those readers only who
have formed their taste on the French drama. His tragedies are some of
the most endurable we have in what a lively modern critic[4] has termed
the rhetorical style. Yet he had some skill in moving compassion.

His diction, both in poetry and prose, is vitiated by