places a new pair at his door;
and the rawboned Servitor, lifting them, looking at them near, with
his dim eyes, with what thoughts,--pitches them out of window! Wet
feet, mud, frost, hunger or what you will; but not beggary: we cannot
stand beggary! Rude stubborn self-help here; a whole world of squalor,
rudeness, confused misery and want, yet of nobleness and manfulness
withal. It is a type of the man's life, this pitching-away of the
shoes. An original man;--not a secondhand, borrowing or begging man.
Let us stand on our own basis, at any rate! On such shoes as we
ourselves can get. On frost and mud, if you will, but honestly on
that;--on the reality and substance which Nature gives _us_, not on
the semblance, on the thing she has given another than us!--

And yet with all this rugged pride of manhood and self-help was there
ever soul more tenderly affectionate, loyally submissive to what was
really higher than he? Great souls are always loyally submissive,
reverent to what is over them; only small mean souls are otherwise. I
could not find a better proof of what I said the other day, That the
sincere man was by nature the obedient man; that only in a World of
Heroes was there loyal Obedience to the Heroic. The essence of
_originality_ is not that it be _new_: Johnson believed altogether in
the old; he found the old opinions credible for him, fit for him; and
in a right heroic manner lived under them. He is well worth study in
regard to that. For we are to say that Johnson was far other than a
mere man of words and formulas; he was a man of truths and facts. He
stood by the old formulas; the happier was it for him that he could so
stand: but in all formulas that _he_ could stand by, there needed to
be a most genuine substance. Very curious how, in that poor Paper-age,
so barren, artificial, thick-quilted with Pedantries, Hearsays, the
great Fact of this Universe glared in, forever wonderful, indubitable,
unspeakable, divine-infernal, upon this man too! How he harmonised his
Formulas with it, how he managed at all under such circumstances: that
is a thing worth seeing. A thing 'to be looked at with reverence, with
pity, with awe.' That Church of St. Clement Danes, where Johnson still
_worshipped_ in the era of Voltaire, is to me a venerable place.

It was in virtue of his _sincerity_, of his speaking still in some
sort from the heart of Nature, though in the current artificial
dialect, that Johnson was a Prophet. Ar