e vigour of a mind, which could so
abstract itself from its own sorrows and misfortunes, which too often
deaden our feelings of pity, as to sympathize with others in affliction,
and even to promote innocent cheerfulness. Bowed down by the loss of a
wife[6], on whom he had called from amidst the horrors of a hopeless
melancholy, to "hide him from the ills of life," and depressed by
poverty, "that numbs the soul with icy hand," his genius sank not
beneath a load, which might have crushed the loftiest; but the
"incumbrances of his fortune were shaken from his mind, 'as dew-drops
from a lion's mane[7].'"

The same pure and exalted morality, which stamps their chief value on
the pages of the Rambler, instructs us in the lessons of the Adventurer.
Here is no cold doctrine of expediency or dangerous speculations on
moral approbation, no easy virtue which can be practised without a
struggle, and which interdicts the gratification of no passion but
malice: here is no compromise of personal sensuality, for an endurance
of others' frailties, amounting to an indifference of moral distinctions
altogether. Johnson boldly and, at once, propounds the real motives to
Christian conduct; and does not, with some ethical writers, in a slavish
dread of interfering with the more immediate office of the divine, hold
out slender inducements to virtuous action, which can never give us
strength to stem the torrent of passion; but holding with the acute Owen
Feltham[8], "that, as true religion cannot be without morality, no more
can morality, that is right, be without religion," Johnson ever directs
our attention, not to the world's smile or frown, but to the discharge
of the duty which Providence assigns us, by the consideration of the
awful approach of that night when no man can work. To conclude with the
appropriate words of an eloquent writer, "in his sublime discussions of
the most sacred truths, as no style can be too lofty nor conceptions too
grand for such a subject, so has the great master never exerted the
powers of his great genius with more signal success. Impiety shrinks
beneath his rebuke; the atheist trembles and repents; the dying sinner
catches a gleam of revealed hope; and all acknowledge the just
dispensations of eternal Wisdom[9]."

FOOTNOTES:

[1] For the general history of the Adventurer, the reader may be
referred to Chalmers' British Essayists, xxiii, Dr. Drake's Essays
on Rambler, Adventurer, &c. ii, and Boswell