to see some names there which we should hardly think of (that of
Sir Isaac Newton is among them,) and also to observe the degree of
interest excited by those of the different persons, which is not
determined according to the rules of the Herald's College. One literary
name lasts as long as a whole race of heroes and their descendants! The
Guardian, which followed the Spectator, was, as may be supposed, inferior
to it.

The dramatic and conversational turn which forms the distinguishing
feature and greatest charm of the Spectator and Tatler, is quite lost in
the Rambler by Dr. Johnson. There is no reflected light thrown on human
life from an assumed character, nor any direct one from a display of the
author's own. The Tatler and Spectator are, as it were, made up of notes
and memorandums of the events and incidents of the day, with finished
studies after nature, and characters fresh from the life, which the writer
moralises upon, and turns to account as they come before him: the Rambler
is a collection of moral Essays, or scholastic theses, written on set
subjects, and of which the individual characters and incidents are merely
artificial illustrations, brought in to give a pretended relief to the
dryness of didactic discussion. The Rambler is a splendid and imposing
common-place-book of general topics, and rhetorical declamation on the
conduct and business of human life. In this sense, there is hardly a
reflection that has been suggested on such subjects which is not to be
found in this celebrated work, and there is, perhaps, hardly a reflection
to be found in it which had not been already suggested and developed by
some other author, or in the common course of conversation. The mass of
intellectual wealth here heaped together is immense, but it is rather the
result of gradual accumulation, the produce of the general intellect,
labouring in the mine of knowledge and reflection, than dug out of the
quarry, and dragged into the light by the industry and sagacity of a
single mind. I am not here saying that Dr. Johnson was a man without
originality, compared with the ordinary run of men's minds, but he was not
a man of original thought or genius, in the sense in which Montaigne or
Lord Bacon was. He opened no new vein of precious ore, nor did he light
upon any single pebbles of uncommon size and unrivalled lustre. We seldom
meet with anything to "give us pause;" he does not set us thinking for the
first time. His reflections