present themselves like reminiscences; do not
disturb the ordinary march of our thoughts; arrest our attention by the
stateliness of their appearance, and the costliness of their garb, but
pass on and mingle with the throng of our impressions. After closing the
volumes of the Rambler, there is nothing that we remember as a new truth
gained to the mind, nothing indelibly stamped upon the memory; nor is
there any passage that we wish to turn to as embodying any known
principle or observation, with such force and beauty that justice can only
be done to the idea in the author's own words. Such, for instance, are
many of the passages to be found in Burke, which shine by their own light,
belong to no class, have neither equal nor counterpart, and of which we
say that no one but the author could have written them! There is neither
the same boldness of design, nor mastery of execution in Johnson. In the
one, the spark of genius seems to have met with its congenial matter: the
shaft is sped; the forked lightning dresses up the face of nature in
ghastly smiles, and the loud thunder rolls far away from the ruin that is
made. Dr. Johnson's style, on the contrary, resembles rather the rumbling
of mimic thunder at one of our theatres; and the light he throws upon a
subject is like the dazzling effect of phosphorus, or an _ignis fatuus_ of
words. There is a wide difference, however, between perfect originality
and perfect common-place: neither ideas nor expressions are trite or
vulgar because they are not quite new. They are valuable, and ought to be
repeated, if they have not become quite common; and Johnson's style both
of reasoning and imagery holds the middle rank between startling novelty
and vapid common-place. Johnson has as much originality of thinking as
Addison; but then he wants his familiarity of illustration, knowledge of
character, and delightful humour. What most distinguishes Dr. Johnson from
other writers is the pomp and uniformity of his style. All his periods are
cast in the same mould, are of the same size and shape, and consequently
have little fitness to the variety of things he professes to treat of. His
subjects are familiar, but the author is always upon stilts. He has
neither ease nor simplicity, and his efforts at playfulness, in part,
remind one of the lines in Milton:--

"----The elephant
To make them sport wreath'd his proboscis lithe."

His Letters from Correspondents, i