sudden fits of inadvertency will surprise vigilance,
slight avocations will seduce attention, and casual eclipses of
the mind will darken learning; and that the writer shall often in
vain trace his memory at the moment of need for that which
yesterday he knew with intuitive readiness, and which will come
uncalled into his thoughts to-morrow.

"In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it
not be forgotten that much likewise is performed; and though no
book was ever spared out of tenderness to the author, and the
world is little solicitous to know whence proceeded the faults of
that which it condemns, yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it
that the _English Dictionary_ was written with little assistance
of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the
soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academic
bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and
in sorrow; and it may repress the triumph of malignant criticism
to observe, that if our language is not here fully displayed, I
have only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto
completed. If the lexicons of ancient tongues, now immutably fixed
and comprised in a few volumes, be yet, after the toil of
successive ages, inadequate and delusive; if the aggregated
knowledge and co-operating diligence of the Italian academicians
did not secure them from the censure of Beni; if the embodied
critics of France, when fifty years had been spent upon their
work, were obliged to change its economy, and give their second
editions another form, I may surely be contented without the
praise of perfection which, if I could obtain, in this gloom of
solitude what would it avail me?

"I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to
please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are
empty sounds; I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity,
having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise."

This seems to me to be the noblest passage that Johnson ever wrote.

Almost all the most magnificent utterances of man are tinged with
sadness. In this they possess a quality that is almost inseparable from
grandeur wherever displayed. No man of sensibility and taste feels it
possible to make jokes himself, or to tolerate them from others when in
the pre