rm of invective he would have
overwhelmed any man who had blamed him for celebrating the redemption of
mankind with sugarless tea and butterless buns!...

Johnson, as Mr. Burke most justly observed, appears far greater in
Boswell's books than in his own. His conversation appears to have been
quite equal to his writings in matter, and far superior to them in
manner. When he talked, he clothed his wit and his sense in forcible
and natural expressions. As soon as he took his pen in his hand to write
for the public, his style became systematically vicious. All his books
are written in a learned language; in a language which nobody hears from
his mother or his nurse; in a language in which nobody ever quarrels, or
drives bargains, or makes love; in a language in which nobody ever
thinks. It is clear that Johnson himself did not think in the dialect in
which he wrote. The expressions which came first to his tongue were
simple, energetic, and picturesque. When he wrote for publication he did
his sentences out of English into Johnsonese. His letters from the
Hebrides to Mrs. Thrale are the original of that work of which the
"Journey to the Hebrides" is the translation; and it is amusing to
compare the two versions. "When we were taken upstairs," says he in one
of his letters, "a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on which one of
us was to lie." This incident is recorded in the Journal as follows:
"Out of one of the beds on which we were to repose started up, at our
entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from the forge." Sometimes Johnson
translated aloud. "_The Rehearsal_" he said, very unjustly, "has not wit
enough to keep it sweet"; then, after a pause, "it has not vitality
enough to preserve it from putrefaction."

Mannerism is pardonable, and is sometimes even agreeable, when the
manner, though vicious, is natural. Few readers, for example, would be
willing to part with the mannerism of Milton or of Burke. But a
mannerism which does not sit easy on the mannerist, which has been
adopted on principle, and which can be sustained only by constant
effort, is always offensive. And such is the mannerism of Johnson.

The characteristic faults of his style are so familiar to all our
readers, and have been so often burlesqued, that it is almost
superfluous to point them out. It is well known that he made less use
than any other eminent writer of those strong, plain words, Anglo-Saxon
or Norman-French, of which the roots lie in the inm