ost depths of our
language; and that he felt a vicious partiality for terms which, long
after our own speech had been fixed, were borrowed from the Greek and
Latin, and which, therefore, even when lawfully naturalised, must be
considered as born aliens, not entitled to rank with the King's English.
His constant practice of padding out a sentence with useless epithets,
till it became as stiff as the bust of an exquisite, his antithetical
forms of expression, constantly employed even where there is no
opposition in the ideas expressed, his big words wasted on little
things, his hard inversions, so widely different from those graceful and
easy inversions which give variety, spirit, and sweetness to the
expression of our great old writers--all these peculiarities have been
imitated by his admirers and parodied by his assailants till the public
has become sick of the subject.

Goldsmith said to him, very wittily and very justly, "If you were to
write a fable about little fishes, doctor, you would make the little
fishes talk like whales." No man surely ever had so little talent for
personation as Johnson. Whether he wrote in the character of a
disappointed legacy-hunter or an empty town fop, of a crazy virtuoso or
a flippant coquette, he wrote in the same pompous and unbending style.
His speech, like Sir Piercy Shafton's Euphuistic eloquence, bewrayed him
under every disguise. Euphelia and Rhodoclea talk as finely as Imlac the
poet or Seged, Emperor of Ethiopia. The gay Cornelia describes her
reception at the country-house of her relations in such terms as these:
"I was surprised, after the civilities of my first reception, to find,
instead of the leisure and tranquillity which a rural life always
promises, and, if well conducted, might always afford, a confused
wilderness of care, and a tumultuous hurry of diligence, by which every
face was clouded, and every motion agitated." The gentle Tranquilla
informs us that she "had not passed the earlier part of life without the
flattery of courtship and the joys of triumph; but had danced the round
of gaiety amidst the murmurs of envy and the congratulations of
applause, had been attended from pleasure to pleasure by the great, the
sprightly, and the vain, and had seen her regard solicited by the
obsequiousness of gallantry, the gaiety of wit, and the timidity of
love." Surely Sir John Falstaff himself did not wear his petticoats with
a worse grace. The reader may well cry out, with