d persons were aware that he
was engaged in compiling an English Dictionary, and intended to edit
Shakespeare. He was also, at the moment, attracting brief but not
over-favorable attention as the author of one of the season's new crop of
tragedies at Drury Lane. But _The Vanity of Human Wishes_ and _The
Rambler_ were a potent force in establishing Johnson's claim to a
permanent place in English letters. _The Vanity_ appeared early in
January, 1749; _The Rambler_ ran from March 20, 1749/50 to March 14, 1752.
With the exception of five numbers and two quoted letters, the periodical
was written entirely by Johnson.

As moral essays, the Ramblers deeply stirred some readers and bored
others. Young Boswell, not unduly saturnine in temperament, was profoundly
impressed by them and determined on their account to seek out the author.
Taine, a century later, discovered that he already knew by heart all they
had to teach and warned his readers away from them. Generally speaking,
they were valued as they deserved by the eighteenth century and
undervalued by the nineteenth. The first half of the twentieth has shown a
marked impulse to restore them, as a series, to a place of honor second
only to the work of Addison and Steele in the same form. Raleigh, in 1907,
paid discriminating tribute to their humanity. If read, he observed,
against a knowledge of their author's life, "the pages of _The Rambler_
are aglow with the earnestness of dear-bought conviction, and rich in
conclusions gathered not from books but from life and suffering." And
later: "We come to closer quarters with Johnson in the best pages of _The
Rambler_ than in the most brilliant of the conversations recalled by
Boswell. The hero of a hundred fights puts off his armour, and becomes a
wise and tender confessor." Latterly, the style of Johnson's essays has
been subjected to a closer scrutiny than ever before. What Taine found as
inflexible and inert as a pudding-mold is now seen to be charged with life
and movement, vibrant with light and shadow and color. More particularly,
Wimsatt has shown how intimately connected is the vocabulary of _The
Rambler_ with Johnson's reading for the Dictionary, and how, having
mastered the words of the experimental scientists of the previous century,
Johnson proceeded to put them to original uses, generating with them new
stylistic overtones in contexts now humorously precise, now
philosophically metaphorical, employing them now for purp