there was something about him that secured respect. It is too
little to say that no one ever imagined he could with impunity behave
disrespectfully to Johnson. No one ever dared to do so. As he flung
the well-meant boots from his door at Oxford, so throughout life he
knew how to make all men afraid to insult, slight, or patronize him.

But these, after all, were qualities that would only affect the few who
came into personal contact with him. What was it that affected the
larger world and gave him the fame and authority of his later years?
Broadly speaking of course it was what he had written, the work he had
done, his poems, his _Rambler_ and _Idler_, his _Rasselas_, his
_Shakespeare_, above all that colossal and triumphant piece of
single-handed labour, the _Dictionary of the English Language_. But
there was more than that. Another man might have written {16} books
quite as valuable, and attained to nothing like Johnson's position. A
thousand people to-day read what Gray was writing in those years for
one who reads what Johnson wrote, and they are quite right. Yet Gray
in his lifetime had little fame and no authority except among his
friends. Pope, again, had of course immense celebrity, more no doubt
than Johnson ever had among men of letters; but he never became, as
Johnson did, something almost like a national institution. What was it
that gave Johnson what great poets never attained? It could not yet be
his reputation as a great talker, which was only beginning to spread.
We think of him as the greatest talker the world has ever seen: but
that is chiefly due to Boswell, of course, and we are speaking at
present of the years before the memorable meeting in the back parlour
of Mr. Davies's shop in Russell Street, Covent Garden. Besides, good
talk, except in Boswell's pages, is like good acting, a vain thing to
those who only know it by hearsay. We are therefore thrown back on
Johnson's public work for an explanation of the position he held. What
was it in his work, with so little of Pope's amazing wit and
brilliancy, with so little of Gray's fine imaginative quality and
distinction, prose too, in the main, and not poetry, with none of the
prestige of poetry, {17} that gave him what neither Pope nor Gray ever
received, what it is scarcely too much to call, the homage of a nation?

The answer is that, especially in England, it is not brilliance or
distinction of mind that win the respect of a nation. Ge