st. No man of letters--perhaps scarcely
even Shakespeare himself--is so often quoted in the columns of the
daily press. His is a name that may {8} be safely introduced into any
written or spoken discussion, without fear of the stare of
unrecognizing ignorance; and the only danger to which those who quote
him expose themselves is that of the yawn of over-familiarity. Even in
his own lifetime his reputation extended far beyond the limited circle
of literature or scholarship. Actresses delighted in his conversation;
soldiers were proud to entertain him in their barracks; innkeepers
boasted of his having slept in their inns. His celebrity was such that
he himself once said there was hardly a day in which the newspapers did
not mention his name; and a year after his death Boswell could venture
to write publicly of him that his "character, religious, moral,
political and literary, nay his figure and manner, are, I believe, more
generally known than those of almost any man." But what was, in his
own day, partly a respect paid to the maker of the famous _Dictionary_
and partly a curiosity about "the great Oddity," as the Edensor
innkeeper called him, has in the course of the nineteenth century
become a great deal more.

He is still for us the great scholar and the strongly marked
individuality, but he has gradually attained a kind of apotheosis, a
kind of semi-legendary position, almost rivalling that of the great
John Bull himself, as the {9} embodiment of the essential features of
the English character. We never think of the typical Englishman being
like Shakespeare or Milton. In the first place, we know very little
about Shakespeare, and not very much about Milton; and so we are thrown
back on their works, and our mental picture of them takes on a dim and
shadowy grandeur, very unlike what we see when we look within into our
familiar and commonplace selves. Nor do Englishmen often plume
themselves on their aesthetic or imaginative gifts. The achievements
of Wren, or Purcell, or Keats may arouse in them admiration and pride,
but never a sense of kinship. When they recognize themselves in the
national literature, it is not Hamlet, or Lear, or Clarissa, or
Ravenswood that holds up the mirror; but Falstaff, or The Bastard, or
Tom Jones, or Jeanie Deans, or perhaps Gabriel Oak: plain people, all
of them, whatever their differences, with a certain quiet and downright
quality which Englishmen are apt to think the peculia