applicable and useful in circumstances very different from those that
were in the author's mind when he wrote. By that test these words of
Johnson are certainly great literature. The degrees of wealth and
poverty have varied infinitely in the history of the world. They were
very different under the Roman Empire from what they became in the
Middle Age; by Johnson's day they had become quite unlike what they had
been in {25} the days of Dante and Chaucer; and they have again changed
almost or quite as much in the hundred and thirty years that have
passed since he died. Yet was there ever a time, will there ever be,
when the self-deception of the human heart or the loose thinking of the
human mind, will not allow men who never knew poverty to boast of their
cheerful endurance of it? Have we not to-day reached a time when men
with an assured income of ten, twenty, or even thirty pounds a week,
affect to consider themselves too poor to be able to afford to marry?
And where will such people better find the needed recall to fact, than
in Johnson's trenchant and unanswerable appeal to the obvious truth as
all can see it, if they will, for themselves, in the visible conditions
of the world about them: "No man can, with any propriety, be termed
poor who does not see the greater part of mankind richer than himself?"

This hold on the realities of life is the most essential element in
Johnson's greatness. Ordinary people felt it from the first, however
unconsciously, and looked to Johnson as something more than an author.
Pope might do himself honour by acclaiming the verses of the unknown
poet: Warburton might hasten to pay his tribute to the unknown critic:
but they could not give Johnson, what neither {26} of them could have
gained for himself, the confidence, soon to be felt by the whole
reading part of the population of England, that here was a man uniquely
rich in the wisdom of every day, learned but no victim of learning,
sincerely religious but with a religion that never tried to ignore the
facts of human life, a scholar, a philosopher and a Christian, but also
pre-eminently a man.

A grave man, no doubt, apt to deal in grave subjects, especially when
he had his pen in his hand. But that helped rather than hindered his
influence. He would not have liked to think that he owed part of his
own authority to the sixteenth and seventeenth century Puritans, but no
doubt he did. Still the Puritan movement only deepened a