Johnson's subjects for the ten _Ramblers_ which appeared between
November 20 and December 22, 1750: the shortness of life, the value of
good-humour, the folly of heirs who live on their expectations,
peevishness, the impossibility of knowing mankind till one has
experienced misfortune, the self-deceptions of conscience, the moral
responsibilities of men of genius, the power of novelty, the justice of
suspecting the suspicious, the pleasures of change and in particular
that of winter following upon summer. None of these can be called
exciting topics. Yet when there is a man of real power to discuss
them, and men of sense to listen to him, they can make up a book which
goes through many editions, is translated into foreign languages, and
is called by a great critic a hundred and fifty years after its
appearance, a "splendid repository of wisdom and truth." With the
exception of the first word, Sir Walter Raleigh's daring praise may be
accepted as strictly true. There is nothing splendid about _The
Rambler_ or _The Idler_. The more shining qualities {196} of
literature, except occasional eloquence, are conspicuously wanting in
them. There is no imagination, little of the fancy, wit and readiness
of illustration so omnipresent in Johnson's talk, little power of
drawing character, very little humour. He often puts his essay into
the form of a story, but it remains an essay still. His strength is
always in the reflections, never in the facts related or the persons
described. The club of Essex gentlemen who fancied themselves to be
satirized in _The Rambler_ were only an extreme instance of the common
vanity which loves to fancy itself the subject of other people's
thoughts. Johnson's portraits have not life enough to be caricatures;
still less can posterity find in them the finer truth of human beings.
His was a profounder mind than Addison's; but he could not have drawn
Sir Roger de Coverley. He had not "run about the world," as he said,
for nothing, and he knew a great deal about men and women; but he could
not create. _Rasselas_, his only professed story, is a total failure
as a story. It is a series of moral essays, and whoever reads it must
read it for the same reasons as he reads _The Rambler_. The remark
Johnson absurdly made of Richardson's masterpiece is exactly true of
his own _Rasselas_: "If you were to read it for the story {197} your
impatience would be so fretted that you would hang yourself."

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