kindling with rapture and
attention swelling into praise."

In that shrewd observation lies the secret {201} of the comparative
unproductiveness of his later years. Men like Dryden and Gibbon and
Lecky are the men to get through immense literary labours: to a great
talker like Johnson what can the praises of reviewers or of posterity
be in comparison with the flashing eyes, and attentive ears, the
expectant silence and spontaneous applause, of the friends in whom he
has an immediate mirror of his success?

It is impossible and unnecessary to multiply illustrations. The only
thing that need be added is that even in _Rasselas_ and the essays,
Johnson's slow-moving style is constantly relieved by those brief and
pregnant generalizations of which he is one of the greatest masters in
our language. They are so close to life as all men know it, that the
careless reader, as we have already seen, is apt to take them for
platitudes; but there is all the difference between the stale
superficiality which coldly repeats what only its ears have heard, and
these sayings of Johnson heated to new energy in the fires of
conscience, thought and experience. "I have already enjoyed too much,"
says the Prince in _Rasselas_; "give me something to desire." And
then, a little later, as so often happens with the wise, comes the
other side of the medal of truth: "Human life is everywhere {202} a
state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed." Or
take such sentences as that embodying the favourite Johnsonian and
Socratic distinction: "to man is permitted the contemplation of the
skies, but the practice of virtue is commanded"; or, "we will not
endeavour to fix the destiny of kingdoms: it is our business to
consider what beings like us may perform"; or such sayings as, "the
truth is that no mind is much employed upon the present: recollection
and anticipation fill up almost all our moments"; "marriage has many
pains but celibacy has no pleasures"; "envy is almost the only vice
which is practicable at all times and in every place"; "no place
affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a
public library"; "I have always thought it the duty of an anonymous
author to write as if he expected to be hereafter known"; or, last of
all, to bring citation to an end, that characteristic saying about the
omnipresence of the temptations of idleness: "to do nothing is in every
man's power: we can never want an oppor