tever credit
is due to the man who performs one more variation on the old theme,
_Vanitas vanitatum_, we must in candour admit that the 'Rambler' has the
one unpardonable fault: it is unreadable.

What an amazing turn it shows for commonplaces! That life is short, that
marriages from mercenary motives produce unhappiness, that different men
are virtuous in different degrees, that advice is generally ineffectual,
that adversity has its uses, that fame is liable to suffer from
detraction;--these and a host of other such maxims are of the kind upon
which no genius and no depth of feeling can confer a momentary interest.
Here and there, indeed, the pompous utterance invests them with an
unlucky air of absurdity. 'Let no man from this time,' is the comment in
one of his stories, 'suffer his felicity to depend on the death of his
aunt.' Every actor, of course, uses the same dialect. A gay young
gentleman tells us that he used to amuse his companions by giving them
notice of his friends' oddities. 'Every man,' he says, 'has some
habitual contortion of body, or established mode of expression, which
never fails to excite mirth if it be pointed out to notice. By
premonition of these particularities, I secured our pleasantry.' The
feminine characters, Flirtillas, and Cleoras, and Euphelias, and
Penthesileas, are, if possible, still more grotesque. Macaulay remarks
that he wears the petticoat with as ill a grace as Falstaff himself. The
reader, he thinks, will cry out with Sir Hugh, 'I like not when a 'oman
has a great peard! I spy a great peard under her muffler.' Oddly enough
Johnson gives the very same quotation; and goes on to warn his supposed
correspondents that Phyllis must send no more letters from the Horse
Guards; and that Belinda must 'resign her pretensions to female elegance
till she has lived three weeks without hearing the politics of Button's
Coffee House.' The Doctor was probably sensible enough of his own
defects. And yet there is a still more wearisome set of articles. In
emulation of the precedent set by Addison, Johnson indulges in the
dreariest of allegories. Criticism, we are told, was the eldest daughter
of Labour and Truth, but at last resigned in favour of Time, and left
Prejudice and False Taste to reign in company with Fraud and Mischief.
Then we have the genealogy of Wit and Learning, and of Satire, the Son
of Wit and Malice, and an account of their various quarrels, and the
decision of Jupiter. Neither