are the histories of such semi-allegorical
personages as Almamoulin, the son of Nouradin, or of Anningait and Ayut,
the Greenland lovers, much more refreshing to modern readers. That
Johnson possessed humour of no mean order, we know from Boswell; but no
critic could have divined his power from the clumsy gambols in which he
occasionally recreates himself. Perhaps his happiest effort is a
dissertation upon the advantage of living in garrets; but the humour
struggles and gasps dreadfully under the weight of words. 'There are,'
he says, 'some who would continue blockheads' (the Alpine Club was not
yet founded), 'even on the summit of the Andes or the Peak of Teneriffe.
But let not any man be considered as unimprovable till this potent
remedy has been tried; for perhaps he was found to be great only in a
garret, as the joiner of Aretaeus was rational in no other place but his
own shop.'

How could a man of real power write such unendurable stuff? Or how,
indeed, could any man come to embody his thoughts in the style of which
one other sentence will be a sufficient example? As it is afterwards
nearly repeated, it may be supposed to have struck his fancy. The
remarks of the philosophers who denounce temerity are, he says, 'too
just to be disputed and too salutary to be rejected; but there is
likewise some danger lest timorous prudence should be inculcated till
courage and enterprise are wholly repressed and the mind congested in
perpetual inactivity by the fatal influence of frigorifick wisdom.' Is
there not some danger, we ask, that the mind will be benumbed into
perpetual torpidity by the influence of this soporific sapience? It is
still true, however, that this Johnsonese, so often burlesqued and
ridiculed, was, as far as we can judge, a genuine product. Macaulay says
that it is more offensive than the mannerism of Milton or Burke, because
it is a mannerism adopted on principle and sustained by constant effort.
Facts do not confirm the theory. Milton's prose style seems to be the
result of a conscious effort to run English into classical moulds.
Burke's mannerism does not appear in his early writings, and we can
trace its development from the imitation of Bolingbroke to the last
declamation against the Revolution. But Johnson seems to have written
Johnsonese from his cradle. In his first original composition, the
preface to Father Lobo's 'Abyssinia,' the style is as distinctive as in
the 'Rambler.' The Parliamentary repo