rts in the 'Gentleman's Magazine'
make Pitt and Fox[1] express sentiments which are probably their own in
language which is as unmistakably Johnson's. It is clear that his style,
good or bad, was the same from his earliest efforts. It is only in his
last book, the 'Lives of the Poets,' that the mannerism, though equally
marked, is so far subdued as to be tolerable. What he himself called his
habit of using 'too big words and too many of them' was no affectation,
but as much the result of his special idiosyncrasy as his queer
gruntings and twitchings. Sir Joshua Reynolds indeed maintained, and we
may believe so attentive an observer, that his strange physical
contortions were the result of bad habit, not of actual disease.
Johnson, he said, could sit as still as other people when his attention
was called to it. And possibly, if he had tried, he might have avoided
the fault of making 'little fishes talk like whales.' But how did the
bad habits arise? According to Boswell, Johnson professed to have
'formed his style' partly upon Sir W. Temple, and on 'Chambers's
Proposal for his Dictionary.' The statement was obviously
misinterpreted: but there is a glimmering of truth in the theory that
the 'style was formed'--so far as those words have any meaning--on the
'giants of the seventeenth century,' and especially upon Sir Thomas
Browne. Johnson's taste, in fact, had led him to the study of writers
in many ways congenial to him. His favourite book, as we know, was
Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy.' The pedantry of the older school did
not repel him; the weighty thought rightly attracted him; and the more
complex structure of sentence was perhaps a pleasant contrast to an ear
saturated with the Gallicised neatness of Addison and Pope. Unluckily,
the secret of the old majestic cadence was hopelessly lost. Johnson,
though spiritually akin to the giants, was the firmest ally and subject
of the dwarfish dynasty which supplanted them. The very faculty of
hearing seems to change in obedience to some mysterious law at different
stages of intellectual development; and that which to one generation is
delicious music is to another a mere droning of bagpipes or the grinding
of monotonous barrel-organs.

Assuming that a man can find perfect satisfaction in the versification
of the 'Essay on Man,' we can understand his saying of 'Lycidas,' that
'the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers
unpleasing.' In one of the 'Ramblers' w