truck deep enough to be
not quite forgotten. We still quote the lines about pointing a moral and
adorning a tale, which conclude a really noble passage. We are too often
reminded of his melancholy musings over the

Fears of the brave and follies of the wise,

and a few of the concluding lines of the 'Vanity of Human Wishes,' in
which he answers the question whether man must of necessity

Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate,

in helplessness and ignorance, may have something of a familiar ring. We
are to give thanks, he says,

For love, which scarce collective man can fill;
For patience, sovereign o'er transmuted ill;
For faith, that, panting for a happier seat,
Counts death kind nature's signal for retreat;
These goods for man, the laws of heaven ordain,
These goods He grants, who grants the power to gain,
With these celestial wisdom calms the mind,
And makes the happiness she does not find.

These lines, and many others which might be quoted, are noble in
expression, as well as lofty and tender in feeling. Johnson, like
Wordsworth, or even more deeply than Wordsworth, had felt all the
'heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world;' and,
though he stumbles a little in the narrow limits of his versification,
he bears himself nobly, and manages to put his heart into his poetry.
Coleridge's paraphrase of the well-known lines, 'Let observation with
extensive observation, observe mankind from China to Peru,' would
prevent us from saying that he had thrown off his verbiage. He has not
the felicity of Goldsmith's 'Traveller,' though he wrote one of the best
couplets in that admirable poem; but his ponderous lines show genuine
vigour, and can be excluded from poetry only by the help of an arbitrary
classification.

The fullest expression, however, of Johnson's feeling is undoubtedly to
be found in 'Rasselas.' The inevitable comparison with Voltaire's
'Candide,' which, by an odd coincidence, appeared almost simultaneously,
suggests some curious reflections. The resemblance between the moral of
the two books is so strong that, as Johnson remarked, it would have been
difficult not to suppose that one had given a hint to the other but for
the chronological difficulty. The contrast, indeed, is as marked as the
likeness. 'Candide' is not adapted for family reading, whereas
'Rasselas' might be a textbook for young ladies studying English in a
convent. 'Candide' is