y. The melancholy is intensified by the ponderous
style, which suggests a man weary of a heavy burden. The air seems to be
filled with what Johnson once called 'inspissated gloom.' 'Rasselas,'
one may say, has a narrow escape of being a great book, though it is ill
calculated for the hasty readers of to-day. Indeed, the defects are
serious enough. The class of writing to which it belongs demands a
certain dramatic picturesqueness to point the moral effectively. Not
only the long-winded sentences, but the slow evolution of thought and
the deliberation with which he works out his pictures of misery, make
the general effect dull beside such books as 'Candide' or 'Gulliver's
Travels.' A touch of epigrammatic exaggeration is very much needed; and
yet anybody who has the courage to read it through will admit that
Johnson is not an unworthy guide into those gloomy regions of
imagination which we all visit sometimes, and which it is as well to
visit in good company.

After his fashion, Johnson is a fair representative of Greatheart. His
melancholy is distinguished from that of feebler men by the strength of
the conviction that 'it will do no good to whine.' We know his view of
the great prophet of the Revolutionary school. 'Rousseau,' he said, to
Boswell's astonishment, 'is a very bad man. I would sooner sign a
sentence for his transportation than that of any felon who has gone from
the Old Bailey these many years. Yes, I should like to have him work in
the plantations.' That is a fine specimen of the good Johnsonese
prejudices of which we hear so much; and, of course, it is easy to infer
that Johnson was an ignorant bigot, who had not in any degree taken the
measure of the great moving forces of his time. Nothing, indeed, can be
truer than that Johnson cared very little for the new gospel of the
rights of man. His truly British contempt for all such fancies ('for
anything I see,' he once said, 'foreigners are fools') is one of his
strongest characteristics. Now, Rousseau and his like took a view of the
world as it was quite as melancholy as Johnson's. They inferred that it
ought to be turned upside down, assured that the millennium would begin
as soon as a few revolutionary dogmas were accepted. All their remedies
appeared to the excellent Doctor as so much of that cant of which it was
a man's first duty to clear his mind. The evils of life were far too
deeply seated to be caused or cured by kings or demagogues. One of the
mos