ing the sun: Sun, how I hate thy beams!' The phrase
sounds exaggerated, but it was apparently his settled conviction that
the only remedy for melancholy, except indeed the religious remedy, was
in hard work or in the rapture of conversational strife. His little
circle of friends called forth his humour as the House of Commons
excited Chatham's eloquence; and both of them were inclined to mouth too
much when deprived of the necessary stimulus. Chatham's set speeches
were as pompous as Johnson's deliberate writing. Johnson and Chatham
resemble the chemical bodies which acquire entirely new properties when
raised beyond a certain degree of temperature. Indeed, we frequently
meet touches of the conversational Johnson in his controversial writing.
'Taxation no Tyranny' is at moments almost as pithy as Swift, though the
style is never so simple. The celebrated Letter to Chesterfield, and the
letter in which he tells MacPherson that he will not be 'deterred from
detecting what he thinks a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian,' are as
good specimens of the smashing repartee as anything in Boswell's
reports. Nor, indeed, does his pomposity sink to mere verbiage so often
as might be supposed. It is by no means easy to translate his ponderous
phrases into simple words without losing some of their meaning. The
structure of the sentences is compact, though they are too elaborately
balanced and stuffed with superfluous antitheses. The language might be
simpler, but it is not a mere sham aggregation of words. His written
style, however faulty in other respects, is neither slipshod nor
ambiguous, and passes into his conversational style by imperceptible
degrees. The radical identity is intelligible, though the superficial
contrast is certainly curious. We may perhaps say that his century,
unfavourable to him as a writer, gave just what he required for talking.
If, as is sometimes said, the art of conversation is disappearing, it is
because society has become too large and diffuse. The good talker, as
indeed the good artist of every kind, depends upon the tacit
co-operation of the social medium. The chorus, as Johnson has himself
shown very well in one of the 'Ramblers,' is quite as essential as the
main performer. Nobody talks well in London, because everybody has
constantly to meet a fresh set of interlocutors, and is as much put out
as a musician who has to be always learning a new instrument. A literary
dictator has ceased to be a possib