ility, so far as direct personal
influence is concerned. In the club, Johnson knew how every blow would
tell, and in the rapid thrust and parry dropped the heavy style which
muffled his utterances in print. He had to deal with concrete
illustrations, instead of expanding into platitudinous generalities. The
obsolete theories which impair the value of his criticism and his
politics, become amusing in the form of pithy sayings, though they weary
us when asserted in formal expositions. His greatest literary effort,
the 'Dictionary,' has of necessity become antiquated in use, and, in
spite of the intellectual vigour indicated, can hardly be commended for
popular reading. And thus but for the inimitable Boswell, it must be
admitted that Johnson would probably have sunk very deeply into
oblivion. A few good sayings would have been preserved by Mrs. Thrale
and others, or have been handed down by tradition, and doubtless
assigned in process of time to Sydney Smith and other conversational
celebrities. A few couplets from the 'Vanity of Human Wishes' would not
yet have been submerged, and curious readers would have recognised the
power of 'Rasselas,' and been delighted with some shrewd touches in the
'Lives of the Poets.' But with all desire to magnify critical insight,
it must be admitted that that man would have shown singular penetration,
and been regarded as an eccentric commentator, who had divined the
humour and the fervour of mind which lay hid in the remains of the huge
lexicographer. And yet when we have once recognised his power, we can
see it everywhere indicated in his writings, though by an unfortunate
fatality the style or the substance was always so deeply affected by the
faults of the time, that the product is never thoroughly sound. His
tenacious conservatism caused him to cling to decaying materials for the
want of anything better, and he has suffered the natural penalty. He was
a great force half wasted, so far as literature was concerned, because
the fashionable costume of the day hampered the free exercises of his
powers, and because the only creeds to which he could attach himself
were in the phase of decline and inanition. A century earlier or later
he might have succeeded in expressing himself through books as well as
through his talk; but it is not given to us to choose the time of our
birth, and some very awkward consequences follow.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See, for example, the great debate on February 13, 1