y
whether the advantage of the new scheme be proportionate to the labour."
We may still notice a "repercussion" of words from one coxcomb to
another; though somehow the words have been changed or translated.

Johnson's style is characteristic of the individual and of the epoch.
The preceding generation had exhibited the final triumph of common sense
over the pedantry of a decaying scholasticism. The movements represented
by Locke's philosophy, by the rationalizing school in theology, and by
the so-called classicism of Pope and his followers, are different phases
of the same impulse. The quality valued above all others in philosophy,
literature, and art was clear, bright, common sense. To expel the
mystery which had served as a cloak for charlatans was the great aim of
the time, and the method was to appeal from the professors of exploded
technicalities to the judgment of cultivated men of the world. Berkeley
places his Utopia in happy climes,--

Where nature guides, and virtue rules,
_Where men shall not impose for truth and sense
The pedantry of courts and schools_.

Simplicity, clearness, directness are, therefore, the great virtues of
thought and style. Berkeley, Addison, Pope, and Swift are the great
models of such excellence in various departments of literature.

In the succeeding generation we become aware of a certain leaven of
dissatisfaction with the aesthetic and intellectual code thus inherited.
The supremacy of common sense, the superlative importance of clearness,
is still fully acknowledged, but there is a growing undertone of dissent
in form and substance. Attempts are made to restore philosophical
conceptions assailed by Locke and his followers; the rationalism, of the
deistic or semi-deistic writers is declared to be superficial; their
optimistic theories disregard the dark side of nature, and provide no
sufficient utterance for the sadness caused by the contemplation of
human suffering; and the polished monotony of Pope's verses begins to
fall upon those who shall tread in his steps. Some daring sceptics are
even inquiring whether he is a poet at all. And simultaneously, though
Addison is still a kind of sacred model, the best prose writers are
beginning to aim at a more complex structure of sentence, fitted for the
expression of a wider range of thought and emotion.

Johnson, though no conscious revolutionist, shares this growing
discontent. The _Spectator_ is written in the language of