account by
Johnson. "The last of men," says Madame D'Arblay, "was Doctor Johnson to
have abetted squandering the delicacy of integrity by nullifying the
labors of talents."

The Club, Johnson's Club, did itself no honor by rejecting on political
grounds two distinguished men, one a Tory, the other a Whig. Madame
D'Arblay tells the story thus: "A similar ebullition of political rancor
with that which so difficultly had been conquered for Mr. Canning foamed
over the ballot box to the exclusion of Mr. Rogers."

An offence punishable with imprisonment is, in this language, an offence
"which produces incarceration." To be starved to death is "to sink from
inanition into nonentity." Sir Isaac Newton is "the developer of the
skies in their embodied movements;" and Mrs. Thrale, when a party of
clever people sat silent, is said "to have been provoked by the dulness
of a taciturnity that, in the midst of such renowned interlocutors,
produced as narcotic a torpor as could have been caused by a dearth the
most barren of all human faculties." In truth, it is impossible to look
at any page of Madame D'Arblay's later works without finding flowers of
rhetoric like these. Nothing in the language of those jargonists at whom
Mr. Gosport laughed, nothing in the language of Sir Sedley Clarendel,
approaches this new Euphuism.

It is from no unfriendly feeling to Madame D'Arblay's memory that we
have expressed ourselves so strongly on the subject of her style. On the
contrary, we conceive that we have really rendered a service to her
reputation. That her later works were complete failures is a fact too
notorious to be dissembled; and some persons, we believe, have
consequently taken up a notion that she was from the first an overrated
writer, and that she had not the powers which were necessary to maintain
her on the eminence on which good luck and fashion had placed her. We
believe, on the contrary, that her early popularity was no more than the
just reward of distinguished merit, and would never have undergone an
eclipse, if she had only been content to go on writing in her mother
tongue. If she failed when she quitted her own province, and attempted
to occupy one in which she had neither part nor lot, this reproach is
common to her with a crowd of distinguished men. Newton failed when he
turned from the courses of the stars, and the ebb and flow of the ocean,
to apocalyptic seals and vials. Bentley failed when he turned from Homer
and A