(309.) DR. JOHNSON.

The earlier part,―nay, by far the greater part,—of Johnson's career was passed in obscure and apparently hopeless struggles with want and indigence; and, however these may have enlarged his knowledge of human life, or fortified his powers of industry and reflection, they only place in a higher elevation the virtue of the man, and the intellectual vigour of the great scholar. He passed some time at Pembroke College, Oxford: but his father's misfortunes compelled him to leave the University without a degree. To the aspirant after literary fame, to him who takes a wise pleasure in tracing the struggles of genius to emerge from a sea of difficulties, few things are more delightful or more salutary than to follow step by step the commencement of Johnson's career:

"Slow rises worth by poverty oppressed!"

Poor, independent, ambitious, conscious of his own powers, he adopted the desperate, yet natural resolution of launching on the broad ocean of London society, and travelled up to the capital in company with his friend and former pupil, David Garrick, who was destined afterwards to obtain, on the stage, a reputation as great as that ultimately acquired in literature by his companion. Johnson now commenced the profession of author, obtaining a scanty and precarious subsistence by translating and writing task-work for the booksellers, and principally employed as a contributor to the Gentleman's Magazine.

Johnson's style during the whole of his career was exceedingly peculiar and characteristic, both in its beauties and defects, and, when he arrived at eminence, may be said to have produced a revolution in the manner of writing in English. It is, in the highest degree, pompous, sonorous, and, to use a happy expression of Coleridge, hyper-latinistic: running into perpetual antithesis, and balancing period against period with an almost rhythmical regularity, which at once fills and fatigues the ear. The great deficiency of the style is want—not of ease, as has been unjustly supposed, for Johnson's strong and nervous intellect wielded its polished and ponderous weapon with perfect mastery and freedom,—but of that familiar flexibility which is best adapted to the general course of disquisition.

Knowledge, good sense, sincerity, he possessed, at least, in as high a degree as his predecessors; but the reader observes a lack of ease,

a want of light and shade, for which not all the imposing qualities of Johnson's mind can compensate. Addison and Steel talk; Johnson declaims. The former address you like virtuous, well-bred men of the world, whose scholastic acquirements have been harmonized and digested by long intercourse with polished society; Johnson rather like a university professor, who retains, in the world, something of the stiffness of the chair.

In 1755 appeared the celebrated Dictionary of the English Language, on which Johnson had been laboriously engaged during a period of about seven years.

As a moralist, as a painter of men and minds, Johnson has done Shakspeare, at least, as far as any man could, ample justice; but, in his judgment of the great creative poet's more romantic manifestations, he exhibits an insensibility which was partly the result of his education and of the age in which he lived, and partly, without doubt, the consequence of the peculiar constitution of his mind.

It was his positivism, to borrow a most expressive French word, that gave him such an extraordinary and well-deserved supremacy, as a conversationist; and it was this mixture of learning, benevolence, wit, virtue and good sense, that makes the admirable portrait of him, in the memoirs of his friend and disciple Boswell, the most interesting and living portrait which literature exhibits, of a great and good man.— -Thomas B. Shaw.

(310.) EARTH AND HEAVEN.

Confronted with death in its least accountable form, we stand bewildered with the mystery of Life; and "obstinate questionings" about God and Spirit and Time and Immortality flow through our souls, like the night-ripples of forlorn rivers struggling eastward in the dark. There is no separation in nature attended with such a sense of abrupt departure, absence, distance, utter and eternal abstraction, as that of friend from friend at the bed of death. All other farewells have images that fade on the sight, or echoes that die on the ear. But in this there is no trace, or token, or footprint, or sound, or shadow, which can even suggest to us which way our Beloved One has gone. At one moment we are gazing in at the windows of heaven, which lead through spiritual realms of affection and thought, all the way up to the great Source of life: the next, the windows are closed, and we are confronting dead Nature alone; for the dust that is left of our friend has no more genuine connection with him than if it were a statue or a flower. The bank of the mystical

Jordan which separates the Wilderness of this life from the Canaan of a better, is rimmed with total darkness. Our dear ones approach the dreaded verge and disappear from our sight. We peer in vain into the terrible abyss. The sensation is perhaps the same to them that it is to us. To their reverted eyes we may seem also to have been swallowed up in sudden night. An immeasurable wall of blackness divides us. Cries, calls, prayers, however importunate or heart-breaking from one party to the other, strike back only in wailing echoes upon themselves. But what a different scene may be enacted on the other side of the great curtain which separates earth from heaven. On one side we have the dark trappings of woe; the solemn hearse, the funeral crape, the sad procession, the wails of grief, the dreadful "earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust." Yet on the other side, nothing of this can be possible. To the perceptions of angels our death must be a birth, our departure an arrival, our burial a resurrection. The grave for them has no existence: life no break in its continuous current. They look on us merely as travellers coming up from a lower sphere, and they welcome us gladly to their glorious homes.-W. H. Holcombe.

THE END.