style was beneath the dignity of such a work, as, for instance, Samuel Richardson. "Nay," said Johnson, “I have done worse than that; I have cited thee, David."

The work appeared on April 15, 1755, in two folio volumes, at the price of £4 108., and was received with wonder and acclamation. "I may surely," he wrote, "be contented without the praise of perfection, which if I could obtain in this gloom of solitude, what would it avail me? I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave." But there was some morbid exaggeration here.

"The Rambler"

The Dictionary did not absorb all Johnson's energies between 1748 and 1755. On March 20, 1750, the first essay of his Rambler appeared. Following the model of Addison's Spectator, Johnson came forth, says Boswell, as "a majestick teacher of moral and religious wisdom." It is worth noting that just as the Spectator and Tatler had been largely inspired by the talk of the Queen Anne coffee-houses, Johnson's essays reflected in some measure the conversations he enjoyed in the Club he had founded in Ivy Lane, Paternoster Row. During just two years Johnson wrote two essays a week for publication on Tuesdays and Fridays. He invariably supplied his copy at the last moment, and he rarely read a proof; but he revised all the essays carefully for the collected edition. The success of the production was not great. As author Johnson received four guineas a week, which worked out at a guinea per thousand words; and the sales, at twopence, did not reach five hundred copies a day. But there were compensations. Mrs. Johnson said to him: "I thought very well of you before, but I did not imagine you could have written anything equal to this." Nor was self-approval wanting: Johnson said to a friend, "My other works are wine and water, but my Rambler is pure wine."

Of the 208 Rambler essays Johnson wrote all but four or

five. A general idea of their subject-matter may be conveyed by giving a few typical titles. Such are:

Folly of Anger: Misery of a Peevish Old Age.
Various Arts of Self-Delusion.

Advantages of Mediocrity: An Eastern Fable.
Reasons Why Advice is Generally Ineffectual.
A Proper Audience Necessary to a Wit.

A Critical Examination of "Samson Agonistes."
Cruelty of Parental Tyranny.

Directions to Authors Attacked by Critics.

History of a Legacy-Hunter.

Effect of Sudden Riches upon the Manners.

Titles of essays, however, convey little; treatment is all. Johnson's style as an essayist was as heavy-handed and turgid as Steele's or Addison's was light, limpid, and resourceful. Indeed, he criticised his work in a phrase when, says Boswell, "having read over one of his Ramblers, Mr. Langton asked him how he liked that paper; he shook his head, and answered, 'too wordy.'" The same verdict may be passed on his later Idler essays, though in these a livelier fancy and an easier style are sometimes visible.

Mr. Augustine Birrell has compared the march of Johnson's sentences to the measured tread of a well-drilled company of soldiers. His style is well suited to the expression of large verdicts and sombre reflections. Take this declaration of Shakespeare's permanence:

The sand heaped by one flood is scattered by another, but the rock always continues in its place. The stream of time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabricks of other poets, passes without injury the adamant of Shakespeare.

Or the famous passage in his last Idler essay:

There are few things, not purely evil, of which we can say, without some emotion of uneasiness, this is the last. Those who never could agree together shed tears when mutual discontent has determined them to final separation; of a place which has been frequently visited, though without pleasure, the last look is taken with heaviness of heart; and the Idler, with all his chilliness of tranquillity, is not wholly unaffected by the thought that his last essay is before him.

The secret horror of the last is inseparable from a thinking being, whose life is limited, and to whom death is dreadful. We always make a secret comparison between a part and the whole; the termination of any period of life reminds us that life itself has likewise its termination; when we have done anything for the last time we involuntarily reflect that a part of the days allotted to us is past, and that as more is past there is less remaining.

"Rasselas"

Johnson's last year in Gough Square was clouded by the death of his mother, at the age of ninety. In the Idler (No. 41) he referred to this event in those words of sombre beauty: "The last year, the last day, must come. It has come, and is past. The life which made my own life pleasant is at an end, and the gates of death are shut upon my prospects." To relieve his heart, and to pay his mother's funeral expenses, he sat down and wrote his allegorical story on the theme "Vanitas vanitatum," Rasselas, in the evenings of a single week in the spring of 1759. He received £75 for it, and £25 for its second edition. It is constantly stated that Rasselas was written in Johnson's next residence, in Staple Inn, Holborn, but an examination of relevant dates in Boswell's Life shows that this is impossible. It is certain that Rasselas was written in Gough Square. There from night to night, the princely wanderers from the happy valley in Abyssinia travelled on in their vain search for greater

happiness; there Imlac grew eloquent and Pekuah timid, the Pyramids were measured, and the Astronomer rescued from the mists of his distraught imagination; and there Johnson penned that quiet "Conclusion, in which nothing is concluded," save only that "they deliberated a while what was to be done, and resolved, when the inundation should cease, to return to Abissinia." Rasselas gives us the moralisations of the Rambler and the Idler thinly connected by a story. It is now the most widely read of Johnson's prose writings, while it has a close affinity, in mood and motive, to the best of his poems, written ten years earlier, “The Vanity of Human Wishes." A low thunder of melancholy reflection on the transitoriness of human glory and the ironies of fate is heard in every line of this poem. A famous passage is that in which Johnson refers to the hard lot of the writer and the scholar:

Yet hope not life from grief or danger free,
Nor think the doom of man reversed for thee:
Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes,
And pause a while from learning, to be wise;
There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.
See nations, slowly wise, and meanly just,
To buried merit raise the tardy bust.

In dreams yet flatter, once again attend,
Hear Lydiat's life, and Galileo's end.

Equally memorable is the passage in which he draws conclusions from the fate of Charles of Sweden, sunk from splendour into exile:

His fall was destined to a barren strand,

A petty fortress, and a dubious hand;

He left the name at which the world grows pale,

To point a moral, or adorn a tale.

Another literary labour begun by Johnson in Gough Square was his annotated edition of Shakespeare. He had projected it