nature his friendships were not only firm but generous, and tender beneath a rugged exterior: he wounded none of those feelings which the habits of his life enabled him to estimate; but he had become too hardened by serious distress not to contract some disregard for those minor delicacies, which become so keenly susceptible in a calm and prosperous fortune.

He was a Tory, not without some propensities towards Jacobitism, and high churchman, with more attachment to ecclesiastical authority, and a splendid worship, than is quite consistent with the spirit of Protestantism. On these subjects he never permitted himself to doubt, nor tolerated difference of opinion in others. The vigour of his understanding is no more to be estimated by his opinions on subjects where it was bound by his prejudices, than the strength of a man's body by the effects of a limb in fetters.

His conversation, which was one of the most powerful instruments of his extensive influence, was artificial, dogmatical, sententious, and poignant, adapted with the most admirable versatility to every subject as it arose, and distinguished by an almost unparalleled power of serious repartee. He seems to have considered himself as a sort of colloquial magistrate, who inflicted severe punishment from just policy. His course of life led him to treat those sensibilities, which such severity wounds, as fantastic and effeminate, and he entered society too late to acquire those habits of politeness which are a substitute for natural delicacy.

As a man, then, Johnson had a masculine understanding, clouded on important subjects by prejudice; a conscience pure beyond the ordinary measure of human virtue; a heart full of rugged benevolence, and a disregard only for those feelings in controversy or in conversation, of which he had not learnt the force, or which he thought himself obliged to wound. As a writer, he is memorable as one of those who effect a

change in the general style of a nation, and have vigour enough to leave the stamp of their own peculiarities upon their language.

In the progress of English style, three periods may be easily distinguished. The first period extended from Sir Thomas More to Lord Clarendon. During great part of this period, the style partook of the rudeness and fluctuation of an unformed language, in which use had not yet determined the words that were to be English. Writers had not yet discovered the combination of words which best suits the original structure and immutable constitution of our language: where the terms were English, the arrangement was Latin-the exclusive language of learning, and that in which every truth in science, and every model of elegance, was contemplated by youth. For a century and a half, ineffectual attempts were made to bend our vulgar tongue to the genius of the language supposed to be superior ; and the whole of this period, though not without a capricious mixture of coarse idiom, may be called the Latin, or pedantic age, of our style.

In the second period, which extended from the Restoration to the middle of the eighteenth century, a series of writers appeared, of less genius indeed than their predecessors, but more successful in their experiments to discover the mode of writing most adapted to the genius of the language. About the same period that a similar change was effected in France by Pascal, they began to banish from style learned as well as vulgar phraseology, and to confine themselves to the part of the language naturally used in general conversation by well-educated men. That middle region, which lies between vulgarity and pedantry, remains commonly unchanged, while both extremes are equally condemned to perpetual revolution. Those who select words from that permanent part of a language, and who arrange them according to its natural order, have discovered the

true secret of rendering their writings permanent, and of preserving that rank among the classical writers of their country, which men of greater intellectual power have failed to attain. Of these writers, whose language has not yet been slightly superannuated, Cowley was probably the earliest, as Dryden and Addison were assuredly the greatest.

The third period may be called the Rhetorical, and is distinguished by the prevalence of a school of writers, of which Johnson was the founder. The fundamental character of the Rhetorical style is, that it employs undisguised art, where classical writers appear only to obey the impulse of a cultivated and adorned nature. As declamation is the fire of eloquence without its substance, so rhetoric consists in the forms of eloquence without its spirit. In the schools of the rhetorician, every ornament of composition is made by a rule; where ornaments are natural, the feeling from which they spring, if it be tempered, performs the office of taste, by regulating their number, and adapting them to the occasion; but those who fabricate them by rule without this natural regulator, have no security against unseasonable and undistinguishing profusion. These writers have not the variety of nature, but the uniformity of a Dutch garden.

As the English classical writers had been led by the nature of their subjects as well as the bent of their genius, to cultivate a temperate elegance, rather than to emulate the energy and grandeur of their less polished predecessors, so Johnson and his followers, in their attempt (which was partly successful) to impart more vigour and dignity to the general style, receded so far from vulgarity as to lose all ease and variety, and so exclusively preferred terms of Latin origin as to sacrifice all that part of the English language on which its peculiar character depends. With Latin words they attempted also the renewal of those inversions and invo

lutions which the syntax of that language allows, but which, after a vain effort of a century, had been banished from ours. All their words were thrown into one mould, and their periods came up in the same shape. As the mind of Johnson was robust, but neither nimble nor graceful, so his style, though sometimes significant, nervous, and even majestic, was void of all grace and ease, and being the most unlike of all styles to the natural effusion of a cultivated mind, had the least pretensions to the praise of eloquence. During the period, now near a close, in which he was a favourite model, a stiff symmetry and tedious monotony succeeded to that various music with which the taste of Addison diversified his periods, and to that natural imagery which the latter's beautiful genius seemed with graceful negligence to scatter over his composition. They who had not fancy enough to be ornamental, sought to distinguish themselves by being artificial; and, though there were some illustrious exceptions, the general style had all those marks of corrupt taste which Johnson himself had so well satirised in his commendation of the prose of Dryden, and of which he has admirably represented the opposite in his excellent criticism on Addison. His earlier writings abound most with examples of these faults of style. Many of his Latin words in an English shape no imitator has ventured to adopt; others have already dropped from the language, and will soon be known only in Dictionaries.

Some heaviness and weariness must be felt by most readers at the perusal of essays on life and manners, written like the "Rambler;" but it ought never to be forgotten, that the two most popular writers of the eighteenth century, Addison and Johnson, were such efficacious teachers of virtue, that their writings may be numbered among the causes which, in an important degree, have contributed to preserve and to improve the morality of the British nation.

His Dictionary, though distinguished neither by the philosophy nor by the erudition which illustrate the origin and history of words, is a noble monument of his powers and his literary knowledge, and even of his industry, though it betrays frequent symptoms of that constitutional indolence which must have so often overpowered him in so immense a labour.

Towards the end of his life, when intercourse with the world had considerably softened his style, he published his "Lives of the English Poets," a work of which the subject insures popularity, and on which his fame probably now depends. He seems to have poured into it the miscellaneous information which he had collected, and the literary opinions which he had formed, during his long reign over the literature of London. The critical part has produced the warmest agitations of literary faction. The time may, perhaps, now be arrived for an impartial estimate of its merits. Whenever understanding alone is sufficient for poetical criticism, the decisions of Johnson are generally right. But the beauties of poetry must be felt before their causes are investigated. There is a poetical sensibility which, in the progress of the mind, becomes as distinct a power as a musical ear or a picturesque eye. Without a considerable degree of this sensibility, it is as vain for a man of the greatest understanding to speak of the higher beauties of poetry, as it is for a blind man to speak of colours. To adopt the warmest sentiments of poetry, to realise its boldest imagery, to yield to every impulse of enthusiasm, to submit to the illusions of fancy, to retire with the poet into his ideal worlds, were dispositions wholly foreign from the worldly sagacity and stern shrewdness of Johnson.... If this unpoetical character be considered, if the force of prejudice be estimated, if we bear in mind that in this work of his old age we must expect to find him enamoured of every paradox which he had supported with brilliant success,