Here is another passage, in which Johnson is speaking upon a topic more within his proper province; and which contains sound sense under its weight of words.  A man, he says, who reads a printed book, is often contented to be pleased without critical examination.  “But,” he adds, “if the same man be called to consider the merit of a production yet unpublished, he brings an imagination heated with objections to passages which he has never yet heard; he invokes all the powers of criticism, and stores his memory with Taste and Grace, Purity and Delicacy, Manners and Unities, sounds which having been once uttered by those that understood them, have been since re-echoed without meaning, and kept up to the disturbance of the world by constant repercussion from one coxcomb to another.  He considers himself as obliged to show by some proof of his abilities, that he is not consulted to no purpose, and therefore watches every opening for objection, and looks round for every opportunity to propose some specious alteration.  Such opportunities a very small degree of sagacity will enable him to find, for in every work of imagination, the disposition of parts, the insertion of incidents, and use of decorations may be varied in a thousand ways with equal propriety; and, as in things nearly equal that will always seem best to every man which he himself produces, the critic, whose business is only to propose without the care of execution, can never want the satisfaction of believing that he has suggested very important improvements, nor the power of enforcing his advice by arguments, which, as they appear convincing to himself, either his kindness or his vanity will press obstinately and importunately, without suspicion that he may possibly judge too hastily in favour of his own advice or inquiry 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.