elaborate and ornate language and their deep and solemn tone of sentiment, than to the brilliant but comparatively superficial writers of Queen Anne’s time.  He was, one may say, a scholar of the old type, forced by circumstances upon the world, but always retaining a sympathy for the scholar’s life and temper.  Accordingly, his style acquired something of the old elaboration, though the attempt to conform to the canons of a later age renders the structure disagreeably monotonous.  His tendency to pomposity is not redeemed by the naivete and spontaneity of his masters.

The inferiority of Johnson’s written to his spoken utterances is indicative of his divided life.  There are moments at which his writing takes the terse, vigorous tone of his talk.  In his letters, such as those to Chesterfield and Macpherson and in occasional passages of his pamphlets, we see that he could be pithy enough when he chose to descend from his Latinized abstractions to good concrete English; but that is only when he becomes excited.  His face when in repose, we are told, appeared to be almost imbecile; he was constantly sunk in reveries, from which he was only roused by a challenge to conversation.  In his writings, for the most part, we seem to be listening to the reverie rather than the talk; we are overhearing a soliloquy in his study, not a vigorous discussion over the twentieth cup of tea; he is not fairly put upon his mettle, and is content to expound without enforcing.  We seem to see a man, heavy-eyed, ponderous in his gestures, like some huge mechanism which grinds out a ponderous tissue of verbiage as heavy as it is certainly solid.

The substance corresponds to the style.  Johnson has something in common with the fashionable pessimism of modern times.  No sentimentalist of to-day could be more convinced that life is in the main miserable.  It was his favourite theory, according to Mrs. Thrale, that all human action was prompted by the “vacuity of life.”  Men act solely in the hope of escaping from themselves.  Evil, as a follower of Schopenhauer would assert, is the positive, and good merely the negative of evil.  All desire is at bottom an attempt to escape from pain.  The doctrine neither resulted from, nor generated, a philosophical theory in Johnson’s case, and was in the main a generalization of his own experience.  Not the less, the aim of most of his writing is to express this sentiment in one form or other.  He differs, indeed, from most modern sentimentalists, in having the most hearty contempt for useless whining.  If he dwells upon human misery, it is because he feels that it is as futile to join with the optimist in ignoring, as with the pessimist in howling over the evil.  We are in a sad world, full of pain, but we have to make the best of it.  Stubborn patience and hard work are the sole remedies, or rather the sole means of temporary escape.  Much of the Rambler is occupied with variations upon this theme, and expresses