the kind of dogged resolution with which he would have us plod through this weary world.  Take for example this passage:—­“The controversy about the reality of external evils is now at an end.  That life has many miseries, and that those miseries are sometimes at least equal to all the powers of fortitude is now universally confessed; and, therefore, it is useful to consider not only how we may escape them, but by what means those which either the accidents of affairs or the infirmities of nature must bring upon us may be mitigated and lightened, and how we may make those hours less wretched which the condition of our present existence will not allow to be very happy.

“The cure for the greatest part of human miseries is not radical, but palliative.  Infelicity is involved in corporeal nature, and interwoven with our being; all attempts, therefore, to decline it wholly are useless and vain; the armies of pain send their arrows against us on every side, the choice is only between those which are more or less sharp, or tinged with poison of greater or less malignity; and the strongest armour which reason can supply will only blunt their points, but cannot repel them.

“The great remedy which Heaven has put in our hands is patience, by which, though we cannot lessen the torments of the body, we can in a great measure preserve the peace of the mind, and shall suffer only the natural and genuine force of an evil, without heightening its acrimony or prolonging its effects.”

It is hardly desirable for a moralist to aim at originality in his precepts.  We must be content if he enforces old truths in such a manner as to convince us of the depth and sincerity of his feeling.  Johnson, it must be confessed, rather abuses the moralist’s privilege of being commonplace.  He descants not unfrequently upon propositions so trite that even the most earnest enforcement can give them little interest.  With all drawbacks, however, the moralizing is the best part of the Rambler.  Many of the papers follow the precedent set by Addison in the Spectator, but without Addison’s felicity.  Like Addison, he indulges in allegory, which, in his hands, becomes unendurably frigid and clumsy; he tries light social satire, and is fain to confess that we can spy a beard under the muffler of his feminine characters; he treats us to criticism which, like Addison’s, goes upon exploded principles, but unlike Addison’s, is apt to be almost wilfully outrageous.  His odd remarks upon Milton’s versification are the worst example of this weakness.  The result is what one might expect from the attempt of a writer without an ear to sit in judgment upon the greatest master of harmony in the language.