His very malevolence proceeded from a flaccidity which meanly envied the activities and enthusiasms of other men.  As a writer he was superficial; he had not the requisite energy for forming a clear or profound judgment on any question of difficulty; Johnson’s comment, “He thinks justly but he thinks faintly” sums up the truth about him.  His good qualities were of a slighter kind than Swift’s; he was a quiet and accurate observer of manners and fashions in life and conversation, and he had the gift of a style—­what Johnson calls “The Middle Style”—­very exactly suited to the kind of work on which he was habitually engaged, “always equable, always easy, without glowing words or pointed sentences” but polished, lucid, and urbane.

Steele and Addison were conscious moralists as well as literary men.  They desired to purge society from Restoration licences; to their efforts we must credit the alteration in morality which The School for Scandal shows over The Way of the World.  Their professed object as they stated themselves was “to banish vice and ignorance out of the territories of Great Britain, (nothing less!) and to bring philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffee-houses.”  In fact their satires were politically nearer home, and the chief objects of their aversion were the Tory squires whom it was their business as Whigs to deride.  On the Coverley papers in the Spectator rests the chief part of their literary fame; these belong rather to the special history of the novel than to that of the periodical essay.

CHAPTER VI

DR. JOHNSON AND HIS TIME

By 1730 the authors whose work made the “classic” school in England were dead or had ceased writing; by the same date Samuel Johnson had begun his career as a man of letters.  The difference between the period of his maturity and the period we have been examining is not perhaps easy to define; but it exists and it can be felt unmistakably in reading.  For one thing “Classicism” had become completely naturalized; it had ceased to regard the French as arbiters of elegance and literary taste; indeed Johnson himself never spoke of them without disdain and hated them as much as he hated Scotsmen.  Writing, like dress and the common way of life, became plainer and graver and thought stronger and deeper.  In manners and speech something of the brutalism which was at the root of the English character at the time began to colour the refinement of the preceding age.  Dilettantism gave way to learning and speculation; in the place of Bolingbroke came Adam Smith; in the place of Addison, Johnson.  In a way it is the solidest and sanest time in English letters.  Yet in the midst of its urbanity and order forces were gathering for its destruction.  The ballad-mongers were busy; Blake was drawing and rhyming; Burns was giving songs and lays to his country-side.  In the distance—­Johnson could not hear them—­sounded, like the horns of elf-land faintly blowing, the trumpet calls of romance.