If the whole story of Dr. Johnson’s life were the story of his published books it would be very difficult to understand his pre-eminent and symbolic position in literary history.  His best known work—­it still remains so—­was his dictionary, and dictionaries, for all the licence they give and Johnson took for the expression of a personality, are the business of purely mechanical talents.  A lesser man than he might have cheated us of such delights as the definitions of “oats,” or “net” or “pension,” but his book would certainly have been no worse as a book.  In his early years he wrote two satires in verse in imitation of Juvenal; they were followed later by two series of periodical essays on the model of the Spectator; neither of them—­the Rambler nor the Idler—­were at all successful. Rasselas, a tale with a purpose, is melancholy reading; the Journey to the Western Hebrides has been utterly eclipsed by Boswell’s livelier and more human chronicle of the same events.  The Lives of the Poets, his greatest work, was composed with pain and difficulty when he was seventy years old; even it is but a quarry from which a reader may dig the ore of a sound critical judgment summing up a life’s reflection, out of the grit and dust of perfunctory biographical compilations.  There was hardly one of the literary coterie over which he presided that was not doing better and more lasting work.  Nothing that Johnson wrote is to be compared, for excellence in its own manner, with Tom Jones or the Vicar of Wakefield or the Citizen of the World.  He produced nothing in writing approaching the magnitude of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or the profundity of Burke’s philosophy of politics.  Even Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose main business was painting and not the pen, was almost as good an author as he; his Discourses have little to fear when they are set beside Johnson’s essays.  Yet all these men recognised him as their guide and leader; the spontaneous selection of such a democratic assembly as men of genius in a tavern fixed upon him as chairman, and we in these later days, who are safe from the overpowering force of personality and presence—­or at least can only know of it reflected in books—­instinctively recognize him as the greatest man of his age.  What is the reason?

Johnson’s pre-eminence is the pre-eminence of character.  He was a great moralist; he summed up in himself the tendencies of thought and literature of his time and excelled all others in his grasp of them; and he was perhaps more completely than any one else in the whole history of English literature, the typical Englishman.  He was one of those to whom is applicable the commonplace that he was greater than his books.  It is the fashion nowadays among some critics to speak of his biographer Boswell as if he were a novelist or a playwright and to classify the Johnson we know with Hamlet and Don Quixote as