the product of creative or imaginative art, working on a “lost original.”  No exercise of critical ingenuity could be more futile or impertinent.  The impression of the solidity and magnitude of Johnson’s character which is to be gathered from Boswell is enforced from other sources; from his essays and his prayers and meditations, from the half-dozen or so lives and reminiscences which were published in the years following his death (their very number establishing the reverence with which he was regarded), from the homage of other men whose genius their books leave indisputable.  Indeed the Johnson we know from Boswell, though it is the broadest and most masterly portrait in the whole range of biography, gives less than the whole magnitude of the man.  When Boswell first met him at the age of twenty-two, Johnson was fifty-four.  His long period of poverty and struggle was past.  His Dictionary and all his works except the Lives of the Poets were behind him; a pension from the Crown had established him in security for his remaining years; his position was universally acknowledged.  So that though the portrait in the Life is a full-length study of Johnson the conversationalist and literary dictator, the proportion it preserves is faulty and its study of the early years—­the years of poverty, of the Vanity of Human Wishes and London, of Rasselas, which he wrote to pay the expenses of his mother’s funeral, is slight.

It was, however, out of the bitterness and struggle of these early years that the strength and sincerity of character which carried Johnson surely and tranquilly through the time of his triumph were derived.  From the beginning he made no compromise with the world and no concession to fashion.  The world had to take him at his own valuation or not at all.  He never deviated one hair’s breadth from the way he had chosen.  Judged by the standards of journalistic success, the Rambler could not well be worse than he made it.  Compared with the lightness and gaiety and the mere lip-service to morality of Addison its edification is ponderous.  Both authors state the commonplaces of conduct, but Addison achieves lightness in the doing of it, and his manner by means of which platitudes are stated lightly and pointedly and with an air of novelty, is the classic manner of journalism.  Johnson goes heavily and directly to the point, handling well worn moral themes in general and dogmatic language without any attempt to enliven them with an air of discovery or surprise.  Yet they were, in a sense, discoveries to him; not one of them but was deeply and sincerely felt; not one but is not a direct and to us a pathetically dispassionate statement of the reflection of thirty years of grinding poverty and a soul’s anguish.  Viewed in the light of his life, the Rambler is one of the most moving of books.  If its literary value is slight it is a document in character.