now began to displace the French and Dutch fashion of clipped hedges, and regular parterres, and that Gothic architecture came into repute.  Horace Walpole was a virtuoso in Gothic art, and in his castle at Strawberry Hill he made a collection of ancient armor, illuminated manuscripts, and bric-a-brac of all kinds.  Gray had been Walpole’s traveling companion in France and Italy, and the two had quarreled and separated, but were afterward reconciled.  From Walpole’s private printing-press at Strawberry Hill Gray’s two “sister odes,” the Bard, and the Progress of Poesy, were first issued in 1757.  Both Gray and Walpole were good correspondents, and their printed letters are among the most delightful literature of the kind.

The central figure among the English men of letters of that generation was Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), whose memory has been preserved less by his own writings than by James Boswell’s famous Life of Johnson, published in 1791.  Boswell was a Scotch laird and advocate, who first met Johnson in London, when the latter was fifty-four years old.  Boswell was not a very wise or witty person, but he reverenced the worth and intellect which shone through his subject’s uncouth exterior.  He followed him about, note-book in hand, bore all his snubbings patiently, and made the best biography ever written.  It is related that the doctor once said that if he thought Boswell meant to write his life, he should prevent it by taking Boswell’s.  And yet Johnson’s own writings and this biography of him have changed places in relative importance so completely that Carlyle predicted that the former would soon be reduced to notes on the latter; and Macaulay said that the man who was known to his contemporaries as a great writer was known to posterity as an agreeable companion.

Johnson was one of those rugged, eccentric, self-developed characters so common among the English.  He was the son of a Lichfield book-seller, and after a course at Oxford, which was cut short by poverty, and an unsuccessful career as a school-master, he had come up to London, in 1737, where he supported himself for many years as a book-seller’s hack.  Gradually his great learning and abilities, his ready social wit and powers as a talker, caused his company to be sought at the tables of those whom he called “the great.”  He was a clubbable man, and he drew about him at the tavern a group of the most distinguished intellects of the time:  Edmund Burke, the orator and statesman; Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds, the portrait painter, and David Garrick, the great actor, who had been a pupil in Johnson’s school, near Lichfield.  Johnson was the typical John Bull of the last century.  His oddities, virtues, and prejudices were thoroughly English.  He hated Frenchmen, Scotchmen, and Americans, and had a cockneyish attachment to London.  He was a high Tory, and an orthodox churchman; he loved a lord in the abstract, and yet he asserted a sturdy