independence against any lord in particular.  He was deeply religious, but had an abiding fear of death.  He was burly in person, and slovenly in dress, his shirt-frill always covered with snuff.  He was a great diner out, an inordinate tea-drinker, and a voracious and untidy feeder.  An inherited scrofula, which often took the form of hypochondria and threatened to affect his brain, deprived him of control over the muscles of his face.  Boswell describes how his features worked, how he snorted, grunted, whistled, and rolled about in his chair when getting ready to speak.  He records his minutest traits, such as his habit of pocketing the orange peels at the club, and his superstitious way of touching all the posts between his house and the Mitre Tavern, going back to do it, if he skipped one by chance.  Though bearish in his manners and arrogant in dispute, especially when talking “for victory,” Johnson had a large and tender heart.  He loved his ugly, old wife—­twenty-one years his senior—­and he had his house full of unfortunates—­a blind woman, an invalid surgeon, a destitute widow, a negro servant—­whom he supported for many years, and bore with all their ill-humors patiently.

Among Johnson’s numerous writings the ones best entitled to remembrance are, perhaps, his Dictionary of the English Language, 1755; his moral tale, Rasselas, 1759; the introduction to his edition of Shakspere, 1765, and his Lives of the Poets, 1781.  Johnson wrote a sonorous, cadenced prose, full of big Latin words and balanced clauses.  Here is a sentence, for example, from his Visit to the Hebrides:  “We were now treading that illustrious island which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion.  To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible, if it were endeavored, and would be foolish, if it were possible.”  The difference between his colloquial style and his book style is well illustrated in the instance cited by Macaulay.  Speaking of Villiers’s Rehearsal, Johnson said, “It has not wit enough to keep it sweet;” then paused and added—­translating English into Johnsonese—­“it has not vitality sufficient to preserve it from putrefaction.”  There is more of this in Johnson’s Rambler and Idler papers than in his latest work, the Lives of the Poets.  In this he showed himself a sound and judicious critic, though with decided limitations.  His understanding was solid, but he was a thorough classicist, and his taste in poetry was formed on Pope.  He was unjust to Milton and to his own contemporaries, Gray, Collins, Shenstone, and Dyer.  He had no sense of the higher and subtler graces of romantic poetry, and he had a comical indifference to the “beauties of nature.”  When Boswell once ventured to remark that poor Scotland had, at least, some “noble wild prospects,” the doctor replied that the noblest prospect a Scotchman ever saw was the road that led to London.