The study of Sir Thomas Browne, Mr. Gosse says, ’encouraged Johnson, and with him a whole school of rhetorical writers in the eighteenth century, to avoid circumlocution by the invention of superfluous words, learned but pedantic, in which darkness was concentrated without being dispelled.’  Such is Mr. Gosse’s account of the influence of Browne and Johnson upon the later eighteenth-century writers of prose.  But to dismiss Johnson’s influence as something altogether deplorable, is surely to misunderstand the whole drift of the great revolution which he brought about in English letters.  The characteristics of the pre-Johnsonian prose style—­the style which Dryden first established and Swift brought to perfection—­are obvious enough.  Its advantages are those of clarity and force; but its faults, which, of course, are unimportant in the work of a great master, become glaring in that of the second-rate practitioner.  The prose of Locke, for instance, or of Bishop Butler, suffers, in spite of its clarity and vigour, from grave defects.  It is very flat and very loose; it has no formal beauty, no elegance, no balance, no trace of the deliberation of art.  Johnson, there can be no doubt, determined to remedy these evils by giving a new mould to the texture of English prose; and he went back for a model to Sir Thomas Browne.  Now, as Mr. Gosse himself observes, Browne stands out in a remarkable way from among the great mass of his contemporaries and predecessors, by virtue of his highly developed artistic consciousness.  He was, says Mr. Gosse, ’never carried away.  His effects are closely studied, they are the result of forethought and anxious contrivance’; and no one can doubt the truth or the significance of this dictum who compares, let us say, the last paragraphs of The Garden of Cyrus with any page in The Anatomy of Melancholy.  The peculiarities of Browne’s style—­the studied pomp of its latinisms, its wealth of allusion, its tendency towards sonorous antithesis—­culminated in his last, though not his best, work, the Christian Morals, which almost reads like an elaborate and magnificent parody of the Book of Proverbs.  With the Christian Morals to guide him, Dr. Johnson set about the transformation of the prose of his time.  He decorated, he pruned, he balanced; he hung garlands, he draped robes; and he ended by converting the Doric order of Swift into the Corinthian order of Gibbon.  Is it quite just to describe this process as one by which ’a whole school of rhetorical writers’ was encouraged ‘to avoid circumlocution’ by the invention ‘of superfluous words,’ when it was this very process that gave us the peculiar savour of polished ease which characterises nearly all the important prose of the last half of the eighteenth century—­that of Johnson himself, of Hume, of Reynolds, of Horace Walpole—­which can be traced even in Burke, and which fills the pages of Gibbon?  It is, indeed, a curious reflection, but one which is amply justified by the facts, that the Decline and Fall could not have been precisely what it is, had Sir Thomas Browne never written the Christian Morals.