All his books are written in a learned language; in a language which nobody hears from his mother or his nurse; in a language in which nobody ever quarrels, or drives bargains, or makes love; in a language in which nobody ever thinks.  It is clear that Johnson himself did not think in the dialect in which he wrote.  The expressions which came first to his tongue were simple, energetic, and picturesque.  When he wrote for publication he did his sentences out of English into Johnsonese.  His letters from the Hebrides to Mrs. Thrale are the original of that work of which the “Journey to the Hebrides” is the translation; and it is amusing to compare the two versions.  “When we were taken upstairs,” says he in one of his letters, “a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on which one of us was to lie.”  This incident is recorded in the Journal as follows:  “Out of one of the beds on which we were to repose started up, at our entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from the forge.”  Sometimes Johnson translated aloud. “The Rehearsal” he said, very unjustly, “has not wit enough to keep it sweet”; then, after a pause, “it has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction.”

Mannerism is pardonable, and is sometimes even agreeable, when the manner, though vicious, is natural.  Few readers, for example, would be willing to part with the mannerism of Milton or of Burke.  But a mannerism which does not sit easy on the mannerist, which has been adopted on principle, and which can be sustained only by constant effort, is always offensive.  And such is the mannerism of Johnson.

The characteristic faults of his style are so familiar to all our readers, and have been so often burlesqued, that it is almost superfluous to point them out.  It is well known that he made less use than any other eminent writer of those strong, plain words, Anglo-Saxon or Norman-French, of which the roots lie in the inmost depths of our language; and that he felt a vicious partiality for terms which, long after our own speech had been fixed, were borrowed from the Greek and Latin, and which, therefore, even when lawfully naturalised, must be considered as born aliens, not entitled to rank with the King’s English.  His constant practice of padding out a sentence with useless epithets, till it became as stiff as the bust of an exquisite, his antithetical forms of expression, constantly employed even where there is no opposition in the ideas expressed, his big words wasted on little things, his hard inversions, so widely different from those graceful and easy inversions which give variety, spirit, and sweetness to the expression of our great old writers—­all these peculiarities have been imitated by his admirers and parodied by his assailants till the public has become sick of the subject.