friend, can give.  In some of his biographical sketches, with what force has he brought out the moral resolution which animated, or ought to have animated, the man of whom he is writing!  We shall have occasion, by and by, to notice what, to our mind, appears a mere perversion of thought, and a mischievous exaggeration in our author, who, in his love of a certain energy of character, has often made this energy (apart from a moral purpose) the test and rule of his admiration.  But at present turn to his admirable estimation of Dr Samuel Johnson, and the noble regret which he throws over the memory of Burns.  A portion of the first we cannot resist extracting.  What a keen mountain air, bracing to the nerves, mortal to languor and complaint, blows over us from passages such as these:—­

“The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.  Johnson, in the eighteenth century, all as a man of letters, was, in good truth, ’the bravest of the brave.’  What mortal could have more to war with?  Yet, as we saw, he yielded not, faltered not; he fought, and even, such was his blessedness, prevailed.  Whoso will understand what it is to have a man’s heart, may find that, since the time of John Milton, no braver heart had beat in any English bosom than Samuel Johnson now bore.  Observe, too, that he never called himself brave, never felt himself to be so; the more completely was he so.  No Giant Despair, no Golgotha Death-Dance, or Sorcerer’s Sabbath of ’Literary Life in London,’ appals this pilgrim; he works resolutely for deliverance; in still defiance steps stoutly along.  The thing that is given him to do he can make himself do; what is to be endured he can endure in silence.

“How the great soul of old Samuel, consuming daily his own bitter, unalleviable allotment of misery and toil, shows beside the poor, flimsy, little soul of young Boswell; one day flaunting in the ring of vanity, tarrying by the wine-cup, and crying, Aha, the wine is red; the next day deploring his down-pressed, night-shaded, quite poor estate; and thinking it unkind that the whole movement of the universe should go on, while his digestive apparatus had stopped!  We reckon Johnson’s ‘talent of silence’ to be among his great and rare gifts.  Where there is nothing further to be done, there shall nothing further be said; like his own poor, blind Welshwoman, he accomplished somewhat, and also ’endured fifty years of wretchedness with unshaken fortitude.’  How grim was life to him; a sick prison-house and doubting-castle!  ’His great business,’ he would profess, ‘was to escape from himself.’  Yet towards all this he has taken his position and resolution; can dismiss it all ’with frigid indifference, having little to hope or to fear.’  Friends are stupid, and pusillanimous, and parsimonious; ’wearied of his stay, yet offended at his departure;’ it is the manner of the world.  ’By popular delusion,’