For, after all, which of those writings can be said to have any life to-day?  Not “Rasselas,” surely—­that stilted romance.  “The Lives of the Poets” are but a succession of prefaces, and the “Ramblers” of ephemeral essays.  There is the monstrous drudgery of the Dictionary, a huge piece of spadework, a monument to industry, but inconceivable to genius.  “London” has a few vigorous lines, and the “Journey to the Hebrides” some spirited pages.  This, with a number of political and other pamphlets, was the main output of his lifetime.  Surely it must be admitted that it is not enough to justify his predominant place in English literature, and that we must turn to his humble, much-ridiculed biographer for the real explanation.

And then there was his talk.  What was it which gave it such distinction?  His clear-cut positiveness upon every subject.  But this is a sign of a narrow finality—­impossible to the man of sympathy and of imagination, who sees the other side of every question and understands what a little island the greatest human knowledge must be in the ocean of infinite possibilities which surround us.  Look at the results.  Did ever any single man, the very dullest of the race, stand convicted of so many incredible blunders?  It recalls the remark of Bagehot, that if at any time the views of the most learned could be stamped upon the whole human race the result would be to propagate the most absurd errors.  He was asked what became of swallows in the winter.  Rolling and wheezing, the oracle answered:  “Swallows,” said he, “certainly sleep all the winter.  A number of them conglobulate together by flying round and round, and then all in a heap throw themselves under water and lie in the bed of a river.”  Boswell gravely dockets the information.  However, if I remember right, even so sound a naturalist as White of Selborne had his doubts about the swallows.  More wonderful are Johnson’s misjudgments of his fellow-authors.  There, if anywhere, one would have expected to find a sense of proportion.  Yet his conclusions would seem monstrous to a modern taste.  “Shakespeare,” he said, “never wrote six consecutive good lines.”  He would only admit two good verses in Gray’s exquisite “Elegy written in a Country Churchyard,” where it would take a very acid critic to find two bad ones.  “Tristram Shandy” would not live.  “Hamlet” was gabble.  Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” was poor stuff, and he never wrote anything good except “A Tale of a Tub.”  Voltaire was illiterate.  Rousseau was a scoundrel.  Deists, like Hume, Priestley, or Gibbon, could not be honest men.

And his political opinions!  They sound now like a caricature.  I suppose even in those days they were reactionary.  “A poor man has no honour.”  “Charles the Second was a good King.”  “Governments should turn out of the Civil Service all who were on the other side.”  “Judges in India should be encouraged to trade.”  “No country is the richer on account of trade.” (I wonder if Adam Smith was in the company when this proposition was laid down!) “A landed proprietor should turn out those tenants who did not vote as he wished.”  “It is not good for a labourer to have his wages raised.”  “When the balance of trade is against a country, the margin must be paid in current coin.”  Those were a few of his convictions.