Johnson’s play was a failure, but by that time he had begun the great work which was to name him and single him out from the rest of the world as Dictionary Johnson.  To make a complete dictionary of a language is a tremendous work.  Johnson thought that it would take three years.  It took, instead, seven.

But during these seven years he also wrote other things and steadily added to his fame.  He started a paper after the model of the Spectator, called the Rambler.  This paper was continued for about two years, Johnson writing all but five of the essays.  After that he wrote many essays in a paper called the Adventurer, and, later still, for two years he wrote for another paper a series of articles called the Idler.

But none of these can we compare with the Spectator.  Johnson never for a moment loses sight of “a grand moral end.”  There is in his essays much sound common sense, but they are lumbering and heavy.  We get from them no such picture of the times as we get from the Spectator, and, although they are not altogether without humor, it is a humor that not seldom reminds us of the dancing of an elephant.  This is partly because, as Johnson said himself, he is inclined to “use too big words and too many of them.”

In the days when Johnson wrote, this style was greatly admired, but now we have come back to thinking that the simplest words are best, or, at least, that we must suit our words to our subject.  And if we tell a fairy tale (as Johnson once did) we must not use words of five syllables when words of two will better give the feeling of the tale.  Yet there are many pleasant half-hours to be spent in dipping here and there into the volumes of the Rambler or the Idler.  I will give you in the next chapter, as a specimen of Johnson’s prose, part of one of the essays from the Idler.  It is the story of a man who sets forth upon a very ordinary journey and who makes as great a tale of it as he had been upon a voyage of discovery in some untraveled land.

Chapter LXIX JOHNSON—­THE END OF THE JOURNEY

“I SUPPED three nights ago with my friend Will Marvel.  His affairs obliged him lately to take a journey into Devonshire, from which he has just returned.  He knows me to be a very patient hearer, and was glad of my company, as it gave him an opportunity of disburdening himself, by a minute relation of the casualties of his expedition.

“Will is not one of those who go out and return with nothing to tell.  He has a story of his travels, which will strike a home-bred citizen with horror, and has in ten days suffered so often the extremes of terror and joy, that he is in doubt whether he shall ever again expose either his body or his mind to such danger and fatigue.

“When he left London the morning was bright, and a fair day was promised.  But Will is born to struggle with difficulties.  That happened to him, which has sometimes, perhaps, happened to others.  Before he had gone more than ten miles, it began to rain.  What course was to be taken?  His soul disdained to turn back.  He did what the King of Prussia might have done; he flapped his hat, buttoned up his cape, and went forwards, fortifying his mind by the stoical consolation, that whatever is violent will be short.”