“As for Johnson, I have always considered him to be, by nature, one of our great English souls.  A strong and noble man; so much left undeveloped in him to the last; in a kindlier element what might he not have been,—­Poet, Priest, Sovereign Ruler!  On the whole, a man must not complain of his ’element,” or his ‘time’ or the like; it is thriftless work doing so.  His time is bad; well then, he is there to make it better!—­

“Johnson’s youth was poor, isolated, hopeless, very miserable.  Indeed, it does not seem possible that, in any of the favourablest outward circumstances, Johnson’s life could have been other than a painful one.  The world might have had more profitable work out of him, or less; but his effort against the world’s work could never have been a light one.  Nature, in return for his nobleness, had said to him, ’Live in an element of diseased sorrow.’  Nay, perhaps the sorrow and the nobleness were intimately and even inseparably connected with each other. . . .

“The largest soul that was in all England; and provision made for it of ‘fourpence halfpenny a day.’  Yet a giant, invincible soul; a true man’s.  One remembers always that story of the shoes at Oxford; the rough, seamy-faced, raw-boned College Servitor stalking about, in winter season, with his shoes worn out; how the charitable Gentleman Commoner secretly places a new pair at his door, and the raw-boned Servitor, lifting them, looking at them near, with his dim eyes, with what thought,—­pitches them out of window!  Wet feet, mud, frost, hunger, or what you will; but not beggary:  we cannot stand beggary!  Rude stubborn self-help here; a whole world of squalor, rudeness, confused misery and want, yet of nobleness and manfulness withal.

“It is a type of the man’s life, this pitching away of the shoes, an original man;—­not a second hand, borrowing or begging man.  Let us stand on our own basis, at any rate!  On such shoes as we ourselves can get.  On frost and mud, if you will, but honestly on that;—­On the reality and substance which nature gives us, not on the semblance, on the thing she has give another than us!-

“And yet with all this rugged pride of manhood and self-help, was there ever soul more tenderly affectionate, loyally submissive to what was really higher than he?  Great souls are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them; only small souls are otherwise. . . .

“It was in virtue of his sincerity, of his speaking still in some sort from the heart of Nature, though in the current artificial dialect, that Johnson was a Prophet. . . .  Mark, too, how little Johnson boasts of his ‘sincerity.’  He has no suspicion of his being particularly sincere,—­of his being particularly anything!  A hard-struggling, weary-hearted man, or ‘scholar’ as he calls himself, trying hard to get some honest livelihood in the world, not to starve, but to live,—­without stealing!  A noble unconsciousness is in him.  He does not ’engrave Truth on his watch-seal’; no, but he stands by truth, speaks by it, works and lives by it.  Thus it ever is. . . .