uniformly didactic, cathedral, and declamatory; he has no shift of words, and will describe the frivolity of a coxcomb with the same rolling periods and solemn gravity of antithesis as would be appropriate enough in an invective against tyranny or fanaticism. But the 'Ramblers' are full of weighty and solid sense, and if less amusing, they are certainly neither less useful nor less instructive. Addison and Steele talk, Johnson declaims: the former address you like virtuous, learned, and well-bred men of the world, whose scholastic acquirements have been harmonised and digested by long intercourse with polished society; Johnson rather like a university professor, who retains, in the world, something of the stiffness of the chair. The above remarks will apply no less to the ' Idler,' another publication on a similar plan, which continued to appear between 1758 and 1760.

In the interval which occurred between the discontinuance of the former and the commencement of the lastDictionary. mentioned periodical, appeared the celebrated 'Dictionary of the English Language,' on which Johnson had been laboriously engaged during a period of about seven years. This work is a glorious monument of learning, energy, and perseverance; and, when viewed as the production of a single unaided scholar, is perhaps one of the most signal triumphs of literary activity. If we compare with Johnson's Dictionary the great national work of the French Academy, we shall find abundant reason to admire the astonishing courage and diligence of our countryman, who alone, unsupported, in the midst of other and pressing occupations, found means to produce, in seven years, a dictionary certainly not inferior to what was considered as a great national monument, which was produced by the united labour of a royally-endowed and numerous corporation, and which occupied an infinitely longer time in the preparation. We must not forget, either, the immense difference between the two languages in point of richness and copiousness, which renders the task of an English lexicographer immeasurably more onerous. Both Johnson's work and the 'Dictionnaire de l'Académie' are remarkable for the neatness and acuteness of interpretation of words; both give examples of the various meanings from good authors;

and in this last respect we conceive that Johnson's work is markedly superior; for the Académie contents itself with any quotation which exhibits with sufficient clearness the particular use of the word in question, but beyond this has no specific value, and often no meaning or interest whatever. The quotations employed by Johnson, on the other hand, to illustrate and exemplify the different significations of words, are not only taken from a vast collection of works of classical authority, but themselves contain something complete and interesting in itself—either a beautiful passage of poetry, a pithy remark, a historical fact, or a scientific definition. The principal defect of this excellent dictionary is the etymological part. When Johnson wrote, the German literature could hardly be said to be in existence, and the northern languages were consequently not studied: the investigator was deprived almost completely of the immense light thrown upon the history of our language by those dialects which form the source of so important a portion of it.

Rasselas.

As a

In 1759 appeared the famous oriental tale entitled 'Rasselas,' a work of no great length, but exhibiting all the peculiarities of Johnson's manner. representation of Eastern society, or indeed as a picture of society in any sense, it has no claim to our admiration: there is no interest in the plot, if, indeed, it can be said to have a plot-there is hardly any attempt at the delineation of character; but if read as a fine succession of moral remarks, breathing a somewhat desponding tone of feeling, and conveyed in his characteristic pomp of measured declamation— it merits more than one perusal. Compared with the descriptions of Oriental manners, which more recent times have given us-'Rasselas' will seem stiff, vague, and unnatural. The Happy Valley of the Abyssinian prince is as nothing when compared with the Hall of Eblis in the wonderful tale of 'Vathek ;' but we repeat, that Johnson's production is not to be read as a novel, but as a series of moral essays on a vast multiplicity of subjects, full of sense, acuteness, and originality of thought. The last work which we shall mention is 'The Lives of the Lives of the Poets,' originally composed at the instance of a bookseller, in order to be prefixed to a collection

Poets.

of specimens of this branch of English literature. The plan of this work was very limited, perhaps unavoidably so, excluding nearly all of the very greatest names in our literature, and embracing for the most part only what must be considered as by no means the most brilliant period of the English Muse, i.e. from Cowley to Johnson's own time. With the exception of Milton, all the poets whose biographies he has written belong to that school which we have described as having grown up mainly under Latin, French, and Italian influence -in short, the classicists-in whose works the intellect is the predominant power. In judging of this species of poetry, Johnson has shown a might, mastery, and solidity of criticism, perhaps unequalled by any other author; but the moment he enters the enchanted ground of what is called romantic poetry, he exhibits a singular and total want of perception. Indeed, his mind, admirably adapted as it was for the scientific part of criticism, was impotent to feel or appreciate what is picturesque or passionate. He is like a deaf man seated at a symphony of Beethoven—a sense is wanting to him. How accurately and acutely has he characterised Cowley, Dryden, Pope, and Otway! How justly has he appreciated the more intellectual qualities of Milton! But when he ridicules the 'Lycidas,' or complains of the blank verse of 'Paradise Lost,'-when he charges the lyrics of Gray with absurdity and extravagance, who does not see that Nature, so liberal to him in some respects, had denied to his powerful mind the least sensibility for what is beautiful and enchanting in the airy world of fancy? 'The Lives of the Poets,' when read with due allowance, will undoubtedly remain a classical work in England. We shall not easily find so vast an accumulation of ingenious, solid, and acute observation, so rich a treasury of noble moral lessons, or so fine and manly a tone of writing and thinking, as this excellent volume contains. Let us enjoy what it possesses and can give, without murmuring at what it has not.

Besides the above works, Johnson composed an immense number of detached pieces of criticism, and distinguished himself as a political writer. Many of his pamphlets (which were always in support of extreme Tory or monarchical opinions)

obtained great celebrity at the time. In 1762 he received the gift of a pension of 300l. a-year-a just though inadequate reward for the utility of his numerous writings, and his unflinching devotion to the cause of virtue, religion, and morality. He also published an edition of Shakspeare, not very valuable in a philological point of view, from his imperfect acquaintance and sympathy with our older and more romantic literature, but useful as embodying a large mass of notes and illustrations of disputed and obscure passages. The character of Shakspeare's genius, given in the preface, is a noble specimen of panegyric; and it is singular to see how far the divine genius of the dramatist almost succeeds in overcoming all the prejudices of Johnson's age and education. As a moralist, as a painter of men and minds, Johnson has done Shakspeare (at least as far as any man could) ample justice; but in his judgment of the great creative poet's more romantic manifestations he exhibits a callousness and insensibility which was partly the result of his education and of the age when he lived, and partly, without doubt, the consequence of the peculiar constitution of his mind-a mind which felt much more sympathy with men than with things, and was much more at home in the "full tide of London existence" than in the airy world of imagination-among the every-day crowds of Fleet Street, than in Prospero's enchanted isle, or the moonlit terraces of Verona. It was this positivism of mind (to borrow a most expressive French word) that gave him such an extraordinary and well-deserved supremacy as a conversationist; and it was this mixture of learning, benevolence, wit, virtue, and good sense that makes the admirable portrait of him, Daguerreotyped in the memoirs of his friend and disciple Boswell, the most interesting and living portrait which literature exhibits of a great and good man—the perfect embodiment of the ideal of the English character, with all its honesty, goodness, and nobility, rather individualised than disfigured by the few and venial foibles and oddities which alloy its sterling gold.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE GREAT NOVELISTS.

History of Prose Fiction-in Spain, Italy, and France-The Romance and the Novel-Defoe-Robinson Crusoe-Source of its CharmDefoe's Air of Reality-Minor Works-Richardson-Pamela-Clarissa Harlowe-Female Characters-Sir Charles Grandison-Fielding -Joseph Andrews-Jonathan Wild-Tom Jones-Amelia-Smollett -Roderick Random-Sea Characters - Peregrine Pickle-Count Fathom-Humphry Clinker-Sterne-Tristram Shandy and the Sentimental Journey-Goldsmith-Chinese Letters-Traveller and Deserted Village-Vicar of Wakefield-Comedies-Histories.

WE are now arrived at that point in the history of British literature where, in obedience to the ever-acting History of laws which regulate intellectual as they do phy- prose fiction. sical development, a new species of composition was to originate. As in the material creation we find the several manifestations of productive energy following a progressive order, -the lower, humbler, and less organised existences appearing first, and successively making way for kinds more variously and bounteously endowed, the less perfect merging imperceptibly into the more perfect,—so can we trace a similar action of this law in the gradual development of man's intellectual operations. No sooner do certain favourable conditions exist, no sooner has a fit nidus or theatre of action been produced, than we behold new manifestations of human intellect appearing in literature, in science, and in art, with as much regularity as, in the primeval eras of the physical world, the animalcule gave way to the fish, the fish to the reptile, the reptile to the bird, the beast, and ultimately to man.

Spain, France, and Italy had all possessed the germ or embryo of prose fiction before it can be said to appear as a substantive, independent, and influential species of literature in Great Britain; and in each of these countries it manifested itself under a different form, modified by the character of the