happiness was imperfectly fulfilled in this world, there was another where all would be well. But for scepticism he would have none of it. He abhorred sceptics even more than Whigs, and we all know that the first Whig was the Devil. Hume, whom he probably did not read, must be a liar and a scoundrel, and one of the worst quarrels he ever had was with Adam Smith, for hinting that Hume was a good man. "You lie, sir," said Johnson, with laconic insolence; and Adam Smith's retort was rather worse than its provocation. If a man got sceptical he should look to his liver, or drink himself out of it. But he himself was too real a creature altogether to banish the obstinate questionings which belonged to his age, and indeed none of his contemporaries seemed to realise them with so deep a sense of personal unhappiness. "I will have no more on't," he cried, in terrible agitation, as his friends discussed his and mankind's chances of salvation. "Treat life as a show, which man should cheerfully enjoy," it was suggested. "Yes, sir," replied Johnson, "if he is sure he is to be well after he goes out of it. But if he is to grow blind after he goes out of the show-room, and never to see anything again; or if he does not know whither he is to go next, a man will not go cheerfully out of a show-room." Indeed, if we are to take Carlyle's estimate of greatness, we must admit that Johnson, who was much troubled with the immensities, and the mysteries, and the "verities," was a great man.

He took

Johnson, therefore, was religious in spite of himself. He would have said with Newman: "The whole world seems to give the lie to the great truth of the being of a God, and of that truth my whole being is full." But, as I have shown, he would have nothing to do with philosophic doubt. Nor would he turn Papist. "I have fear enough," he said, honestly, "but an obstinate rationality prevents me," and he would not treat a man, à la Pope, as a mere machine. But he did not care for transcendental guesses at the great secret. the traditional religion and ritual; he was neither mystic nor methody, and he sniffed scornfully at the idealist theory. "I refute it thus," he said "it" being the non-existence of "matter "-striking his foot against a stone. He probably knew that he had not refuted "it" at all, but that was Johnson's short way with men and theories for which he had no taste. So with the free-will controversy. All theory might be against the freedom of the will. Johnson, with his way of testing all things by rough and ready experience, knew better. "We know our will is free, and there's an end on't," and for Mr. Boswell, of course and a good many other people too-there was an end on't. Johnson's attitude towards politics was much of the same character. He has been called the last of the Tories; but he really was a Gallio,

caring for none of these things, and saying generally that he would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government more than another. Johnson was a confirmed individualist. Patriotism he delicately denominated as the last refuge of a scoundrel, and politics were to him a mere game of the ins and outs, in which no sensible man, with books and good talk, and friends at his club, would dream of taking a hand. The Whigs he hated, for he thought they were opposed to all order, and theories of equality and natural rights were his bêtes noires. “Madam," he said to a fine lady democrat, a kind of she Horace Walpole, "I am now become a convert to your way of thinking. I am convinced that all mankind are upon an equal footing; and to give you an unquestionable proof, madam, that I am in earnest, here is a very sensible, civil, well-behaved fellow-citizen, your footman; I desire that he may be allowed to sit down and dine with us." He held there was a natural law against oppression. If kings got too tyrannical the people would cut off their heads. As for political squabbles: "Pooh! Leave me alone," he cried to a mob, roaring for Wilkes and liberty; "I, at least, am not ashamed to own that I care for neither the one nor the other." And he said profoundly of the whole controversy that to his mind a far worse thing than keeping Wilkes out of his parliamentary rights was that so many people wanted to have such a man in Parliament at all. We think of Tennyson :

He that roars for liberty,
Faster binds the tyrant's power,

and confess that here, too, as in many other things, Johnson's sturdy sense was right, more especially as, having the root of the matter in him, he saw that the end of government was not, as the cant of the Whigs went, the establishment of any fanciful system of political balance, but the social well-being of the whole people. What a wise saying is this, for instance: "A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilisation. Gentlemen of education," he observed, "were pretty much the same in all countries; the condition of the lower orders, the poor especially, was the true mark of national discrimination." For Ireland he had ever a good word. "When," said Boswell, "the corn laws were in agitation in Ireland, by which that country has been enabled not only to feed itself, but to export corn to a large amount, Sir Thomas Robinson observed that those laws might be prejudicial to the corn trade of England. 'Sir Thomas,' said he, 'you talk the language of a savage. What, sir! would you prevent any people from feeding themselves, if by any honest means they can do it?'"

Talking women, indeed, he hated, and, as he was a bit of a Turk in his way, I am afraid the shrieking sisterhood would have had short shrift from him. "Here," he said in his poem, "London,"

Falling houses thunder on your head,

And here a female atheist talks you dead.

Generally, one may say of Johnson that most of his vehement hatreds were inspired by his dislike of shams of all kinds, and especially of shams masquerading as truth-truths beyond the common. Horace Walpole, who did not love the Doctor, said that Johnson had neither taste nor judgment, but only his old woman's prejudices. Perhaps Johnson was thinking of Walpole when he remarked of the men of feeling, "Sir, don't be duped by them any more. You will find these very feeling people are not very ready to do you good. They pay you by feeling." He certainly told a good average truth about human nature when he insisted in his depressing, but not cynical, way that the misfortunes of a friend-from hanging downwards-did not affect a man's appetite for dinner. "Sir," he said, "I should do what I could to bail him and give him any other assistance, but if he were once fairly hanged I should not suffer." Boswell: "Would you eat your dinner that day, sir?" Johnson: "Yes, sir ; and eat it as if he were eating with me. Why, there's Baretti, who is to be tried for his life to-morrow; friends have risen up for him on every side; yet, if he should be hanged, none of them will eat a slice of pudding the less. Sir, that sympathetic feeling goes a very little way in depressing the mind."

Humanitarian as he was, he would not over-state his case. Marriages made in heaven? Nonsense! the Lord Chancellor might make them all, and no one would be a penny the worse. The luxury of the rich an evil? By no means. It did good and employed labour. Better for a man to spend £10,000 a year than to give away £8,000 and spend £2,000. "Clear your mind of cant;" "Don't pretend that the moral average is higher than it is;" "Trust God, and keep clear of liquor," was Johnson's recipe for superfine criticisms of life.

One would have thought that this touchstone of common sense applied to literature would have produced splendid results. So in a sense it did. Johnson has contributed many imperishable sayings to the English language. Unfortunately, in literary matters he had a divided life. Macaulay has exaggerated the contrast between Johnson talking at his ease in the club or at Mrs. Thrale's tea-table, and Johnson penning "Ramblers" in the study. Still, there was a difference.

Talk was to the Doctor the wine of life; it stirred his pulses, quickened his powerful but rather sluggish intellect, brought out his humour, drove off his besetting melancholy. Alone in Bolt Court, with blue devils, his pen lagged, and he produced, with some profoundly interesting work, a good deal of lumber. Though he raised the tone of the essay, he disimproved its form, as the masterly hand of Addison left it. The "Ramblers " and "Idlers," for instance, are, on the whole, failures, for want of the salt of personality which make the club talks successes. "Rasselas" is almost charming, but it resembles a theatrical performance by Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Crummles and Company. One was all Crummles; the other is all Johnson. Pakuah, Imlac, Rasselas, and the rest, all wear knee-breeches and buckles; their speech bewrayeth them. Here and there, especially in the "Idlers," there is a lively personal touch worthy of the "Spectator"; and weighty satire and vigorous criticisms of life are never wanting. As an example of the former, take the complaint of the husband whose wife was mad on what ladies vaguely call "work." "We have twice as many fire-screens as chimneys, and three quilts for every bed. She has boxes filled with knit garters and braided shoes. Kitty knows not at sixteen the difference between a Protestant and a Papist, because she has been employed three years in filling a side of a closet with a hanging that is to represent Cranmer in the flames. And Dolly, my eldest girl, is now unable to read a chapter in the Bible, having spent all the time which other children passed at school in working the interview between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba." For serious stuff, read the solemn talks at the end of "Rasselas," read "London," and the "Vanity of Human Wishes ;" and read them, too, in the light of Johnson's terrible trials, his ill-health, his morbid temper, his darkened hours, and the noble fortitude of his later years.

As a critic Johnson is excellent-intelligent, shrewd, knowing— and his worth may be well gauged by comparing him with his contemporaries, and even with the critical school of the earlier years of the nineteenth century. He has been abused for his mistakes. What I critic is without them? What about the Edinburgh Reviewers? How many of Francis Jeffrey's literary verdicts remain? I was reading an article the other day to show that not one was worth the paper it was written on. What will Carlyle's historical criticisms be worth fifty years hence? What are Mr. Froude's worth now? Of Johnson, it may be said that as he produced the best dictionary in an age when philology was in its infancy, so he was the best literary critic of an age when there was very little criticism to speak of. Look at the stuff which passes for literary judgments with Horace Walpole, who

was always sneering at Johnson's "tasteless pedantry!" Johnson was, in fact, a good deal better than his age and his prejudices. His training led him to admire the formal rhymes, the mechanical metres, the monotonous balance of Pope and his school. Much of the poetry of the day was like the style of gardening, in which the designer, if he placed a statue in a summer-house in one corner, preserved what he called "symmetry " by another summer-house and another statue in the other. Johnson's common sense broke through this and similar traditions, and so his "Lives of the Poets" are full of sound sentiment; and even when they are wrong, are often well, and always amusingly, wrong. He certainly said that some poorish lines in Congreve were better than the best things Shakespeare ever wrote, but then he pointed to the true source of Shakespeare's greatness, as the poet of truth and nature. "His story requires Romans and kings, but he thinks only on men." How modern this is, and much else in Johnson ! Critics have built a reputation on a tithe of the sound things scattered up and down "The Lives of the Poets." Cowley's, Dryden's, and Milton's, in spite of the terrible "howler" about "Lycidas," are excellent, and as lively as a dinner-bell. Read them, and then say whether Johnson's fame as a critic was undeserved, or whether you would put him down from his literary throne. One confesses, of course, that he had shocking prejudices. His taste in kings was terrible. He thought Charles II. and Louis XIV. very fine gentlemen. I wonder what he would have thought of George IV., whom, when he was a little boy, he examined in Scripture history, expressing himself much pleased with the intelligence of the future king.

the wits had responded with what Outside his own language and He went to Paris, where Hume

Johnson was no "mummer worshipper." "Why should a man clap a hump on his back and a lump on his leg, and call himself Richard III.?" He sincerely envied Garrick his guineas, just as Goldsmith envied Johnson his fame and literary pre-eminence. But, alas, he was not disinterested! He had asked the fops to be silent, and the wits to be dumb, when his abysmal drama, "Irene," was being performed, and the fops and Johnson calls "partial catcalls." literature his curiosity was small. and Gibbon had drunk in the spirit of the age at great gulps, and saw nothing but a parcel of nuns and old women of both sexes. What this stout old friend of "law and order" would have said of the great upheaval which swallowed up Burke's "Whig" sympathies one shudders even to think. Bozzy's life would have been unbearable, for that poor gentleman was tainted with the accursed thing, Whiggery. I am not sure that Johnson-who called the revolted Americans a race of convicts-would not have brained him on the spot.