iety which dictated the serious papers in the
"Rambler" will be for ever remembered; for ever, I think, revered. That
ample repository of religious truth, moral wisdom, and accurate
criticism, breathes, indeed, the genuine emanations of its great author's
mind, expressed, too, in a style so natural to him, and so much like his
common mode of conversing, that I was myself but little astonished when
he told me that he had scarcely read over one of those inimitable essays
before they went to the press.

I will add one or two peculiarities more before I lay down my pen. Though
at an immeasurable distance from content in the contemplation of his own
uncouth form and figure, he did not like another man much the less for
being a coxcomb. I mentioned two friends who were particularly fond of
looking at themselves in a glass. "They do not surprise me at all by so
doing," said Johnson; "they see, reflected in that glass, men who have
risen from almost the lowest situations in life; one to enormous riches,
the other to everything this world can give--rank, fame, and fortune.
They see, likewise, men who have merited their advancement by the
exertion and improvement of those talents which God had given them; and I
see not why they should avoid the mirror."

The other singularity I promised to record is this: That though a man of
obscure birth himself, his partiality to people of family was visible on
every occasion; his zeal for subordination warm even to bigotry; his
hatred to innovation, and reverence for the old feudal times, apparent,
whenever any possible manner of showing them occurred. I have spoken of
his piety, his charity, and his truth, the enlargement of his heart, and
the delicacy of his sentiments; and when I search for shadow to my
portrait, none can I find but what was formed by pride, differently
modified as different occasions showed it; yet never was pride so
purified as Johnson's, at once from meanness and from vanity. The mind
of this man was, indeed, expanded beyond the common limits of human
nature, and stored with such variety of knowledge, that I used to think
it resembled a royal pleasure ground, where every plant, of every name
and nation, flourished in the full perfection of their powers, and where,
though lofty woods and falling cataracts first caught the eye, and fixed
the earliest attention of beholders, yet neither the trim parterre nor
the pleasing shrubbery, nor even the antiquated evergreens,