deride. On
the Coverley papers in the _Spectator_ rests the chief part of their
literary fame; these belong rather to the special history of the novel
than to that of the periodical essay.

CHAPTER VI

DR. JOHNSON AND HIS TIME

By 1730 the authors whose work made the "classic" school in England were
dead or had ceased writing; by the same date Samuel Johnson had begun
his career as a man of letters. The difference between the period of his
maturity and the period we have been examining is not perhaps easy to
define; but it exists and it can be felt unmistakably in reading. For
one thing "Classicism" had become completely naturalized; it had ceased
to regard the French as arbiters of elegance and literary taste; indeed
Johnson himself never spoke of them without disdain and hated them as
much as he hated Scotsmen. Writing, like dress and the common way of
life, became plainer and graver and thought stronger and deeper. In
manners and speech something of the brutalism which was at the root of
the English character at the time began to colour the refinement of the
preceding age. Dilettantism gave way to learning and speculation; in the
place of Bolingbroke came Adam Smith; in the place of Addison, Johnson.
In a way it is the solidest and sanest time in English letters. Yet in
the midst of its urbanity and order forces were gathering for its
destruction. The ballad-mongers were busy; Blake was drawing and
rhyming; Burns was giving songs and lays to his country-side. In the
distance--Johnson could not hear them--sounded, like the horns of
elf-land faintly blowing, the trumpet calls of romance.

If the whole story of Dr. Johnson's life were the story of his published
books it would be very difficult to understand his pre-eminent and
symbolic position in literary history. His best known work--it still
remains so--was his dictionary, and dictionaries, for all the licence
they give and Johnson took for the expression of a personality, are the
business of purely mechanical talents. A lesser man than he might have
cheated us of such delights as the definitions of "oats," or "net" or
"pension," but his book would certainly have been no worse as a book. In
his early years he wrote two satires in verse in imitation of Juvenal;
they were followed later by two series of periodical essays on the model
of the _Spectator_; neither of them--the _Rambler_ nor the _Idler_--were
at all successful. _Rasselas_, a tale with a purpose