d
reminiscences which were published in the years following his death
(their very number establishing the reverence with which he was
regarded), from the homage of other men whose genius their books leave
indisputable. Indeed the Johnson we know from Boswell, though it is the
broadest and most masterly portrait in the whole range of biography,
gives less than the whole magnitude of the man. When Boswell first met
him at the age of twenty-two, Johnson was fifty-four. His long period of
poverty and struggle was past. His _Dictionary_ and all his works except
the _Lives of the Poets_ were behind him; a pension from the Crown had
established him in security for his remaining years; his position was
universally acknowledged. So that though the portrait in the _Life_ is a
full-length study of Johnson the conversationalist and literary
dictator, the proportion it preserves is faulty and its study of the
early years--the years of poverty, of the _Vanity of Human Wishes_ and
_London_, of _Rasselas_, which he wrote to pay the expenses of his
mother's funeral, is slight.

It was, however, out of the bitterness and struggle of these early
years that the strength and sincerity of character which carried Johnson
surely and tranquilly through the time of his triumph were derived. From
the beginning he made no compromise with the world and no concession to
fashion. The world had to take him at his own valuation or not at all.
He never deviated one hair's breadth from the way he had chosen. Judged
by the standards of journalistic success, the _Rambler_ could not well
be worse than he made it. Compared with the lightness and gaiety and the
mere lip-service to morality of Addison its edification is ponderous.
Both authors state the commonplaces of conduct, but Addison achieves
lightness in the doing of it, and his manner by means of which
platitudes are stated lightly and pointedly and with an air of novelty,
is the classic manner of journalism. Johnson goes heavily and directly
to the point, handling well worn moral themes in general and dogmatic
language without any attempt to enliven them with an air of discovery or
surprise. Yet they were, in a sense, discoveries to him; not one of them
but was deeply and sincerely felt; not one but is not a direct and to us
a pathetically dispassionate statement of the reflection of thirty years
of grinding poverty and a soul's anguish. Viewed in the light of his
life, the _Rambler_ is one of the mos