{182} may not know who it is whom we are quoting. That
is the pleasure of art. And if the lines, as often, utter the voice of
good sense in morals or politics, it is its accidental utility also.
Johnson has, of course, little of Pope's amazing dexterity, wit and
finish. But he has some qualities of which Pope had nothing or not
very much. In his verse, as everywhere else, he shows a sense of the
real issues of things quite out of the reach of a well-to-do wit living
in his library, like Pope; what he writes may be in form an imitation
of Juvenal, but it is in essence a picture of life and often of his own
life.

How large a part of the business of poetry consists in giving new
expression to the old truths of experience, is known to all the great
poets and seen in their practice. Johnson can do this with a force
that refuses to be forgotten.

"But few there are whom hours like these await,
Who set unclouded in the gulfs of fate.
From Lydia's monarch should the search descend,
By Solon cautioned to regard his end,
In life's last scene what prodigies surprise,
Fears of the brave and follies of the wise!
From Marlborough's eyes the streams of dotage flow,
And Swift expires a driveller and a show."

Such lines almost challenge Pope on his own {183} ground, meeting his
rapier-like dexterity of neatness with heavy sword-strokes of sincerity
and strength. But here, as in the prose, the true Johnsonian
excellence is best seen when he is in the confessional.

"Should no disease thy torpid veins invade,
Nor Melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade;
Yet hope not life from grief or danger free,
Nor think the doom of man reversed for thee--
Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes,
And pause awhile from Letters to be wise;
There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol."

There, and in such lines as the stanza on Levett--

"His virtues walked their narrow round,
Nor made a pause, nor left a void;
And sure the Eternal Master found
The single talent well employed,"

one hears the authentic unique voice of Johnson; not that of a great
poet but of a real man to whom it is always worth while to listen, and
not least when he puts his thoughts into the pointed shape of verse.

Still, of course, prose and not verse is his natural medium. And here
a word should be said about that prose style of his which had an
immense vogue for a