this is a fair account of
his ordinary style. You may read many _Ramblers_ in succession and
scarcely find a marked instance of it; and, as every one knows, his
last, longest and pleasantest work, the _Lives of the Poets_, is almost
free from it. All through {186} his life one can trace a kind of
progress as he gradually shakes off these mannerisms, and writes as
easily as he talked. They are most conspicuous in _The Rambler_ and
_Rasselas_. But even there, through all the heaviness, born perhaps of
the too obvious desire to instruct and improve, we get more than
occasional suggestions of the trenchant force which we most associate
with the pages of Boswell.

"My curiosity," said Rasselas, "does not very strongly lead me to
survey piles of stone, or mounds of earth; my business is with man. I
came hither not to measure fragments of temples, or trace choaked
aqueducts, but to look upon the various scenes of the present
world. . . . To judge rightly of the present we must oppose it to the
past; for all judgment is comparative, and of the future nothing can be
known."

There is nothing here of the intimacy and charm which, as Dryden and
Cowley had already shown, and Johnson himself was occasionally to show
in his last years, a plain prose may possess; but of the lucidity and
force which are its most necessary characteristics never prose
exhibited more. Those who know their Boswell will catch in the passage
a pleasant foretaste of the outburst to Thrale when he wanted Johnson
to contrast {187} French and English scenery: "Never heed such
nonsense, sir; a blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in
one country or another; let us, if we _do_ talk, talk about something;
men and women are my subjects of inquiry: let us see how these differ
from those we have left behind."

This natural trenchancy gets freer play, of course, in the talk than in
the writings. But it is in them all from the first, even in
_Rasselas_, even in _The Rambler_. "The same actions performed by
different hands produce different effects, and, instead of rating the
man by his performances we rate too frequently the performances by the
man. . . . Benefits which are received as gifts from wealth are
exacted as debts from indigence; and he that in a high station is
celebrated for superfluous goodness would in a meaner condition have
barely been confessed to have done his duty."

It is not necessary to multiply citations. What is