found even in _The
Rambler_, which he himself in later years found "too wordy," is found
much more abundantly in the Dictionary and the _Shakespeare_; and as he
grows old, and, with age and authority, increasingly indifferent to
criticism and increasingly confident in his own judgment, there
gradually comes an ease and familiarity which without {188} diminishing
the perfect lucidity of the phrases adds sometimes to the old
contemptuous force, and occasionally brings a new intimacy and
indulgence. The writing becomes gradually more like the talk. Nobody
in his earlier work was ever quite so unceremoniously kicked downstairs
as Wilkes was in _The False Alarm_.

"All wrong ought to be rectified. If Mr. Wilkes is deprived of a
lawful seat, both he and his electors have reason to complain, but it
will not be easily found why, among the innumerable wrongs of which a
great part of mankind are hourly complaining, the whole care of the
publick should be transferred to Mr. Wilkes and the freeholders of
Middlesex, who might all sink into non-existence without any other
effect than that there would be room made for a new rabble and a new
retailer of sedition and obscenity."

This is the old power of invective indulged now with the reckless
indifference of a man who is talking among friends, knows his power and
enjoys using it. But the ease of his later manner more commonly takes
the form of a redoubled directness in his old appeal to universal
experience, or that of these natural indulgences of old age, anecdote
and autobiography. Take, for instance, the first volume of his
_Lives_. It is not only full {189} of such admirable generalizations
as that in which he sums up the case for a literary as against a
mathematical or scientific education: "The truth is that the knowledge
of external nature and the sciences which that knowledge requires or
includes are not the great or the frequent business of the human
mind. . . . We are perpetually moralists: we are geometricians only by
chance"; or that in which he expresses his contempt for Dryden
exchanging Billingsgate with Settle: "Minds are not levelled in their
powers, but when they are first levelled in their desires"; or the
pregnant commonplace with which he prefaces his derision of the
artificial love-poems which Cowley thought it necessary to address to
an imaginary mistress: "It is surely not difficult, in the solitude of
a college or in the bustle of the world, to f