ind useful studies and
serious employment." This is the Johnson his readers had known from
the beginning. What is newer are the personal touches sprinkled all
over the book. Here he will bring in a fact about his friend, Sir
Joshua Reynolds; there he will give a piece of information derived from
"my father, an old bookseller." He who studied life and manners before
all things loves to record the personal habits of his poets and to try
their writings rather by the tests of life than {190} of criticism. He
was, perhaps, the first great critic to take the seeming trifles of
daily life out of the hands of gossips and anecdote-mongers, and give
them their due place in the study of a great man. All this necessarily
gave him something of the colloquial ease of the writer of
recollections. Nothing could be simpler than his style when he tells
us of Milton that "when he first rose he heard a chapter in the Hebrew
Bible and then studied till twelve; then took some exercise for an
hour; then dined; then played on the organ, and sang, or heard another
sing; then studied; to six; then entertained his visitors till eight;
then supped, and after a pipe of tobacco and a glass of water went to
bed." On which his comment is characteristic and plainly
autobiographical. "So is his life described; but this even tenour
appears attainable only in colleges. He that lives in the world will
sometimes have the succession of his practice broken and confused.
Visitors, of whom Milton is represented to have had great numbers, will
come and stay unseasonably: business, of which every man has some, must
be done when others will do it." This may still have about it
something of the style of a school-master, but of a school-master who
teaches the art of living, not without having learnt by experience the
difficulty of practising it.

{191}

So we may trace the gradual diminution, but never the entire
disappearance, of the excessive "deportment" which is the best known
feature of Johnson's style. Of another feature often found in it by
hostile critics less need be said because it is not really there at
all. Johnson is frequently accused of verbosity. If that word means
merely pomposity it has already been discussed. If it means, as it
should mean, the use of superfluous words adding nothing to the sense,
few authors are so seldom guilty of it as Johnson. There are many good
writers, Scott, for instance, and the authors of the Book of Co