arely bring himself
to be "below refinement," the refinement not of the drawing-room but of
the library. In what he says he is always a man; in the way he says it
he is nearly always too visibly an author. Those who have eyes to see
and the will to look never fail of finding the man; but the author
stares them in the face.

His prose works may be divided into two classes, those in which he is
primarily a moralist, and those in which he is primarily a critic.
Life and manners are never out of his mind; but while they are the
direct and avowed subject of _The Rambler_, _The Idler_ and _Rasselas_,
they only come, as it were, indirectly into the _Dictionary_, the
_Shakespeare_ and the _Lives of the Poets_, where the ostensible
business is the criticism of literature. Outside these categories are
the political pamphlets, the interesting _Journey to the Western
Islands_, {194} and a great quantity of miscellaneous literary
hack-work. All of these have mind and character in them, or they would
not be Johnson's; but they call for no special discussion. Nor do the
_Prayers and Meditations_, which of course he did not publish himself.
It is enough to say that, while fools have frequently ridiculed them,
all who have ever realized that there is such a thing as the warfare of
the spirit with its own weakness, will find a poignant interest in the
tragedy of Johnson's inner life, always returning again and again to
the battle in which he seemed to himself to be always defeated.

_The Rambler_, _The Idler_ and _Rasselas_ fill four volumes out of the
twelve in the 1823 library edition of Johnson. When Johnson decided to
bring out a periodical paper he, of course, had the model of the
_Spectator_ and _Tatler_ before him. But he had in him less of the
graces of life than Addison and Steele, and a far deeper sense of the
gravity of its issues; with the result that _The Rambler_ and _The
Idler_ are much heavier than their predecessors, not only in style but
in substance. They deal much more avowedly with instruction. As we
read them we wonder, not at the slow sale of the original papers, but
at the editions which the author lived to see. We stand amazed to-day
at the audacity of a journalist {195} who dares to offer, and at the
patience or wisdom of a public which is content twice a week to read,
not exciting events or entertaining personalities, but sober essays on
the most ancient and apparently threadbare of topics. Here are