of more importance that the law should be known than that it
should be right.

To have done all this, and to have explained what was done and what was
attempted in language of such manliness, modesty and eloquence as that
of the great Preface, is to have rendered one of the greatest services
that can be rendered to the literature of a nation. "The chief glory
of every people," says Johnson, "arises from its authors." That would
be a bold thing to say to-day and was a bolder then, especially in so
prosaic a place as the preface to a dictionary. But the world sees its
truth more and more. And it is less out of place in a dictionary than
appears at first sight. For that glory is not easily gained or
recognized till both authors {211} and people realize that their
language is the peer of the greatest in the world, a fit vehicle for
the highest thoughts that can enter the mind of man. And towards that
result in England only a few works of genius have contributed more than
Johnson's Dictionary.

After the language itself comes the most priceless of its monuments.
The services Johnson rendered to Shakespeare are only second to those
he rendered to the language in which Shakespeare wrote. The Preface to
his edition of Shakespeare is certainly the most masterly piece of his
literary criticism: and it may still be doubted, after all that has
been written about Shakespeare in the century and a half that separate
it from our own day, whether the world can yet show any sixty pages
about Shakespeare exhibiting so much truth and wisdom as these. All
Johnson's gifts are seen at their best in it: the lucidity, the virile
energy, the individuality of his style: the unique power of first
placing himself on the level of the plain man and then lifting the
plain man to his: the resolute insistence on life and reason, not
learning or ingenuity, as the standard by which books are to be judged.
No one ever was so free as Johnson from that pest of literature which a
fine French critic, one of the subtlest of his countrymen, called
"l'ingenieux sans bon {212} sens"; and he never showed himself so free
of it as in his Shakespeare. The master of life who "whether life or
nature be his subject, shows plainly that he has seen with his own
eyes," inspired the great critic with more even than his usual measure
of sanity: and perhaps the very best things in the Preface and the
notes are the frequent summonings of ingenious sophistries to the b