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e novelists of our own, about the danger of detailed enumeration by which description so often loses all its power: for "of the greatest things the parts are little." Now he is incidentally laying down the true ideal of the translator: to "exhibit his author's thoughts in such a dress of diction as the author would have given them, had his language been English." Now he is discoursing at length on what it was Wordsworth's misfortune never fully to understand, the immense power of association upon words, so that the greatest thoughts and noblest emotions fail of their effect if expressed in words ordinarily connected with trivial, vulgar, or ignoble actions, and therefore necessarily arousing in the reader a state of mind unfit for the reception of greatness. Or again he will speak of the value of surprise in literature; "the pleasures of the mind imply something sudden and unexpected." Or he will enlarge, as in the Life of Addison, upon the definition of a simile, the use of similes in poetry, and the distinction between them and what he calls "exemplifications"; or, as in that of Pope, upon the subject of representative metres and onomatopoeic words. No one will pretend that all he says in these general excursions is final: but it is always the work of a man who had {230} read a great deal and had applied a very vigorous mind to what he had read. For all these reasons the _Lives of the Poets_ will always be eagerly read by those who wish to understand a great man and a great period of English literature. But they will be read still more for their pleasantness, humanity and wisdom. CHAPTER VI THE FRIENDS OF JOHNSON Johnson thought human life in general, and his own in particular, an unhappy business. Boswell once urged, in reply to his melancholy, that in fact life was lived upon the supposition of happiness: houses are built, gardens laid out, places of amusement erected and filled with company, and these things would not be done if people did not expect to enjoy themselves. As so often happens in these arguments Boswell appears to us to be substantially right. But the only reply he drew from Johnson was, "Alas, sir, these are all only struggles for happiness." And he went on to give a curious illustration of his rooted conviction that every man knew himself to be unhappy if he stopped to {231} think about it. "When I first entered Ranelagh it gave an expansion and gay sensation to my mind such
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