miliar example of a
similar escape from a monotonous simplicity into awkward complexity.
Such writers are like men who have been chilled by what Johnson would
call the 'frigorifick' influence of the classicism of their fathers, and
whose numbed limbs move stiffly and awkwardly in a first attempt to
regain the old liberty. The form, too, of the 'Rambler' is unfortunate.
Johnson has always Addison before his eyes; to whom it was formerly the
fashion to compare him for the same excellent reason which has recently
suggested comparisons between Dickens and Thackeray--namely, that their
works were published in the same external shape. Unluckily, Johnson gave
too much excuse for the comparison by really imitating Addison. He has
to make allegories, and to give lively sketches of feminine
peculiarities, and to ridicule social foibles of which he was, at most,
a distant observer. The inevitable consequence is, that though here and
there we catch a glimpse of the genuine man, we are, generally, too much
provoked by the awkwardness of his costume to be capable of enjoying, or
even reading him.

In many of his writings, however, Johnson manages, almost entirely, to
throw off these impediments. In his deep capacity for sympathy and
reverence, we recognise some of the elements that go to the making of a
poet. He is always a man of intuitions rather than of discursive
intellect; often keen of vision, though wanting in analytical power. For
poetry, indeed, as it is often understood now, or even as it was
understood by Pope, he had little enough qualification. He had not the
intellectual vivacity implied in the marvellously neat workmanship of
Pope, and still less the delight in all natural and artistic beauty
which we generally take to be essential to poetic excellence. His
contempt for 'Lycidas' is sufficiently significant upon that head. Still
more characteristic is the incapacity to understand Spenser, which
comes out incidentally in his remarks upon some of those imitations,
which even in the middle of the eighteenth century showed that
sensibility to the purest form of poetry was not by any means extinct
amongst us. But there is a poetry, though we sometimes seem to forget
it, which is the natural expression of deep moral sentiment; and of this
Johnson has written enough to reveal very genuine power. The touching
verses upon the death of Levett are almost as pathetic as Cowper; and
fragments of the two imitations of Juvenal have s