s prayer." The truth is
that we cannot do without both; and when we have prayed for courage,
and tried to rejoice in our beds, as the saints who are joyful in glory
do, we had better spend no time in begging that money may be sent us to
meet our particular need, or that health may return to us, or that this
and that person may behave more kindly and considerately, but go our
way to some perfectly commonplace bit of work, do it as thoroughly as
we can, and simply turn our back upon the hobgoblin whose grimaces fill
us with such uneasiness. He melts away in the blessed daylight over the
volume or the account-book, in the simple talk about arrangements or
affairs, and above all perhaps in trying to disentangle and relieve
another's troubles and anxieties. We cannot get rid of fear by drugs or
charms; we have to turn to the work which is the appointed solace of
man, and which is the reward rather than the penalty of life.

XI

DR. JOHNSON

There is one great and notable instance in our annals which ought once
and for all to dispose of the idea that there is anything weak or
unmanly in finding fear a constant temptation, and that is the case of
Dr. Johnson. Dr. Johnson holds his supreme station as the "figure" par
excellence of English life for a number of reasons. His robustness, his
wit, his reverence for established things, his secret piety are all
contributory causes; but the chief of all causes is that the proportion
in which these things were mixed is congenial to the British mind. The
Englishman likes a man who is deeply serious without being in the least
a prig; a man who is tender-hearted without being sentimental; he likes
a rather combative nature, and enjoys repartee more than he enjoys
humour. The Englishman values good sense above almost all qualities; by
a sensible man he means a man with a clear judgment of right and wrong,
a man who is not taken in by pretences nor gulled by rhetoric; a man
who can instinctively see what is important and what is unimportant.
But of course the chief external reason, apart from the character of
Johnson himself, for his supremacy of fame, is that his memory is
enshrined in an incomparable biography. It shows the strange ineptness
of Englishmen for literary and artistic criticism, their incapacity for
judging a work of art on its own merits, their singular habit of
allowing their disapprobation of a man's private character to
depreciate his work, that an acknowledged