which came next before his own, the writers who were the standards of style in the reigns of Anne and George I.—such as Addison and Pope. That period had been characterised by a revolt from the pedantries of scholasticism, and the revolt had run to the other extreme; common sense was the new divinity; and everything that common sense could not explain, everything that savoured of a mystic profundity, was suspected of imposture, or at least of mental confusion. In style the great virtue was elegant correctness—the appropriate garb for penetrating and polished common sense. If we wished to illustrate this ideal by the opposite extreme, we might turn to Carlyle, hurling his amorphous language into space, and tormenting human speech in a struggle to body forth the Immensities. Johnson's age was remote enough from Carlyle's ways of thinking, but at least it was in process of outgrowing the deification of common sense and correctness; it was beginning to feel that there were more things in heaven and earth than had been comprehended by the literary law-givers of the age before it. This perception necessarily re-acted upon style; in Johnson's own ponderous sentences we can occasionally see that, like Thucydides, he labours under the difficulty that the things which he wishes to express are rather too complex for his instrument, in the form which recent usage had given to it, and that he must strive to draw some new tones out of that instrument in his own way. Compare Johnson with Addison, for instance. Addison had
