468 Essay on
��upon a fine taste, than the vigour of his mind. His Latin Poetry shews, that he relished, with a just selection, all the refined and delicate beauties of the Roman classics ; and when he cultivated hi/ native language, no wonder that he formed that graceful tyle, which has been so justly admired ; simple, yet elegant ; lorned, yet never over- wrought ; rich in allusion, yet pure and ^rspicuous ; correct, without labour, and, though sometimes leficient in strength, yet always musical. His essays, in general, are on the surface of life ; if ever original, it was in pieces of humour. Sir Roger de Coverley, and the Tory Fox-hunter T , nped not to be mentioned. Johnson had a fund of humour, but fle did not know it 2 , nor was he willing to descend to the familiar idiom and the variety of diction which that mode of composition required. The letter, in the Rambler, N. 12, from a young girl that wants a place, will illustrate this observation. Addison possessed an unclouded imagination, alive to the first objects of nature and of art. He reaches the sublime without any apparent effort. When he tells us, * If we consider the fixed stars as so many vast oceans of flame, that are each of them attended with a different set of planets ; and still discover new firmaments and new lights, that are sunk farther in those unfathomable depths of sether, so as not to be seen by the strongest of our telescopes, we are lost in such a labyrinth of suns and world, and confounded with the immensity and magnificence of nature ; ' the ease, with which this passage rises to unaffected grandeur, is the secret charm that captivates the reader 3 . Johnson is always lofty; he seems, to use Dryden's phrase, to be o'er-inform'd with meaning 4 , and his words do not appear to himself adequate to his concep tion. He moves in state, and his periods are always harmonious. His Oriental Tales are in the true style of Eastern magnificence 5 ,
caressed both by Somers and Mon- Murphy made five errors which I
tague.' Johnson's Works, vii. 423. have corrected.
Addison, in The Freeholder, No. 4 Murphy, I suppose, refers to the
39, finely describes Somers's char- line in Absalom and Achitophel
acter. 'And o'er-inform'd the tenement
1 The Freeholder, Nos. 22, 44, 47. of clay.'
2 Ante, pp. 287, 452. 5 The Rambler, Nos. 120, 190, 204,
3 In quoting this passage, which is 205; Idler, Nos. 75, 99. Percy found in The Spectator, No. 420, ' heard Johnson say that he thought
and
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