("Rambler," No. 33). In another paper, Rest, Labor, Lassitude, Luxury, and Satiety are personified; so elsewhere are Truth, Falsehood, Curiosity, etc.
It is a fair question, whether this artifice stands on the same footing as pastoral poetry and mythological decoration. We scarcely think it does. There is a large body of our experience not expressed in the current literature for the very reason that in this utter disuse of personification there is no longer any means of bringing it in a sustained way before the mind. For the mental and moral qualiites, representing so much of what we know and feel, we have names; but a name is not embodiment enough to enable us to contemplate them effectually. Indeed, what we may term the natural history of the virtues and the vices can only be given in parable. We now are pretending to do without it, and we succeed after a fashion; that is, we omit effective meditation on these subjects. Let any one who wishes to know how much we lose by this utter exclusion of personification read Johnson's "Vision of the Hermit of Teneriffe." The fable of the "Mountain of Existence," with its personifications of Education, Appetite, Habits, Reason, Pride, Content, Indolence, Melancholy, Despair, and Religion, will make — unless we are wholly mistaken — the process of human experience intelligible to him in a way which is impossible by the use of abstract terms only. A time may come when language will have condensed itself and have developed its associations sufficiently for mere names to serve, but, at present, we are far from it. Personification seems a real need of exposition, one which cannot be permanently unrecognized. It has the objection of staling badly from over-use. Now and then, it must ask a period of neglect to gain freshness. Whenever it is readopted, it will give a palpable enlargement of the vehicle of literary expression. Johnson's great use of it has these grounds of justification.
But, in order fully to perceive Johnson's extraordinary merits, you must take the perfect wisdom of what he says in his splendid fragments with the all but perfect way in which he said it, for his style was ample for these brief flights of composition. In his writings, we again say, there is no oddity of manner, no unsoundness of view, nothing approaching to grotesqueness; he is nearly the politest of our writers; everything with him is polished, even stiffened a little into elegant hardness. His one exaggeration was that of a careful nobleness. It is quite true that there was the huge Boswellian difference between Johnson as an author and as a man, but we have so many eccentric men and so few nearly perfect writers, that it may be doubted whether it would not have been as well to have had the unlessened effect of Johnson as an author. For it is from this sublime, inevitable hypocrisy of literature that the world gets its lay working ideal perpetually renewed. As yet, a human creature can only sometimes be quite good in the still act of writing. By a happy error, those who do not write mix up the man and the author, where the difference is not forced on them as in this case, and, thinking there are beings so much better than the common, they try, fitfully, to live after the style of books. If the illusion should be destroyed, and it ever came to be universally known that literature is intentional only, that the writers of these high judgments, exact reflections, beautiful flights of sentiment, are in act simply as other men, how is the great bulk to be stung into trying after progress?
Johnson was a wonderful possibility of this illusion. With the pen in his hand, he was a nearly perfect man. But, thanks to Boswell's fidelity, the accidents of a diseased body have been allowed to obscure more than a little the literary effect of his splendid mind. William Cyples
PRINCE BISMARCK.
BY ONE OF HIS COUNTRYMEN.
I.
He is a powerful man. That is what strikes at once every one who sees him for the first time. He is very tall and of enormous weight, but not ungainly. Every part of his gigantic frame is well-proportioned, — the large, round head, the massive neck, the broad shoulders, and the vigorous limbs. He is now more than sixty-three, and the burden he has had to bear has been unusually heavy; but though his step has become slow and ponderous, he carries his head high — looking down, even, on those who are as tall as himself — and his figure is still erect. During these latter years he has suffered frequent and severe bodily pain, but no one could look upon him as an old man, or as one to be pitied. On the contrary, everybody who
