and below refinement where propriety resides, and where this poet (Shakespeare) seems to have gathered his comic dialogue. He is therefore more agreeable to the ears of the present age than any other author equally remote, and among his other excellencies deserves to be studied as one of the original masters of our language."
All Johnson's criticism has one great merit; it is thoroughly independent. It is also marked, almost everywhere, by strong good sense; and though good sense does not necessarily mean good taste, at any rate there can be no good taste without it.
His character was a noble one—generous, brave, unswervingly honest, and, above all, wonderfully kind. He had no patience for people grumbling about petty or sentimental troubles; but where there was real trouble, his bounty and his self-sacrifice were signal. Two thirds of his income went in charity. His dependents were numerous. In his later years his own house was full of permanent inmates who were either partly or wholly supported by him. Johnson describes, in a letter to Mrs Thrale, how his guests got on with each other; "Williams," he says, "hates everybody; Levett hates Desmoulins, and does not love Williams; Desmoulins hates them both; Poll (Miss Carmichael) loves none of them." Then Frank Barber resented the authority of Miss Williams, and she complained of Barber's insubordination. And in this circle Johnson voluntarily made his home for years. His acts of goodness to the outcasts of society, to the
