470 Essay on
��Johnson is JUPITER TONANS : he darts his lightning, and rolls his thunder, in the cause of virtue and piety. The language seems to fall short of his ideas ; he pours along, familiarizing the terms of philosophy x , with bold inversions, and sonorous periods ; but we may apply to him what Pope has said of Homer : ' It is the sentiment that swells and fills out the diction, which rises with it, and forms itself about it ; .... like glass in the furnace, which grows to a greater magnitude, .... as the breath within is more powerful, and the heat more intense 2 .'
It is not the design of this comparison to decide between those two eminent writers. In matters of taste every reader will chuse for himself 3 . Johnson is always profound, and of course gives the fatigue of thinking. Addison charms while he instructs ; and writing, as he always does, a pure, an elegant, and idiomatic style, he may be pronounced the safest model for imitation.
The essays written by Johnson in the Adventurer may be called a continuation of the Rambler 4 . The IDLER, in order to be consistent with the assumed character, is written with abated vigour, in a style of ease and unlaboured elegance. It is the Odyssey after the Iliad 5 . Intense thinking would not become the IDLER. The first number presents a well- drawn portrait of
1 ' When common words were less the style of Addison and Johnson, pleasing to the ear, or less distinct in and to depreciate, I think very un- their signification, I have familiar- justly, the style of Addison as nerve- ized the terms of philosophy by ap- less and feeble, because it has not the plying them to popular ideas.' Ram- strength and energy of that of John- bler, No. 208. son.' Life, i. 224. Macaulay wrote
2 Pope's Homer's Iliad, ed. 1760, in 1856: 'On the question of pre- i. Preface, p. 20. cedence between Addison and John-
3 Johnson wrote in 1781 : 'Who- son, a question which seventy years ever wishes to attain an English ago was much disputed, posterity style, familiar but not coarse, and ele- has pronounced a decision from which gant but not ostentatious, must give there is no appeal. 3 Misc. Works, his days and nights to the volumes ed. 1871, p. 381.
of Addison.' Works, vii. 473. Haw- 4 Life, i. 255. kins, in 1787 (p. 270), said: 'The 5 ' The Idler may be described as characteristics of Mr. Addison's style a second part of the Rambler, some- are feebleness and inanity.' Four what livelier and somewhat weaker years later Boswell wrote : ' It has than the first part.' Macaulay's Misc. of late been the fashion to compare Works, p. 383.
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