by Miss Reynolds.
��perceived, that he could not distinguish any man's face half a yard distant from him, not even his most intimate acquaintance.
And yet Dr. Johnson's character, singular as it certainly was from the contrast of his mental endowments with the roughness of his mariners, was, I believe, perfectly natural and consistent throughout ; and to those who were intimately acquainted with him must, I imagine, have appeared so. For being totally devoid of all deceit, free from every tinge of affectation or ostentation x , and unwarped by any vice, his singularities, those strong lights and shades that so peculiarly distinguish his character, may the more easily be traced to their primary and natural causes.
The luminous parts of his character, his soft affections, and I should suppose his strong intellectual powers, at least the dignified charm or radiancy of them, must be allowed to owe their origin to his strict, his rigid principles of religion and virtue ; and the shadowy parts of his character, his rough, unaccommodating manners, were in general to be ascribed to those corporeal defects that I have already observed naturally tended to darken his perceptions of what may be called propriety and impropriety in general conversation ; and of course in the ceremonious or ^artificial sphere of society gave his deportment so contrasting an to the apparent softness and general uniformity of culti vate manners.
perhaps the joint influence of these two primeval causes, his intellectual excellence and his corporeal defects, mutually contributed to give his manners a greater degree of harshness
in they would have had if only under the influence of one of lem ; the imperfect perceptions of the one not unfrequently Producing misconceptions in the other.
Besides these, many other equally natural causes concurred to constitute the singularity of Dr. Johnson's character. Doubtless,
��1 ' He had an abhorrence of affec tation. Talking of old Mr. Langton, of whom he said, " Sir, you will seldom see such a gentleman, such are his stores of literature, such his knowledge in divinity, and such his exemplary life ; " he added, " and
��Sir, he has no grimace, no gesticula tion, no bursts of admiration on trivial occasions ; he never embraces you with an overacted cordiality." ' Life, iv. 27. See ib. i. 470 for Johnson's disapproval of ' studied behaviour.'
the
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