crosses his path; Johnson treats frivolous themes with all the cumbrous elaboration of scholastic philosophy, but when the matter is grave, and thought must follow it outside the traffic of daily intercourse, he is himself again, and strikes at it in English that has no flaw. Even the slightest of his earlier essays is not open to the charge that he brings against Pope. ‘Never,’ he says of the Essay on Man—‘never were penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised. The reader feels his mind full, though he learns nothing; and when he meets it in its new array no longer knows the talk of his mother and his nurse.’ Johnson’s verbosity is duller than Pope’s, less enlivened with plausible rhetoric and formal turns of wit; but it is never empty.
His quarrel with the classical mythology appears again and again in the Lives. He held it to be a meaningless ornament, a useless remainder. The belief in the old gods was long dead, and allusions to them could only be idle. ‘The Fan,’ he says, in the Life of Gay, ‘is one of those mythological fictions which antiquity delivers ready to the hand; but which, like other things that lie open to every one’s use, are of little value. The attention naturally retires from a new tale of Venus, Diana, and Minerva.’ And again, of Waller: ‘He borrows too many of his sentiments and illustrations from the old mythology, for which it is vain to plead the example of ancient poets: the deities which they introduced so frequently were considered as realities, so far as to be received by the imagination, whatever sober reason might even then determine. But of these images time has tarnished the splendor. A fiction, not only detected but despised, can never afford a solid basis to any position, though sometimes it may furnish a transient allusion or
