Drydcn and the Critical Canons of the Eighteenth Century 17 



very new or startling; for his general principles, if not obvious 

 on statement, will carry little or no conviction. His originality 

 will consist in the striking and suggestive application of a small 

 number of universally accepted or acceptable truths. Addison, 

 therefore, is not to be blamed because his ideas are few and fa- 

 miliar. He is to be blamed only as his development of such ideas 

 is otiose or insignificant. When he endeavors, for instance, "to 

 shew how those parts of life which are exercised in study, read- 

 ing, and the pursuits of knowledge, are long but not tedious, and 

 by that means discover a method of lengthening our lives and at 

 the same time of turning all the parts of them to our advantage,"^ 

 he starts an interesting and fruitful topic of speculation ; while in 

 such illustrations of ordinary moral commonplace as are asso- 

 ciated with the names of the Spectator and Sir Roger de Cover- 

 ley, he has laid literature under lasting obligation. But when he 

 spends several pages to prove that a man's acts are not always a 

 sure guide to his character,- then he wastes his own time and 

 abuses his reader's patience. 



Half a century later, however, the unrelieved triteness into 

 which this conversational prose finally ran had become thor- 

 oughly irksome. By Johnson's day there is a vague suspicion 

 that literature ought, not only to differ from talk, but also to go 

 deeper than talk usually can go. Johnson himself, harking back 

 instinctively to Sir Thomas Browne, attempts more or less de- 

 liberately to restore to prose certain of its lost powers by the use 

 of a highly Latinized diction and a highly complicated sentence- 

 structure. In this way he does succeed occasionally in scooping 

 up rather more bottom, and at all events he is always sure of roil- 

 ing the waters into a passable imitation of profundity. But how- 

 ever clumsy his means, such -is undoubtedly the significance of 

 his style. And of this change of opinion nothing can be more 

 indicative than the contrast between his spoken and written lan- 

 guage, which is so striking as fairly to justify Macaulay's epi- 

 gram that when he wrote he did his sentences out of Ensflish into 



'Addison. Spectator, no. 94. 

 "Ibid., no. 257. 



17 



