16 
NORTH SHORE BREEZE. 
ENGLISH LITERATURE 
Continued from page 3 
derstand why men should take the trouble 
to travel to such remote regions as the 
Peak country or the Lake district, above 
all, the barbarous Highlands, when they 
could enjoy the comforts of their own 
firesides; though he was lured by Bos- 
well to the far off Western Isles, the call 
of the mountain and the glen made no 
appeal to his urban tastes; he was a man 
of the city, and anything outside of Lon- 
don was as foreign to him as Abyssinia 
itself. 
In the judgment of Macaulay, the 
Lives of the Poets is Johnson’s greatest 
work; but inthis he is very unequal; 
his lives of Dryden and Pope have been 
adjudged the best, and that of Gray the 
worst. His failure to appreciate and ad- 
mire Milton is one of the strangest con- 
trarieties of the critic’s character. The 
lives are not merely biographies; they 
are more properly critical estimates of 
the poet’s work. They are now seldom 
read. QOnthe whole, we must think of 
Johnson as a great light in the literary 
firmament; his lustre will never fade, 
but his massive mind didnot move in 
channels which make his writings attrac- 
tive to present day thought and expres- 
sion. 
Johnson’s style is always dignified, but 
it is often cumbrous; it lacks ease and 
variety; he was fond of Latinisms both 
in his words and the structure of his 
sentences; his labored and formal per- 
iods have a stateliness in their march, 
but they seem as if always on parade, 
they are never allowed to break step or 
appear in fatigue dress; in a word, he 
wrote JoAnsonese; his pages are divided 
into rather short paragraphs of quite uni- 
form lenght, and his sentences are often 
too long and too complicated, one in the 
Life of Pope consisting of no less than 
eight different subjects. But while he 
had little grace or vivacity, while his 
tread is always ponderous and slow, what 
liveliness he had being of the elephantine 
variety, his works are a model of plain, 
forcible correct English; and while not 
exactly those most in demand in circulat- 
ing libraries, are marked by solid .rea- 
soning, high ethical tone and profound 
thought. He wrote not to pleas-, but 
to instruct. 
Johnson shone at his best in the midst 
of his literary companions, among whom 
he ruled with a kind of despotic sway. 
They were men of mark and genius, 
Burke, Goldsmith, Reynolds, Gibbon, 
Garrick, and others; they were some- 
thing more than satellites to the great 
luminary. Roswell, his servile biograph- 
er, was a man of very inferior talent, a 
mere parasite and sycophant, but he has 
written one of the best Lives of any great 
literary man that has come down to us, 
simply because he lets his master speak 
for himself, shows him to us just as he 
appeared to his friends with all his ex- 
travagances, his sagacious and senten- 
tious wisdom, his crushing retorts, his 
sarcastic humor, his ponderous logic, his 
foibles and his weaknesses as_ well as his 
genius and power. 
On the whole, Johnson impresses us 
as a great, large-souled man; as Carlyle 
calls him, ‘‘a giant, invincible soul, a 
man who was under the noble necessity 
of being true.’’ It would be easy to en- 
large upon the defects in his character; 
he seems to have labored under some 
peculiar mental perversity; he would not 
believe in the Lisbon earthquake, but he 
could believe in the Cock-lane ghost; 
he was a master of reasoning, but was 
himself mastered by the most absurd 
whims and prejudices; he could trample 
upon all the amenities and civilities, and 
stand bareheaded in the rain in Lichfield 
market-place as a sort of penance for an 
unfilial act of his boyhood; perhaps the 
best excuse for his often rude and un- 
civilized manner is that of Boswell, ‘“he 
had nothing of the bear but the skin.’’ 
But to point out spots in the sun is an 
ungracious task; after all deductions are 
justly made, it must be said of Samuel 
Johnson that he was a mass of genuine 
manhood, one of the most virile writers 
that our English tongue can boast. He 
is a igure, unique, isolated, dominating. 
For massiveness of intellect, stern mor- 
ality and indomitable will, he has hardly 
hada peer. We can accept Macaulay’s 
dictum, ““he was both a great and good 
man.’ After a life of strange contrasts 
and vicissitudes, and physical and mental 
suffering, the sun shone out brightly at 
its setting After an almost morbid fear 
of dying, his death-bed was a scene of 
christian tranquillity and hope. 
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Continued from page 3 
soil. If he had relied on God he would 
have done well, but he did not, he relied 
on his own strength and trusted himself. 
“© Then look at Cain’s ruin. He was 
a man almost before he was a boy; he 
was in advance of most children now 
adays. He came well equipped for ma 
terial success; a boy likely to be a win- 
ner in life, and he did win, don’t think 
he didn’t. Even an evil life will achieve 
something. Cain built a city, founded 
a dynasty and was the progenitor of 
those who forged weapons of war. Be- 
sides accomplishing something, he 
carried the human race just one step 
farther into sin and degradation. Adam 
and Eve had been unjust to their Maker; 
Cain slew his brother. How quickly 
one sin leads to another! 
** Lastly, let us ask when we do any- 
thing, What will be the consequences? 
How will this act affect that other per- 
son’s life? Shall you give to the future 
generation a handicap because you re- 
belled against God? Will your life bless 
the future? Or, will it cause sad hearts? 
Will it mean strength for human weak- 
ness? Think of it. . How does your 
life affect the human race? 
‘© Education cannot eradicate the sin 
in one’s soul. Qvne thinks that all they 
have to do to cover up a sin is to get 
hold of some good books. There must 
be something more than books to take 
away the stain of sin from the _ heart. 
Just because a child is born of Christian 
parents, that does not make him a re- 
deemed soul. There is a power that 
will bring us into the ranks of the re- 
deemed and that power comes from — 
Jesus Christ.’’ 
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