proper place as only one element in a miscellaneous magazine. On Defoe's death, it was left to Henry Fielding to maintain the continuity of the essay until Johnson was ready to accept the trust, and he did so with characteristic ability in the Champion, the Facobite's Journal, the True Patriot, and the Covent Garden Journal, from 1739 to 1752. The last especially contains many excellent essays on literature and morals, characterized by their author's robust common-sense, his vigorous, easy style, and his good-humoured, racy wit. Most of the topics he had already handled in his novels, for while it is inexpedient to dislocate them from their proper setting, the prefatory and incidental discourses in Tom Jones are Fielding's best essays. His desultory criticism is as sound as it is original, and whatever differences of opinion there may be as to the value of his fiction, there can be none as to the faithfulness with which he adheres in his novels to the theories which his essays propound.

It was natural, after the Tatler and Spectator had fallen into oblivion, that some attempt should have been made to start a paper which might do for the Georgian era what they had done for the reign of Queen Anne. That the fame of the Spectators was now no longer a serious obstacle to original effort, as Defoe asserted, is tolerably plain from contemporary evidence. In 1750 Richardson candidly states that he " never found time to read them all", and Sylvanus Urban in reply makes the same admission. It was in this same year that the Rambler made the first attempt at revival, and began the second epoch of the English essay. Johnson, who

was born in the year of the Tatler's appearance, decided at last, to use Boswell's phrase, "to come forth in the character for which he was eminently qualified, a majestic teacher of moral and religious wisdom". "The Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian", continues Boswell, "were the last of the kind published in England, which had stood the test of a long trial; and such an interval had now elapsed since their publication, as made him justly think that to many of his readers this form of instruction would in some degree have the advantage of novelty." It is scarcely accurate to say that Johnson's aim was identical with that of the earlier essayists. "As it has been my principal design", he wrote, "to inculcate wisdom or piety, I have allotted few papers to the idle sports of imagination; but scarcely any man is so steadily serious as not to complain that the severity of dictatorial instruction has been too seldom relieved." By the time that Johnson wrote this, he had found that, in spite of the encomiums of the best judges, the public was not prepared to welcome his instruction with anything like the avidity formerly shown for the lucubrations of Bickerstaff. Nor is there any cause for surprise in this. The wonder is that Johnson should have managed to continue it for two years, and that with its many obvious defects he should have been able to win for it at last a very substantial popularity. Too much stress is sometimes laid on the pomposity of his diction. For serious topics, which were avowedly his chief aim, his style is well suited, and his use of a balanced, periodic structure, if ludicrous when misapplied, is certainly impressive

when it is made the vehicle of his moralizings. In the Rambler and Adventurer, the latter of which shows its editor, Hawkesworth, as faithful an imitator of Johnson as Arbuthnot was of Swift or Hughes of Addison, his serious papers are undoubtedly the best. The story is told of him that at one time he was driven to eke out his income by writing sermons, and most of his essays certainly resemble utterances from the pulpit rather than from the editorial easy-chair. The essays in the Rambler are not by any means his best, but they are the most Johnsonian-in the worst sense, in the sense with which tradition has rather unfairly invested the term. An illustration of this is found in the essay on Literary Courage, which closes with a passage that a manual of rhetoric might quote as typical. "By this descent from the pinnacles of art, no honour will be lost; for the condescensions of learning are always overpaid by gratitude. An elevated genius employed in little things appears, to use the simile of Longinus, like the sun in his evening declination: he remits his splendour but retains his magnitude, and pleases more though he dazzles less." Johnson was far from being a pedant, but he wanted the agility to make a graceful descent from the pinnacles of art, and he had not the supreme requisite of being able to conceal the condescensions of learning. The central idea in the essay on Living in a Garret is sufficiently ludicrous, and the humour is able even to break through the heavy cloud of words that envelops it. "He that upon level ground stagnates in silence, or creeps in narrative, might, at the height of half a

mile, ferment into merriment, sparkle with repartee, and froth with declamation." Johnson is seldom so successful as this in his acrobatic feats, and the Rambler as a whole, judged by this novel criterion of his own, compels one to think that it had been written for the most part upon the ground floor. An improvement observable in his contributions to the Adventurer becomes very apparent in the Idler -a collection of papers published weekly for two years in the Universal Chronicle. The increased sprightliness of manner and the simpler mode of expression were probably the result only of Johnson's having more accurately gauged the nature of the public demand. Of other causes the most likely is the influence of the Connoisseur, which preceded the Idler by four years. When Johnson describes Dick Minim he comes very near to the playful irony of Addison, and his two papers on this subject form a good comparison with the Tatler's account of Ned Softly. It must always remain a puzzle to account for the two-sidedness of Johnson's literary character. As conversationalist, letter-writer and poet, he wielded a trenchant and incisive style, while in his essays he was seldom able to free himself from the trammels of a cumbrous mannerism. There was sound criticism in Goldsmith's jest that he would make little fishes talk like whales. With this one irreparable deficiency he had every qualification that can be imagined necessary for an essayist. Even more than Steele or Addison he was a clubable man"; he knew London and loved London as no one else has done; his dictatorship was more powerful and more unquestioned than ever Dryden's

was; and he had besides a passionate love of literature for its own sake, a fund of genuine wit, and a faculty of acute and eminently sensible criticism. "No periodical writer", says Addison, "who always maintains his gravity, and does not sometimes sacrifice to the Graces, must expect to keep in vogue for any considerable time." This statement gives at once the key to the Spectator's success and to the Rambler's failure. Johnson's style was frozen in "the pinnacles of art", while Addison's easy, flexible English adapted itself to every loose sally of the mind.

For ten years after the Rambler, the essay was revived with a vigour that almost rivalled that of the Queen Anne epoch; but, with only one great exception, all Johnson's contemporaries in essaywriting were eclipsed by the magnitude of his personality. Yet it might well be argued that no periodical during this revival resembles the Tatler as closely in many of its outstanding features as the Connoisseur of Colman and Thornton. These writers, who according to their own statement collaborated in every essay, achieved no brilliant innovation either in form or in matter, but their magazine is far and away superior to any of Johnson's as a faithful and graphic picture of Georgian life, and deserves to be remembered for its literary value as well as for the fact that Cowper was one of its correspondents. Two other celebrated letterwriters, Lord Chesterfield and Horace Walpole, were the most brilliant contributors to the World, but they suffered from the constraint of the essayform, and were unable within its scope to display