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it has been unjustly characterised, are actually to be found in it; I am sure, not the proportion of one to each paper. This idle charge has been echoed from one babbler to another, who have confounded Johnson’s Essays with Johnson’s Dictionary; and because he thought it right in a Lexicon of our language to collect many words which had fallen into disuse, but were supported by great authorities, it has been imagined that all of these have been interwoven into his own compositions. That some of them have been adopted by him unnecessarily, may, perhaps, be allowed; but, in general they are evidently an advantage, for without them his stately ideas would be confined and cramped. ‘He that thinks with more extent than another, will want words of larger meaning.’b He once told me, that he had formed his style upon that of Sir William Temple, and upon Chambers’s Proposal for his Dictionary. He certainly was mistaken; or if he imagined at first that he was imitating Temple, he was very unsuccessful; for nothing can be more unlike than the simplicity of Temple, and the richness of Johnson. Their styles differ as plain cloth and brocade. Temple, indeed, seems equally erroneous in supposing that he himself had formed his style upon Sandys’s View of the State of Religion in the Western parts of the World.

The style of Johnson was, undoubtedly, much formed upon that of the great writers in the last century, Hooker, Bacon, Sanderson, Hakewell, and others; those ‘Giants,’ as they were well characterised by a great Personage,90 whose authority, were I to name him, would stamp a reverence on the opinion.

We may, with the utmost propriety, apply to his learned style that passage of Horace, a part of which he has taken as the motto to his Dictionary:

‘Cum tabulis animum censoris sumet honesti;

Audebit quæcumque parùm splendoris habebunt

Et sine pondere erunt, et honore indigna ferentur,

Verba movere loco, quamvis invita recedant,

Et versentur adhuc intra penetralia Vestæ.

Obscurata diu populo bonus eruet, atque

Proferet in lucem speciosa vocabula rerum,

Quæ priscis memorata Catonibus atque Cethegis,

Nunc situs informis premit et deserta vetustas:

Adsciscet nova, quæ genitor produxerit usus:

Vehemens, et liquidus, puroque simillimus amni,

Fundet opes Latiumque beabit divite linguaˆ.’c91

To so great a master of thinking, to one of such vast and various knowledge as Johnson, might have been allowed a liberal indulgence of that licence which Horace claims in another place:

‘—Si forte necesse est

Indiciis monstrare recentibus abdita rerum,

Fingere cinctutis non exaudita Cetbegis

Continget, dabiturque licentia sumpta pudenter;

Et nova fictaque nuper babebunt verba fidem si

Grceco fonte cadant, parce detorta. Quid autem

Ccecilio Plautoque dabit Romanus, ademptum

Virgilio Yarioquei Ego cur, acquirere pauca

Si possum, invideor; cum lingua Catonis et Enni

Sermonem patrium ditaverit, et nova rerum

Nomina protuleriti Licuit semperque licebit

Signatum prtesente notä producere nomen.’92

Yet Johnson assured me, that he had not taken upon him to add more than four or five words to the English language, of his own formation; and he was very much offended at the general licence, by no means ‘modestly taken’ in his time, not only to coin new words, but to use many words in senses quite different from their established meaning, and those frequently very fantastical.

Sir Thomas Brown, whose life Johnson wrote, was remarkably fond of Anglo-Latin diction; and to his example we are to ascribe Johnson’s sometimes indulging himself in this kind of phraseology.a Johnson’s comprehension of mind was the mould for his language. Had his conceptions been narrower, his expression would have been easier. His sentences have a dignified march; and, it is certain, that his example has given a general elevation to the language of his country, for many of our best writers have approached very near to him; and, from the influence which he has had upon our composition, scarcely any thing is written now that is not better expressed than was usual before