Dr. Johnson's reputation, then, is due to Boswell's book. His reputation as a wit, instead of being simply a tradition, surviving, like Dryden's, on a meagre handful of anecdotes, and kept alive, like that of most good talkers, by having all the old stories of centuries fathered on him alone-instead of that, I say, we hear him as he lived and spoke. What makes Boswell's "Life" so valuable is that he did not iron all the eccentricities out of Johnson, that he did not file and polish him into a faultless and bloodless hero, as photographers nowadays burnish from our portraits all the lines which time and experience have marked upon our face.* Hannah More "besought his [Boswell's] tenderness for our virtuous and most revered departed friend, and begged he would mitigate some of his asperities. He said, roughly, ‘He would not cut off his claws, nor make a tiger a cat to please anybody.'

Boswell's reward for his honesty will not surprise thoughtful people. Inasmuch as he put down instances of his own folly and of the rebuffs he drew from Johnson, it has been the fashion to decry him for a simpleton; but few sensible men, however, have given so much pleasure to an ungrateful world. He really opens the door for us and lets us overhear Johnson expressing in his talk all the opposition that conservatives felt against the modern spirit that was then rising on every hand. There were many innovators; for society had become very complex, and there were countless influences at work preparing for the second Renaissance, the Romantic movement.

We have seen in what way much of the new spirit grew,

*Perhaps as marked an instance of the conventional treatment is the authorized life of Day, the author of "Sandford and Merton." His life, as we may see in Miss Edgeworth's memoirs of her father, was a whirl of eccentricity, but in the authorized memoir he is as unreal and pallid as a bust with a toga around its neck.

and how the impending political revolution was anticipated in literature by the deposition of crowned heads from their pre-eminence and the exaltation of the citizen. We have seen the awakening of an interest in the past; this continued, and was one of the most productive of the many influences at work. This need not surprise us; the key of the so-called classical method was the imitation of poets of acknowledged merit. Horace, Seneca, Vergil, had been copied and recopied. Gottsched and Bodmer agreed in urging imitation as the one secret of success; they differed only in the poets they suggested for models. With time there had grown up a new love for the forgotten past, and once-neglected poets now began to be regarded as authorities. We have seen how echoes of Milton reverberated through the whole century, and any one who turns over the collections of verse of that period will find numberless attempts to reproduce Spenser's stanza. Beattie only followed what was already a fashion when he adopted that form for his curious refutation of infidelity in the "Minstrel." The new interest in Shakspere was part of the same movement.*

* Lord Lansdowne made over the "Merchant of Venice" (1701) with music; Otway, "Romeo and Juliet" into "Caius Marius;" Gildon, “Measure for Measure;" Cibber, "Richard the Third," 1700; Dennis, "Merry Wives," 1702; Leveridge, "Midsummer-Night's Dream," 1716; Dennis, "Coriolanus" 1721; Charles Johnson, "As You Like It," 1723; Duke of Buckingham, "Julius Cæsar" into two plays, 1722; Worsdale, “Taming of the Shrew," 1736; J. Miller, "Much Ado About Nothing," 1737; Cibber, "King John," 1744; Lampe, "Midsummer-Night's Dream" into a sort of operetta, 1745.

Garrick, though abused by Lamb for falseness to Shakspere, did much in the way of restoring the original text. The story runs that when Garrick was acting Macbeth according to the original text, Quin asked him where he got all that fine language. It is to be remembered that Steele did not quote the original text in the Tatler, and we should consider how

II. A wholly new voice was heard in Ossian (1762), the effect of which was, however, more distinctly marked on the Continent than in England.* The authenticity of these poems is still a matter of grave doubt. At the best, they were versions of meagre relics, composed in the rhetorical language that marks much of the tumid blank verse of the last century, with imitations of the Old Testament and of certain old Irish and Scotch poems. Macpherson's curious dependence on his contemporaries, which he exhibited in almost every line, probably endeared him to his first readers. The very vagueness of his descriptions of nature seemed like vivid accuracy to those who were but just beginning to enjoy the sight of scenery; now, on the other hand, it is but an additional proof of Macpherson's forgery. But, such as they were-and just what they were still remains uncertain-they had a success which was incontestable. They were put into German, and were often 'reprinted in that country in their English dress. They were translated into French and into Italian, and were much admired by Napoleon, among others; and versions appeared in Spanish, Polish, and Dutch.

seldom we nowadays, more than one hundred years since Garrick's prime, see the plays without great alteration.

* As Taine says, Macpherson "collected fragments of legends, plastered over the whole an abundance of eloquence and rhetoric, and created a Celtic Homer, Ossian, who, with Oscar, Malvina, and his whole troop, made the tour of Europe, and, about 1830, ended by furnishing baptismal names for French grisettes and perruquiers.”—“English Lit.," ii. 220.

"Poor moaning, monotonous Macpherson," as Carlyle called him in his review of Taylor's "German Poetry."-" Essays," ii. 443.

Have not his proclamations, addresses to his troops, etc., an Ossianic sound? He also liked "Werther." Goethe said to Henry Crabbe Robinson (“Diary," ii. 106), "It was the contrast with his own nature. He loved soft and melancholy music. Werther was among his books at St. Helena." But is not this statement too modest? Napoleon liked "Wer

In England they from the first met violent opposition. Dr. Johnson, who detested them because they were Scotch, as well as because they were animated by all that he most despised in the new literature, was their bitterest opponent. His view of them may be gathered from the letter quoted above. The Scotch, however, rose like a man in their behalf. An ardent patriotism sufficed to convince them that Macpherson was a mere translator of their old epics, and no charlatan. Dr. Blair, for instance, undertook to show by copious arguments that Ossian was a Scotch Homer, and how, by virtue of his genius, he had complied with every one of Aristotle's laws:

"The duration of the action in Fingal, is much shorter than in the Iliad or Æneid, but sure there may be shorter as well as longer heroic poems.; and if the authority of Aristotle be also required for this, he says expressly, that the epic composition is indefinite as to the time of its. duration. Accordingly the action of the Iliad lasts only forty-seven days, whilst that of the Eneid is continued for more than a year." And, on the next page, "Homer's art in magnifying the character of Achilles has been universally admired. Ossian certainly shows no less art in aggrandizing Fingal." "The story which is the foundation of the Iliad is in itself as simple as that of Fingal," etc.

Yet Johnson's opposition to the poems was effective at home, although it had no influence abroad, where the readers expected roughness in a twofold translation. What the influence of the book was we may see in the second part of Goethe's "Werther" (1774), in Klopstock, and in many of Goethe's early odes; and Chateaubriand has told

ther" because it came out when he was young. Napoleon, it must be remembered, once came near committing suicide. Vide also "Eckermann," i. 28 (Jan. 2, 1824).

us how he was delighted by the fictitious bard. Germany especially was moved by the Ossianic spirit. That country was then awakening to the consciousness of its powers, and the vague, formless grandeur of Ossian came like a sea-breeze to expel the sultry, close air of the artificial literature that had pretended to exist for so long a time. The inspiration, you will notice, came to the Continent from England. Lillo, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Ossian, each in his own way served as model for French and German writers; Rousseau was directly inspired by Richardson, and it was from Rousseau and Ossian that Goethe drew strength for writing his "Werther," a book that swept over Europe like a meteor.

We of the present day, one of whose favorite affectations is the love of sincerity, are apt to look with a good deal of contempt on the worship of Ossian, and to sneer at our ancestors for finding any delight in his tumid pages. It may be questioned, however, whether our painstaking resuscitations of the dead, with their easily pierced veneering of local color, are actually much better than the vague grandeur and sham heroics of the famous bard. At any rate, whether the poem was really great or really pretty, it is our duty in the first place to understand why it was liked, as it undeniably was, and to do this we must remember the growing intolerance of antiquated and artificial forms. As Mr. Stephen puts it ("English Thought," ii. 447), "its crude attempts to represent a social state when great men stalked through the world in haughty superiority to the narrow conventions of modern life, were congenial to men growing weary of an effete formalism. Men had been talking under their breath, and in a mincing dialect, so long that they were easily gratified, and easily imposed upon, by an affectation of vigorous and natural sentiment." Then, too, the science of criticism,