man. To him, as he flatly declared, Fleet Street, in the midst of the hurry
of London life, was the most interesting place in the world.

In the substance of his work Johnson is most conspicuously, and of set
purpose, a moralist. In all his writing, so far as the subject permitted,
he aimed chiefly at the inculcation of virtue and the formation of
character. His uncompromising resoluteness in this respect accounts for
much of the dulness which it is useless to try to deny in his work. 'The
Rambler' and 'The Idler' altogether lack Addison's lightness of touch and
of humor; for Johnson, thoroughly Puritan at heart, and dealing generally
with the issues of personal conduct and responsibility, can never greatly
relax his seriousness, while Addison, a man of the world, is content if he
can produce some effect on society as a whole. Again, a present-day reader
can only smile when he finds Johnson in his Preface to Shakspere blaming
the great dramatist for omitting opportunities of instructing and
delighting, as if the best moral teachers were always explicit. But
Johnson's moral and religious earnestness is essentially admirable, the
more so because his deliberate view of the world was thoroughly
pessimistic. His own long and unhappy experience had convinced him that
life is for the most part a painful tribulation, to be endured with as much
patience and courage as possible, under the consciousness of the duty of
doing our best where God has put us and in the hope (though with Johnson
not a confident hope) that we shall find our reward in another world.

It has long been a popular tradition, based largely on a superficial page
of Macaulay, that Johnson's style always represents the extreme of
ponderous pedantry. As usual, the tradition must be largely discounted. It
is evident that Johnson talked, on the whole, better than he wrote, that
the present stimulus of other active minds aroused him to a complete
exertion of his powers, but that in writing, his indolence often allowed