him to compose half sleepily, at a low pressure. In some of his works,
especially 'The Rambler,' where, it has been jocosely suggested, he was
exercising the polysyllables that he wished to put into his 'Dictionary,'
he does employ a stilted Latinized vocabulary and a stilted style, with too
much use of abstract phrases for concrete ones, too many long sentences,
much inverted order, and over-elaborate balance. His style is always in
some respects monotonous, with little use, for instance, as critics have
pointed out, of any form of sentence but the direct declarative, and with
few really imaginative figures of speech. In much of his writing, on the
other hand, the most conspicuous things are power and strong effective
exposition. He often uses short sentences, whether or not in contrast to
his long ones, with full consciousness of their value; when he will take
the trouble, no one can express ideas with clearer and more forceful
brevity; and in a very large part of his work his style carries the finely
tonic qualities of his clear and vigorous mind.

JAMES BOSWELL AND HIS 'LIFE OF JOHNSON.' It is an interesting paradox that
while Johnson's reputation as the chief English man of letters of his age
seems secure for all time, his works, for the most part, do not belong to
the field of pure literature, and, further, have long ceased, almost
altogether, to be read. His reputation is really due to the interest of his
personality, and that is known chiefly by the most famous of all
biographies, the life of him by James Boswell.

Boswell was a Scotch gentleman, born in 1740, the son of a judge who was
also laird of the estate of Auchinleck in Ayrshire, near the English
border. James Boswell studied law, but was never very serious in any
regular activity. Early in life he became possessed by an extreme
boyish-romantic admiration for Johnson's works and through them for their
author, and at last in 1763 (only twenty years before Johnson's death)