The Unequaled Dr. Johnson

I have found it the surest tonic, whenever I begin to embrace the prose style of any author as excellent beyond all others, to take a little time with Samuel Johnson. I have greeted the seductions of William Tyndale, Francis Bacon, Jane Austen, even our own American Cicero Daniel Webster; yet it requires but a few drops of the antidote to dispel even these most staying poisons. If there are those among you who are unfamiliar with Dr. Johnson, I advise you in all earnestness and confidence to get hold of some of him: he is the most eloquent man the English language has produced. Shakespeare may be the Homer, Milton the Pindar of our tongue, yet as the firmer perfections of Hellenic speech were reserved to Demosthenes their later peer, so stands Johnson among the English authors. No author's diction is more pure, nor their balance more artless, and where some might approach or even attain, for a breath, the loftiest peak of elegance, there are none that can so long and so consistently persevere in that reverie as Dr. Johnson does.

I give you here an example from the preface to his dictionary, chosen because it was near at hand, although it testifies adequately enough to the excellence of his style in some of the nobler of his sentiments.

"To have attempted much is always laudable, even when the enterprise is above the strength that undertakes it: to rest below his own aim is incident to every one whose fancy is active, and whose views are comprehensive; nor is any man satisfied with himself because he has done much, but because he can conceive little. When first I engaged in this work, I resolved to leave neither words nor things unexamined, and pleased myself with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature, with the obscure recesses of northern learning, which I should enter and ransack, the treasures with which I expected every search into those neglected mines to reward my labor, and the triumph with which I should display my acquisitions to mankind. When I had thus inquired into the original of words, I resolved to show likewise my attention to things; to pierce deep into every science, to inquire the nature of every substance of which I inserted the name, to limit every idea by definition strictly logical, and exhibit every production of art or nature in an accurate description, that my book might be in place of all other dictionaries whether appellative or technical. But these were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer. I soon found that it is too late to look for instruments, when the work calls for execution, and that whatever abilities I brought to my task, with those I must finally perform it. To deliberate whenever I doubted, to inquire whenever I was ignorant, would have protracted the undertaking without end, and, perhaps, without much improvement; for I did not find by my first experiments, that what I had not of my own was easily to be obtained: I saw that one inquiry only gave occasion to another, that book referred to book, that to search was not always to find, and to find was not always to be informed; and that thus to pursue perfection was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chase the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them."