How then does the noble and familiar figure strike us in looking backward from the year 1884? In “constant repercussion from one coxcomb to another,” have the sounds which he continued to make through a career of stormy talk ceased to preserve all their value and importance for us? How does he affect our critical vision now that we observe in relief against him such later talker-seers as Coleridge, De Quincey, and Carlyle? To these questions it is temperament more than literary acumen which will suggest the replies; and the present writer has no intention at this particular moment of attempting to forestall the general opinion of the age. His only object in putting forth this brief note is to lay stress on the curious importance of temperament in dealing with what seems like a purely literary difficulty. The personality of all other English writers, in prose and verse, even of Pope, even of De Quincey, must eventually yield in interest to the qualities of their writing. In Dr. Johnson alone the writings yield to the personality, and in spite of the wonder of foreign critics such as M. Taine, he remains, and will remain, although practically unread, one of the most potent of English men of letters. Must we not admit now, at the close of a century, that it is practically impossible to read him? Among the lesser men that surrounded him, there are many who have outstripped him in literary vitality. In verse he lags far behind Gray and Collins, Churchill and Chatterton; nay, if the _Wanderer_ were by Johnson and _London_ by Savage, the former would possess more readers than the latter now attracts. In prose, who shall venture to say that Johnson is the equal of Fielding, Smollett, Hume, Goldsmith, Gibbon, or Burke? We know that he is far less entertaining, far less versatile and brilliant, than any one of these. The _Discourses_ of his direct disciple Reynolds are more often read, and with more pleasure, than those essays of _The Rambler_ from which their style was taken. As a dramatist, as a novelist, Johnson ranks below _Douglas_ Home, below the inventor of _Peter Wilkins_. For years he labored upon what was not literature at all, for other years on literature which the world has been obliged, against its will, to allow to disappear. When all is winnowed away which has become, in itself, interesting only to scholars, there remains _The Vanity of Human Wishes_, a gnomic poem of tedious morality, singularly feeble in the second joint of almost every recurring distich; _Rasselas_, a _conte_ in the French taste, insufferable in its lumbering machinery and pedantic ethics; the _Lives of the Poets_, in which prejudice, ignorance, and taste combine to irritate the connoisseur and bewilder the student. Such, with obvious exaggeration, and with wilful suppression of exceptional facts, the surviving literary labors of Johnson may be broadly described to be. The paradox is that a Johnsonian may admit all that, and yet hold to it