By 1730 the authors whose work made the "classic" school in England were dead or had ceased writing; by the same date Samuel Johnson had begun his career as a man of letters. The difference between the period of his maturity and the period we have been examining is not perhaps easy to define; but it exists and it can be felt unmistakably in reading. For one thing "Classicism" had become completely naturalized; it had ceased to regard the French as arbiters of elegance and literary taste; indeed Johnson himself never spoke of them without disdain and hated them as much as he hated Scotsmen. Writing, like dress and the common way of life, became plainer and graver and thought stronger and deeper. In manners and speech something of the brutalism which was at the root of the English character at the time began to colour the refinement of the preceding age. Dilettantism gave way to learning and speculation; in the place of Bolingbroke came Adam Smith; in the place of Addison, Johnson. In a way it is the solidest and sanest time in English letters. Yet in the midst of its urbanity and order forces were gathering for its destruction. The ballad-mongers were busy; Blake was drawing and rhyming; Burns was giving songs and lays to his country-side. In the distance--Johnson could not hear them--sounded, like the horns of elf-land faintly blowing, the trumpet calls of romance. If the whole story of Dr. Johnson's life were the story of his published books it would be very difficult to understand his pre-eminent and symbolic position in literary history. His best known work--it still remains so--was his dictionary, and dictionaries, for all the licence they give and Johnson took for the expression of a personality, are the business of purely mechanical talents. A lesser man than he might have cheated us of such delights as the definitions of "oats," or "net" or "pension," but his book would certainly have been no worse as a book. In his early years he wrote two satires in verse in imitation of Juvenal; they were followed later by two series of periodical essays on the model of the _Spectator_; neither of them--the _Rambler_ nor the _Idler_--were at all successful. _Rasselas_, a tale with a purpose, is melancholy reading; the _Journey to the Western Hebrides_ has been utterly eclipsed by Boswell's livelier and more human chronicle of the same events. The _Lives of the Poets_, his greatest work, was composed with pain and difficulty when he was seventy years old; even it is but a quarry from which a reader may dig the ore of a sound critical judgment summing up a life's reflection, out of the grit and dust of perfunctory biographical compilations. There was hardly one of the literary coterie over which he presided that was not doing better and more lasting work. Nothing that Johnson wrote is to be compared, for excellence in its own manner, with _Tom Jones_ or the _Vicar of Wakefield_ or the _Citizen of the World_.