These endowments were accompanied with a copiousness of words, in which it would be difficult to name any writer except Barrow that has surpassed him. Yet his prose style is very far from affording a model that can safely be proposed for our imitation. He seems to exert his powers of intellect and of language indiscriminately, and with equal effort, on the smallest and the most important occasions; and the effect is something similar to that of a Chinese painting, in which, though all the objects separately taken are accurately described, yet the whole is entirely wanting in a proper relief of perspective. What is observed by Milton of the conduct of life, may be applied to composition, "that there is a scale of higher and lower duties," and he who confuses it will infallibly fall short of that proportion which is necessary to excellence no less in matters of taste than of morals. He was more intent in balancing the period, than in developing the thought or image that was present to his mind. Sometimes we find that he multiplies words without amplifying the sense, and that the ear is gratified at the expense of the understanding. This is more particularly the case in the Ramblers, which being called for at short and stated intervals, were sometimes composed in such haste, that he had not leasure even to read them before they were printed; nor can we wonder at the dissatisfaction he expressed some years afterwards, when he exclaimed that he thought they had been better. In the Idler there is more brevity, and consequently more compression. When Johnson trusts to his own strong understanding in a matter of which he has the full command, and does not aim at setting it off by futile decorations, he is always respectable, and sometimes great. But when he attempts the ornamental, he is heavy and inelegant; and the awkwardness of his efforts is more perceptible from the hugeness of the body that is put in motion to produce them. He is like the animal whom Milton describes as making sport for our first parents in Paradise-- --Th' unwieldy elephant, To make them mirth, used all his might. It is a good beast for carrying a burden or trampling down a foe, but a very indifferent one at a lavolta or a coranto. His swelling style is readily counterfeited. Our common advertisements have amply revenged themselves for his ridicule of their large promises in the Idler, by clothing those promises in language as magnificent as his own. It is much less easy to catch the subtle graces of Addison. At the conclusion of the Rambler, he boasts that "he has laboured to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations." The result of his labour is awkward stateliness and irksome uniformity. In his dread of incongruous idioms he writes almost without any idiom at all.