_Rasselas_ was written, as every one knows, during the evenings of a week, when Johnson “had occasion for thirty pounds on Monday night,” as he wrote to the printer on 20 January, 1759. His mother had just died and he sat down in his Gough Square garret to earn the necessary money for her funeral and for paying off the few debts she had left. Her death, we are told, was a great loss to Johnson, and it is wonderful that what he wrote under pressure at that time should be free not only from bitterness but from a complaint of any kind. Melancholy it certainly is, but melancholy with a rare elevation of mind and no more weighed down with thought--a rather foolish charge that is sometimes levelled against it--than is any work that deals profoundly with the major problems of life. It has also been said of _Rasselas_, with more reason, that it is a test of the reader’s capacity to appreciate the peculiar qualities of Johnson’s thought. These qualities, as any one who takes the trouble to analyse them can see for himself, are a square face to face attitude to life that takes things as they come, realizing the futility of attempting “a choice of life,” and if without overmuch hope for the future, at least free from the disintegration of high hopes disappointed. There is nothing pedantic or high-flown in this attitude which, with a noble solemnity, enabled Johnson to bear up against all odds and to steer right on. Undeniably there is sustenance to be got from _Rasselas_. And if its author has certain qualities in common with his own “solemn elephant reposing in the shade,” they are, one feels, the product of a character that, like Donne’s elephant, could hardly be dislodged without the noise and cataclysm of a whole town undermined--whereas much of the style of to-day, which despises what it calls “Johnsonese,” could be blown away with a puff of wind. What obtuseness there is in Johnson’s attitude of mind is due to the qualities that he shared with “the giant of beasts,” a slow-movingness and an apparent lack of the more intricate nerves of feeling. Compare his prose with its antithesis, that of Donne, who, for all his medieval theology, was more modern in the working of his mind than Johnson; for whereas the author of _Rasselas_ will bring you surely and by slow degrees to a conclusion, the mind of the author of _Death’s Duel_ and the sermons seems to anticipate all conclusions at once with the rapidity and circuitousness of a thousand ants. Johnson will attack a problem broadside on, and it is to him we come for substantial resistance against life, but to Donne we go for an inward and self-conscious activity that undermines it. Yet one would read _Rasselas_ ten times for every single reading of Donne’s sermons, which are as the fire of the spirit consuming.