Johnson's generation would have found it equally hard to see the matter from our point of view, or to allow that the authors of the poems named above were being less than impudent or at best flippant in thus brazenly obtruding their private experience, undisguised, before the reader. We ought, moreover, to realize that in this judgment they would have the suffrages of all previous generations, including the greatest writers, from classical times down to their own. It is we who are singular, not they. Quite apart from considerations of moral right or wrong, of artistic good or bad, it obviously, therefore, behooves us to try to cultivate a habit of mind free from initial bias against so large a proportion of recorded testimony. Very early in _The Rambler_ Johnson remarks characteristically that "men more frequently require to be reminded than informed." He believed this, and his generation believed it, because they thought that human nature changed little from age to age. The problems of conduct that confront the living individual have been faced countless times by his predecessors, and the accumulated experience of mankind has arrived at conclusions which in the main are just and therefore helpful to-day. The most important truths are those which have been known for a very long time. For that very reason they tend to be ignored or slighted unless they are restated in such a way as to arrest attention while they compel assent. Hence the best writing is that which most successfully resolves the paradox of combining the sharpest surprise with the widest recognition. Such an ideal is so difficult of attainment that, inevitably, many who subscribed to it succeeded only in unleavened platitude and others rejected it for the easier goal of novelty. In this most difficult class _The Vanity of Human Wishes_ has won a respectable place. It is freighted with a double cargo, the wisdom of two great civilizations, pagan and Christian. Although based upon Juvenal's tenth Satire, it is so free a paraphrase as to be an original poem. The English reader who sets it against Dryden's closer version will sense immediately its greater weight. It is informed with Johnson's own sombre and most deeply rooted emotional responses to the meaning of experience. These, although emanating from a devout practising Christian and certainly not inconsistent with Christianity, neither reflect the specific articles of Christian doctrine nor are lightened by the happiness of Christian faith: they are strongly infused with classical resignation. The poem is difficult as well as weighty. At times its expression is so condensed that the meaning must be wrestled for. Statements so packed as, for example, Fate wings with ev'ry wish th' afflictive dart, Each gift of nature, and each grace of art,