remarks, in the same paper, on the edition of the Pleas of the Crown cannot be thus vindicated, and we must here lament an error in an otherwise honest and well-intentioned mind[12]. Every impartial reader of his works may thus easily trace to their origin Johnson's chief political errors, and his research must terminate in admiration of a writer, who never prostituted his pen to fear or favour; and who, though erroneous often in his estimate of men and measures, still, in his support of a party, firmly believed himself to be the advocate of morality and right. His tenderness of spirit, his firm principles and his deep sense of the emptiness of human pursuits are visible amidst the lighter papers of the Idler, and his serious reflections are, perhaps, more strikingly affecting as contrasted with mirthfulness and pleasantry. His concluding paper and the one[13] on the death of his mother have, perhaps, never been surpassed. Here is no affectation of sentimentality, no morbid and puling complaints, but the dignified and chastened expression of sorrow, which a mind, constituted as Johnson's, must have experienced on the departure of a mother. A heart, tender and susceptible of pathetic emotion, as his was, must have deeply felt, how dreary it is to walk downward to the grave unregarded by her "who has looked on our childhood." Occasions for more violent and perturbed grief may occur to us in our passage through life, but the gentle, quiet death of a mother speaks to us with "still small voice" of our wasting years, and breaks completely and, at once, our earliest and most cherished associations. This tenderness of spirit seems ever to have actuated Johnson, and he is surely greatest when he breathes it forth over the sorrows and miseries of man. Even in his humorous papers, he never wounds feeling for the sake of raising a laugh, nor sports with folly, but in the hope of reclaiming the vicious and with the design of warning the young of the delusion and danger of an example, which can only be imitated by the forfeiture of virtue and the practice of vice. "In whatever he undertook, it was his determined purpose to rectify the heart, to purify the passions, to give ardour to virtue and confidence to truth[14]." FOOTNOTES: [1] The Genius was published by Colman in the St. James's Chronicle, 1761, 1762. The Gentleman, by the same author, came out in the London-Packet, 1775. The Grumbler was the production of the Antiquary Grose, and appeared in the English Chronicle, 1791. [2] Owen Feltham. [3] Preface to Shakespeare. [4] Country Spectator, No. 1. [5] Idler, No. 6. [6] The World was published in 1753. [7] The Connoisseur appeared in 1754. [8] See Dr. Drake's Essays, II. [9] Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. [10] See life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, prefixed to his Works by Malone, i. 28, &c. [11] See Idler, No. 65 and Mr. Chalmers' Preface to vol. 33 of the British Essayists. [12] See Gentleman's Magazine 1706. p. 272.