Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PERSONALITY IN LITERARY WORK. Dr. Johnson is probably the best English illustration of a writer whose personality was so inadequately expressed in his work that what he was is likely to obliterate what he did. The man was hearty, simple, often offensively, always unaffectedly, forceful and downright ; his work, on the other hand, while sound and wholesome, is formal, academic, elaborate, and at times highly artificial. No man spoke with more resolute Saxon bluntness than the author of those solemn and imposing essays in the ', Rambler," of whom Goldsmith said that if he wrote of little fishes they would all speak like great whales. That his pen was not wholly devoid of the vigour which his speech uniformly had, is evident to every one who reads his letters; but as a rule this rugged strength is diffused and lost in a succession of well-wrought phrases rather than concentrated on the sharp edge of concise and telling sentences. It is certainly no lack of personality which one feels in reading Johnson ; the Doctor is never far off in those infrequent moments when one takes up " Rasselas" or the "Rambler; " but it is the wigged and powdered professional man of letters in the wigged and powdered eighteenth century, not the big-brained, big-hearted, irascible, pathetic, and unaffectedly human hero of Bos- well's immortal biography. In the whole company of English writers from Chaucer to Carlyle there is no more sharply denned and vigorous personality; none more pronounced, more clearly shown, more easily understood. Evidently the failure of Johnson's work to impress us adequately is in no sense due to lack of individuality behind it; the fact that we are transferring our interest more and more from the work to the man shows clearly enough that the man possessed qualities which hi...