as they are perfectly conscious that they would not talk now if habit had not gained so tyrannical a power over them. And it is of this overbearing power of habits formed in one period of life, and which assert themselves against the protest of the inner mind in a period when they could never have been first formed, that Wordsworth makes his old friend justly complain. The old are not expert in casting the slough of habits of expression which are no longer appropriate to their inner experiences. There is nothing more painful than this sense that a man often has of talking the language of the past and not of the present, and of hardly knowing how to change it so as to suit his present attitude of feeling. One constantly finds men talking in the light ironic strain of earlier years, though that strain does not in the least represent their present tone of thought. And yet they adhere to that strain, not because they wish to affect a juvenile state of mind, but because their mind has got itself into a groove from which it cannot extricate itself. Yet the newer state of mind may be, and often is, in every respect the deeper, wider, graver. This reminds us of the finest passage in the Quarterly Reviewer's paper, in which he indicates what he calls those "intimations of immortality" which belong properly to old age :

"And if it be true, as Wordsworth says,

that the thoughts and feelings of childhood tells us that our birth is but a sleep,' it is even more true that the experiences of old age tell us that death is but a sleep also. If in our earlier days the joys of earth taught us to for; get the imperial palace whence we came,' memories of that palace-tokens of its real, if far-off, existence-come back upon us as old age takes away those earthly joys one by one. As the bodily frame tends perceptibly to inevitable decay, the human spirit finds in itself a growing conviction that it is not sharing in that decay, but ever rising more and more above it. As the stone walls and iron bars of time and space close ever more narrowly upon us, the spirit becomes more and more conscious that these make no prison for it, but that it is getting ready for a freer action than was ever possible in any earlier and most favorable condition of its former life. Even as regards the material universe, the starry heavens and the mountains and green fields, as the bodily eye grows dim to these we become more fully aware that this eye at its best could see but a very small part of them, and that we

have in us a capacity for infinitely wider and deeper sight of all these things, if only the needful conditions were given us The ideals of literature, of art, or of action, which we have been striving through our lives to realize, and the realizing of which we have now to give up as a thing of the past-these ideals, which once seemed to us so lofty and so satisfying, we now perceive to be in themselves, and not merely in their possible realization, most inadequate and imperfect. In this world we might be able to do nothing better, if we could begin the past work of our lives over again; but the vision of far nobler-of infinite, not finite-ideals rises before us, for the realization of which there must be fitting conditions pos

sible."

This seems to us the better aspect of that painful experience of which Wordsworth complained in the lines which, as we believe, the Quarterly Reviewer has misunderstood. The aged lose the art which the young possess, of so choosing their words and gestures and so moulding the expressions on their countenance as to make their lips and their whole bearing say exactly what they feel. The dramatic period of life is youth, and not age. So far as regards the power of expression, age lives to a great extent on the accumulated capital of earlier days, and does not seem to have the gift of coining afresh the right language and gestures and modes of expression for the thoughts that arise in it. But it is this very knowledge,--that the man is thinking a new class of thoughts, and experiencing a new class of feelings and convictions for which he has no longer the art to find a fitting language, so that he is almost compelled to use the words and, in a certain sense, affect the feelings of a bygone time, which forces upon him the belief that he is approaching a time when his newer attitude of mind and his newer width of feeling will be furnished with new organs of expression which now he lacks. It is the very consciousness of the painful ventriloquism with which age continues to utter a language which is not its own, while it is nevertheless conscious of a much steadier and truer experience, and a much steadier and truer view of life, for which it can find for the moment no proper utterance, that convinces the old of the approach of a change of state in which a new outward expression will be found for the new inward life.- The Spectator.

Interviewer.-What a pleasant place of meeting! I think I have never known the asphodel more abundant, the amaranth more fragrant, than just here.

Johnson. The place, Sir, is enough.

well

Int. What is the building in the grove yonder? It looks like a toy temple.

Johnson. -My dwelling, Sir. It is in the Ionic taste, but I have caused it to be surrounded by a little garden-plot, into which the entrance is by a wicket-gate like that of Bolt Court in my time. Will you do my house the honor of a more immediate inspection? (They pass through the enclosure into the house.)

Int. Quite an ideal residence for a solitary-and a sage.

Johnson.-Yet, Sir, when I first came here, in 1784, I thought I should have died a second time, of very ennui. Int.-Ah, you found it dull. No Literary Club, no réunions at the Turk's Head, no Streatham, no

Johnson.-Streatham I had already taken leave of, a year before; with gratitude for past mercies there enjoyed, and with a sober resignation to their relinquishment.

Int. But you missed the society of London.

Johnson.-Sir, I sighed for the agreeable vanities that mitigate the severity of existence. Seldom, since the love-passages of my Lichfield days, had I discovered such a propensity to suspiration. (Here Dr. Johnson appears to lapse into a tender reverie.)

Int. (after a pause).-But you must have found some of your old friends here before you, on your arrival in this underworld, you can scarcely have been altogether without congenial fellowship. Goldsmith, for instance

Johnson.-Dr. Goldsmith was indeed here, and had already made him many friends, and some creditors; but Elysiuin is wide, and we did not instantly find each other. In process of time, however, Langton and Beauclerk, and Burke and Sir Joshua, one by one, dropped in――

Johnson.- Sir, I divine your drift. You would say, did not your politeness restrain you, that Mr. Boswell has conferred upon my fame the perpetuity which my own writings would have failed to ensure. do not thank him for such a boon. It was scarcely my ambition to survive by proxy, and achieve a sort of vicarious immortality.

Int. But Boswell has preserved for all time one side of your genius which, otherwise, posterity would have had no express record of. We owe it to him that innumerable familiar conversations, in which your various powers, permit me to say, are shown perhaps more racily than in your writings, have been rescued from an oblivion which would have been the misfortune of the world.

Johnson.-Yes, Sir. Thanks to Mr. Boswell, every light word, every ill-considered expression, which the vehemence of debate may have seduced me into uttering, is remembered to my prejudice, while the writings upon which I lavished the best powers of my mind and the ripest fruits of my study are forgotten.

Int. (aside).-How curious! Johnson the great writer jealous of Johnson the wonderful talker. (Aloud.) But can it be said that your works are forgotten? In my own time I recollect several able critics, at Matthew Arnold's instance, getting up a kind of revival of interest in them.

Johnson.-Nay, Sir, forbear me your revivals! Fame is indeed well enough; but when once a man is in the way of feeling comfortably settled in oblivion, he would rather be let alone.

Int. (aside).-Hard to please, either

way.

Johnson. I understand, indeed, that your revivalists have been busy in other directions. They have recalled to a ghastly simulation of life the most barbarous of the justly forgotten playwrights. I do not desire resurrection in such company. No, Sir; I would rather slumber with Addison and Temple than be awake with Webster and Ford. And if in truth I have had my day, it ill becomes me to murmur at the approach of twilight. By the by, I have heard that one of the first persons to deal a blow at my authority as a critic was a poet-one Wordsworth, of whom you may have heard.

Int. I have heard of him. Johnson.-A poet who, before the society of wits and scholars, preferred that of clowns and hinds, and who found the cultivated shores of Thames less to his liking than the savage wilds of Westmoreland, where man is only less rude and forbidding than Nature. I have looked into the writings of this gentleman, and of other poets his contemporaries, and it seems to me that their range is as narrow as their subjects are unedifying. Shakespeare portrayed man in various action; Mr. Pope exhibited man in elegant society, but your modern poet can show nothing but man in presence of some huge comfortless mountain or inhospitable seashore. Your modern poet would appear to be a taciturn and unsocial person, who never opens his mouth until he comes where there are none but ravens and seamews to listen. I have sometimes wondered whether the art of conversation, as understood by my contemporaries, hath since my time perished altogether from among living men.

Int. The generation following your own produced at least one marvellous talker in the person of S. T. Coleridge. But monologue, rather than conversation, was his forte. In my own time, Carlyle had the repute of a conversational gladiator. His prowess had some features in common with your own.

Johnson.-Pray, Sir, what were those
Int. (hesitating).-Well, something of

the trampling style which Boswell has taught us to associate with your great powers of argument. A freedom from any excessive tenderness for weaker people's feelings.

Johnson.-Sir! what stuff is this? I will have you to know you take too much upon you. Let me tell you I was ever the gentlest of disputants, the mildestmanuered of controvertists. Are you here to brow-beat and bully me? I'll none of your bluster. You talk no better than a coxcomb, Sir.

Int.-I only spoke of the impression conveyed by Boswell. If that impression is a false one, I submit that he is to blame, not I.

Johnson. In that sense I accept your explanation, Sir. Indeed, you yourself cannot but perceive how wide of the truth were any attempt to represent me as overbearing or irascible in conversation.

Int. I look upon you, Dr. Johnson, as courtesy embodied.

Johnson (smiling complacently).-Sir, I have the more pleasure in the compliment you make me, as I am not without a modest consciousness of meriting it.

Int. We were speaking just now of poets, considered from a social point of view. I need hardly remind the author of the Lives that Dryden was considered sluggish and Pope insignificant as talkers, and that Addison contrasted his own colloquial unreadiness with his literary facility by saying that he could draw a bill for a thousand pounds though he had not sixpence in his pocket. I don't fancy there can be much evidence for a theory of the decay of conversation as an art. Wordsworth himself, not the most sociable of men certainly, is credited with having possessed great conversational power. I dare say it was not readily called into play, and I should think there may have been something a little set and formal in his manner; he would hold forth rather than talk, perhaps. In my own experience, Rossetti was an admirable talker, when anything roused his interest.

Johnson.-Who, Sir?

Int. Our great modern poet, Dante Rossetti.

Johnson.-An Italian author?

Int.-No. He came of an Italian family; but as a poet, England has the honor to claim him for her own.

Johnson-Did he, too, spend his time

celebrating nameless rivulets, and paying servile court to a mob of outlandish mountains?

Int. On the contrary, that passion for natural scenery, which you regard as paying a disproportionate part in modern poetry was, perhaps, even abnormally and strangely undeveloped in him. He lived on Thames' side by inclination as much as from convenience. He, at least, was no Roman preferring Dacia.

Johnson.-A man of sense, I warrant you. What was his principal work in literature?

Int. Taking it all in all, I should say that his most precious and characteristic achievement is the sequence of poems comprised under the general title of "The House of Life."

Johnson.-Sir, your account of this gentleman engages my curiosity. A modern poet who was not the abject slave of na. ture; who had sufficient judgment to live among men, rather than among sheep, and who selected his themes, as the title of his masterpiece appears to indicate, from among the familiar scenes of that great human drama whose stage is London and its audience the world-such a poet, whether his style copies the energy of Dryden, the pointedness of Pope, or the smoothness of Waller, may count, Sir, upon my favorable attention. Where can I obtain his works? Are they reprinted in this world of shades?

Int. (looking round the room).-Why, you have them on your shelves, among a quantity of other nineteenth century poetry. Here are the volumes: Poems, D. G. Rossetti; Ballads and Sonnets, D. G. Rossetti.

Johnson (with a disappointed air).Then I have read his verses. I thought, Sir, you had meant some other author. Rossetti-h'm-I had forgotten the name. Sir, let us talk of something else. Sir, your times, and the age preceding yours, were remarkable for an abundance of illordered talents, but I cannot allow you to have produced a single poet the equal of Pope, whether in the variety and justness of his observations upon life or in the harmony of his numbers. As commentators upon life, your poets are nothing. They themselves, for the most part, seem to have had but little relish of existence, but a feeble gust of living, to judge from the lachrymosities which they void so copi

ously. Then, too, not a few of the most fainous among them quitted life early, and had lived out of the world while they were yet of the world. Keats, Shelley--Int.-Shelley died young, but he had lived a great deal in his thirty years.

Johnson.-Yet, Sir, he appears to know nothing of men. What men has he painted? Alastor is a shade. Cenci is a monster. Neither of them is a man. Julian and Maddalo-though the one, it is said, is to be understood of himself, and the other of the Lord Byron-appear scarce more alive and substantial; they pass dreamily before us, emitting a thin, desultory current of would-be philosophical talk, which tends we do not well see whither; which at last stagnates in some speculative blind alley. The remaining persons of his poems, for the most part, know not what they would be at.

Int.-Shelley was better at the superhuman than the human. If that is a fault, it is one he shares with Milton. You will hardly deny that his Prometheus is a sublime figure.

Im

And your an

Johnson. I do not deny to his Prometheus a certain sublimity. But, so insubstantial are the moral fundaments of the conception, there results from it, as it were, an ineffectual sublimity and barren grandeur only. Although Prometheus is supposed the champion of the human race, we do not well perceive how his sufferings and the fate of mankind are related. agination is willing to do its part, but it asks some aid from reason and commonsense. Hence, although the tortured Titan's transcendent endurance may awe, it can scarcely concern us. alogy of Shelley and Milton will not hold. Milton's great superhuman personages are all reared upon a solid bottom of human nature. No, Sir; Mr. Shelley can talk fluently enough about man, but men he seems not to have encountered. There is more knowledge of the stuff of human nature in any dozen lines of one of Pope's epistles than in all Shelley ever writ. And surely no man could be so infatuate as that he should question the superiority of Pope's versification. Your moderns take to themselves vast credit for mere diversity of numbers. Any man, by simply willing it, can bring himself to write in a variety of measures. But an assured per fection in one is better than an empirical facility in a thousand.