Abstract
WHAT is the secret of the fascination which the character of Johnson has exerted on his friends, his contemporaries, and all lovers of England for nigh on two centuries? There are no half measures about it—if you know your Johnson, you like or dislike him heartily—and the great-hearted sturdy figure has to-day, even as in his lifetime, far more friends than enemies. It is curious, too, and a reflection in some measure of his powerful personality, that his is one of the few great names in our English life and literature of whom it can be said that their reputation never suffers from the swing of the pendulum. We hear little of Carlyle and Ruskin to-day; Tennyson, after suffering a temporary eclipse, is coming into his own again; following a period of obscurity, the personality and achievements of Gladstone have provided material for half a dozen recent mono graphs. But since the day of Johnson's death the stream of comment and of criticism has never run dry. Apart from the work of the compilers of Ana, successive editions of Boswell by Malone, Croker, Napier, Fitzgerald, Birrell, and greatest of all, Birkbeck Hill, not to mention the misguided efforts of one or two editors to present us with a ‘bovrilised’ Boswell from which the longueurs' have disappeared, are milestones through the nineteenth century.
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FERGUSON, A. The Eighteenth Century Scene*. Nature 133, 344–347 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/133344a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/133344a0