pursuance of our plan of brevity, we shall not here give a list of his
minor and unacknowledged productions, but refer our readers to Boswell;
a new, amended, and enlarged edition of whose interesting and
picturesque Memoirs we purpose speedily to present to the public, after
the style and manner of the present work.

One very important addition, however, we conceive that we have made, in
publishing the whole of his sermons. It has been hitherto the practice
to give one or two, with a cursory notice, that Johnson's theological
knowledge was scanty, or unworthy of his general fame. We have acted
under a very different impression; for though Johnson was not, nor
pretended to be, a polemical or controversial divine, he well knew how
to apply to the right regulation of our moral conduct the lessons of
that Christianity which was not promulged for a sect, but for mankind;
which sought not a distinctive garb in the philosopher's grove, nor
secluded itself in the hermit's cell, but entered without reserve every
walk of life, and sympathized with all the instinctive feelings of our
common nature. This high privilege of our religion Johnson felt, and to
the diffusion of its practical, not of its theoretical advantages, he
applied the energies of his heart and mind; and with what success, we
leave to every candid reader to pronounce.

In conclusion, we would express a hope that we shall not inaptly
commence a series of OXFORD ENGLISH CLASSICS with the works of one whose
writings have so enlarged and embellished the science of moral evidence,
which has long constituted a characteristic feature in the literary
discipline of this university. The science of mind and its progress, as
recorded by history, or unfolded by biography, was Johnson's favourite
study, and is still the main object of pursuit in the place whose system
and institutions he so warmly praised, and to which he ever professed