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.