are aglow with the earnestness of dear-bought conviction, and rich in
conclusions gathered not from books but from life and suffering." And
later: "We come to closer quarters with Johnson in the best pages of _The
Rambler_ than in the most brilliant of the conversations recalled by
Boswell. The hero of a hundred fights puts off his armour, and becomes a
wise and tender confessor." Latterly, the style of Johnson's essays has
been subjected to a closer scrutiny than ever before. What Taine found as
inflexible and inert as a pudding-mold is now seen to be charged with life
and movement, vibrant with light and shadow and color. More particularly,
Wimsatt has shown how intimately connected is the vocabulary of _The
Rambler_ with Johnson's reading for the Dictionary, and how, having
mastered the words of the experimental scientists of the previous century,
Johnson proceeded to put them to original uses, generating with them new
stylistic overtones in contexts now humorously precise, now
philosophically metaphorical, employing them now for purposes of irony and
satire, and again for striking directly home to the roots of morality and
religion. In a playful mood, he is never more characteristic than when he
is his own mimic, propounding with mock seriousness some preposterous
theory like that of the intellectual advantages of living in a garret:

I have discovered ... that the tenuity of a defecated air at a proper
distance from the surface of the earth accelerates the fancy, and sets
at liberty those intellectual powers which were before shackled by too
strong attraction, and unable to expand themselves under the pressure of
a gross atmosphere. I have found dullness to quicken into sentiment in a
thin ether, as water, though not very hot, boils in a receiver partly
exhausted; and heads, in appearance empty, have teemed with notions upon
rising ground, as the flaccid sides of a football would have swelled out
into stiffness and extension.