changed little from age to age. The problems of conduct that confront the
living individual have been faced countless times by his predecessors, and
the accumulated experience of mankind has arrived at conclusions which in
the main are just and therefore helpful to-day. The most important truths
are those which have been known for a very long time. For that very reason
they tend to be ignored or slighted unless they are restated in such a way
as to arrest attention while they compel assent. Hence the best writing is
that which most successfully resolves the paradox of combining the
sharpest surprise with the widest recognition. Such an ideal is so
difficult of attainment that, inevitably, many who subscribed to it
succeeded only in unleavened platitude and others rejected it for the
easier goal of novelty.

In this most difficult class _The Vanity of Human Wishes_ has won a
respectable place. It is freighted with a double cargo, the wisdom of two
great civilizations, pagan and Christian. Although based upon Juvenal's
tenth Satire, it is so free a paraphrase as to be an original poem. The
English reader who sets it against Dryden's closer version will sense
immediately its greater weight. It is informed with Johnson's own sombre
and most deeply rooted emotional responses to the meaning of experience.
These, although emanating from a devout practising Christian and certainly
not inconsistent with Christianity, neither reflect the specific articles
of Christian doctrine nor are lightened by the happiness of Christian
faith: they are strongly infused with classical resignation.

The poem is difficult as well as weighty. At times its expression is so
condensed that the meaning must be wrestled for. Statements so packed as,
for example,

Fate wings with ev'ry wish th' afflictive dart,