"Journey to the Hebrides" is the translation; and it is amusing to
compare the two versions. "When we were taken upstairs," says he in one
of his letters, "a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on which one of
us was to lie." This incident is recorded in the Journal as follows:
"Out of one of the beds on which we were to repose started up, at our
entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from the forge." Sometimes Johnson
translated aloud. "_The Rehearsal_" he said, very unjustly, "has not wit
enough to keep it sweet"; then, after a pause, "it has not vitality
enough to preserve it from putrefaction."

Mannerism is pardonable, and is sometimes even agreeable, when the
manner, though vicious, is natural. Few readers, for example, would be
willing to part with the mannerism of Milton or of Burke. But a
mannerism which does not sit easy on the mannerist, which has been
adopted on principle, and which can be sustained only by constant
effort, is always offensive. And such is the mannerism of Johnson.

The characteristic faults of his style are so familiar to all our
readers, and have been so often burlesqued, that it is almost
superfluous to point them out. It is well known that he made less use
than any other eminent writer of those strong, plain words, Anglo-Saxon
or Norman-French, of which the roots lie in the inmost depths of our
language; and that he felt a vicious partiality for terms which, long
after our own speech had been fixed, were borrowed from the Greek and
Latin, and which, therefore, even when lawfully naturalised, must be
considered as born aliens, not entitled to rank with the King's English.
His constant practice of padding out a sentence with useless epithets,
till it became as stiff as the bust of an exquisite, his antithetical
forms of expression, constantly employed even where there is no
opposition in the ideas expressed, his big words wasted on little