G.P.



11


MY DEAR ANTONY,

I have come now to Dr. Johnson, and it is almost a test of a true man
of letters that he should love him.

He was rugged and prejudiced, but magnanimous; impatient with the
presumptuous, tender to modest ignorance, proudly independent of the
patronage of the great, and was often doing deeds of noble
self-sacrifice by stealth.

Through long years of hard, unremitting toil for his daily bread he lived
bravely and sturdily, with no extraneous help but his stout oak stick--an
unconquerable man.

His prose rises on occasion to a measured and stately grandeur above
the reach of any of his contemporaries.

It was not often that he unveiled to the public gaze the beatings of his
own noble heart, or invited the world to contemplate the depression
and suffering amid which his unending labours were accomplished.

The concluding page of the preface to the first edition of the great
_Dictionary_ is, therefore, the more precious and moving. I know not