paper, published three times a week the "Lay Monastery," founded on
the supposition that some literary men, whose characters are
described, had retired to a house in the country to enjoy
philosophical leisure, and resolved to instruct the public by
communicating their disquisitions and amusements. Whether any real
persons were concealed under fictitious names is not known. The
hero of the club is one Mr. Johnson, such a constellation of
excellence, that his character shall not be suppressed, though there
is no great genius in the design nor skill in the delineation.

"The first I shall name is Mr. Johnson, a gentleman that owes to
nature excellent faculties and an elevated genius, and to industry
and application many acquired accomplishments. His taste is
distinguishing, just, and delicate; his judgment clear, and his
reason strong, accompanied with an imagination full of spirit, of
great compass, and stored with refined ideas. He is a critic of the
first rank and, what is his peculiar ornament, he is delivered from
the ostentation, malevolence, and supercilious temper, that so often
blemish men of that character. His remarks result from the nature
and reason of things, and are formed by a judgment free and
unbiassed by the authority of those who have lazily followed each
other in the same beaten track of thinking, and are arrived only at
the reputation of acute grammarians and commentators; men who have
been copying one another many hundred years without any improvement,
or, if they have ventured farther, have only applied in a mechanical
manner the rules of ancient critics to modern writings, and with
great labour discovered nothing but their own want of judgment and
capacity. As Mr. Johnson penetrates to the bottom of his subject,
by which means his observations are solid and natural, as well as
delicate, so his design is always to bring to light something useful