XII. ROSLYN CHAPEL 225

As it is, these youthful essays, though deformed by assumption, and shallow in contents, are curiously right up to the points they reach; and already distinguished above most of the literature of the time, for the skill of language which the public at once felt for a pleasant gift in me.¹

251. I have above said² that had it not been for constant reading of the Bible, I might probably have taken Johnson for my model of English. To a useful extent I have always done so;³ in these first essays, partly because I could not help it, partly of set, and well-set, purpose.

On our foreign journeys, it being of course desirable to keep the luggage as light as possible, my father had judged that four little volumes of Johnson-the Idler and the Rambler-did, under names wholly appropriate to the circumstances, contain more substantial literary nourishment than could be, from any other author, packed into so portable compass. And accordingly, in spare hours, and on wet days, the turns and returns of reiterated Rambler and iterated Idler fastened themselves in my ears and mind; nor was it possible for me, till long afterwards, to quit myself of Johnsonian symmetry and balance in sentences intended, either with swordsman’s or paviour’s blow, to cleave an enemy’s crest, or drive down the oaken pile of a principle. I never for an instant compared Johnson to Scott, Pope, Byron, or any of the really great writers whom I loved. But I at once and for ever recognized in him a man entirely sincere, and infallibly wise in the view and estimate he gave of the common questions, business, and ways of the world. I valued his sentences not primarily because they were symmetrical, but because they were just, and clear; it is a method of judgment rarely used by the average public, who ask from an author always, in the first place, arguments in favour of their own opinions,

¹ [For some additional passages about the essays, see the Appendix; below, p. 615.]

² [In ch. i. § 2; above, p. 14.]

³ [Compare what Ruskin says in Proserpina of his prose as “honest English, of good Johnsonian lineage,” Vol. XXV. p. 430.]

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