226 PRÆTERITA-I

in elegant terms; and are just as ready with their applause for a sentence of Macaulay’s, which may have no more sense in it than a blot pinched between doubled paper, as to reject one of Johnson’s, telling against their own prejudice,-though its symmetry be as of thunder answering from two horizons.

252. I hold it more than happy that, during those continental journeys, in which the vivid excitement of the greater part of the day left me glad to give spare half-hours to the study of a thoughtful book, Johnson was the one author accessible to me. No other writer could have secured me, as he did, against all chance of being misled by my own sanguine and metaphysical temperament. He taught me carefully to measure life, and distrust fortune; and he secured me, by his adamantine common-sense, for ever, from being caught in the cobwebs of German metaphysics,¹ or sloughed in the English drainage of them.

I open, at this moment, the larger of the volumes of the Idler to which I owe so much. After turning over a few leaves, I chance on the closing sentence of No. 65; which transcribing, I may show the reader in sum what it taught me,-in words which, writing this account of myself, I conclusively obey:-

“Of these learned men, let those who aspire to the same praise imitate the diligence, and avoid the scrupulosity. Let it be always remembered that life is short, that knowledge is endless, and that many doubts deserve not to be cleared. Let those whom nature and study have qualified to teach mankind, tell us what they have learned while they are yet able to tell it, and trust their reputation only to themselves.”

It is impossible for me now to know how far my own honest desire for truth, and compassionate sense of what is instantly helpful to creatures who are every instant perishing, might have brought me, in their own time, to think and judge as Johnson thought and measured,-even had I never learned of him. He at least set me in the

¹ [For Ruskin’s skit on these, see Modern Painters, vol. iii. (Vol. V. pp. 203-204); and compare ibid., p. 424.]

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