tory fox-hunter, need not to be mentioned.  Johnson had a fund of humour, but he did not know it; nor was he willing to descend to the familiar idiom, and the variety of diction, which that mode of composition required.  The letter, in the Rambler, No. 12, from a young girl that wants a place, will illustrate this observation.  Addison possessed an unclouded imagination, alive to the first objects of nature and of art.  He reaches the sublime without any apparent effort.  When he tells us, “If we consider the fixed stars as so many oceans of flame, that are each of them attended with a different set of planets; if we still discover new firmaments, and new lights, that are sunk further in those unfathomable depths of ether; we are lost in a labyrinth of suns and worlds, and confounded with the magnificence and immensity of nature;” the ease, with which this passage rises to unaffected grandeur, is the secret charm that captivates the reader.  Johnson is always lofty; he seems, to use Dryden’s phrase, to be “o’erinform’d with meaning,” and his words do not appear to himself adequate to his conception.  He moves in state, and his periods are always harmonious.  His Oriental Tales are in the true style of eastern magnificence, and yet none of them are so much admired, as the Visions of Mirza.  In matters of criticism, Johnson is never the echo of preceding writers.  He thinks, and decides, for himself.  If we except the essays on the Pleasures of Imagination, Addison cannot be called a philosophical critic.  His moral essays are beautiful; but in that province nothing can exceed the Rambler, though Johnson used to say, that the essay on “the burthens of mankind,” (in the Spectator, No. 558,) was the most exquisite he had ever read.  Talking of himself, Johnson said, “Topham Beauclerk has wit, and every thing comes from him with ease; but when I say a good thing, I seem to labour.”  When we compare him with Addison, the contrast is still stronger:  Addison lends grace and ornament to truth; Johnson gives it force and energy.  Addison makes virtue amiable; Johnson represents it as an awful duty:  Addison insinuates himself with an air of modesty; Johnson commands like a dictator; but a dictator in his splendid robes, not labouring at the plough:  Addison is the Jupiter of Virgil, with placid serenity talking to Venus,

  “Vultu, quo coelum tempestatesque serenat.”

Johnson is Jupiter Tonans:  he darts his lightning and rolls his thunder, in the cause of virtue and piety.  The language seems to fall short of his ideas; he pours along, familiarizing the terms of philosophy, with bold inversions, and sonorous periods; but we may apply to him, what Pope has said of Homer:  “It is the sentiment that swells and fills out the diction, which rises with it, and forms itself about it:  like glass in the furnace, which grows to a greater magnitude, as the breath within is more powerful, and the heat more intense.”

It is not the design of this comparison to decide between these two eminent writers.  In matters of taste every reader will choose for himself.  Johnson is always profound, and, of course, gives the fatigue of thinking.  Addison charms, while he instructs; and writing, as he always does, a pure, an elegant, and idiomatic style, he may be pronounced the safest model for imitation.