The essays written by Johnson in the Adventurer, may be called a continuation of the Rambler.  The Idler, in order to be consistent with the assumed character, is written with abated vigour, in a style of ease and unlaboured elegance.  It is the Odyssey, after the Iliad.  Intense thinking would not become the Idler.  The first number presents a well-drawn portrait of an Idler, and from that character no deviation could be made.  Accordingly, Johnson forgets his austere manner, and plays us into sense.  He still continues his lectures on human life, but he adverts to common occurrences, and is often content with the topic of the day.  An advertisement in the beginning of the first volume informs us, that twelve entire essays were a contribution from different hands.  One of these, No. 33, is the journal of a senior fellow, at Cambridge, but, as Johnson, being himself an original thinker, always revolted from servile imitation, he has printed the piece with an apology, importing, that the journal of a citizen, in the Spectator, almost precluded the attempt of any subsequent writer.  This account of the Idler may be closed, after observing, that the author’s mother being buried on the 23rd of January, 1759, there is an admirable paper occasioned by that event, on Saturday, the 27th of the same month, No. 41.  The reader, if he pleases, may compare it with another fine paper in the Rambler, No. 54, on the conviction that rushes on the mind at the bed of a dying friend.

“Rasselas,” says sir John Hawkins, “is a specimen of our language scarcely to be paralleled; it is written in a style refined to a degree of immaculate purity, and displays the whole force of turgid eloquence.”  One cannot but smile at this encomium.  Rasselas, is, undoubtedly, both elegant and sublime.  It is a view of human life, displayed, it must be owned, in gloomy colours.  The author’s natural melancholy, depressed, at the time, by the approaching dissolution of his mother, darkened the picture.  A tale, that should keep curiosity awake by the artifice of unexpected incidents, was not the design of a mind pregnant with better things.  He, who reads the heads of the chapters, will find, that it is not a course of adventures that invites him forward, but a discussion of interesting questions; reflections on human life; the history of Imlac, the man of learning; a dissertation upon poetry; the character of a wise and happy man, who discourses, with energy, on the government of the passions, and, on a sudden, when death deprives him of his daughter, forgets all his maxims of wisdom, and the eloquence that adorned them, yielding to the stroke of affliction, with all the vehemence of the bitterest anguish.  It is by pictures of life, and profound moral reflection, that expectation is engaged, and gratified throughout the work.  The history of the mad astronomer, who imagines that, for five years, he possessed the regulation of the weather, and that the sun passed, from tropic