“Most thinking People,—­When persons address an audience from the stage, it is usual, either in words or gesture, to say, ’Ladies and gentlemen, your servant.’  If I were base enough, mean enough, paltry enough, and brute beast enough to follow that fashion, I should tell two lies in a breath.  In the first place, you are not ladies and gentlemen, but, I hope, something better—­that is to say, honest men and women; and, in the next place, if you were ever so much ladies, and ever so much gentlemen, I am not, nor ever will be, your humble servant.”

With Dr. Johnson’s style—­supposing we had ever forgotten its masculine force and its balanced antitheses—­we have been made again familiar by the erudite labours of Dr. Birkbeck Hill and Mr. Augustine Birrell.  But even those learned critics might, I think, have mistaken a copy for an original if in some collection of old speeches they had lighted on the ensuing address:—­

“That which was organized by the moral ability of one has been executed by the physical efforts of many, and DRURY LANE THEATRE is now complete.  Of that part behind the curtain, which has not yet been destined to glow beneath the brush of the varnisher or vibrate to the hammer of the carpenter, little is thought by the public, and little need be said by the Committee.  Truth, however, is not to be sacrificed to the accommodation of either, and he who should pronounce that our edifice has received its final embellishment would be disseminating falsehood without incurring favour, and risking the disgrace of detection without participating the advantage of success.”

An excellent morsel of Johnsonese prose belongs to a more recent date.  It became current about the time when the scheme of Dr. Murray’s Dictionary of the English Language was first made public.  It took the form of a dialogue between Dr. Johnson and Boswell:—­

“Boswell.  Pray, sir, what would you say if you were told that the next dictionary of the English language would be written by a Scotsman and a Presbyterian domiciled at Oxford?

“Dr. J.  Sir, in order to be facetious it is not necessary to be indecent.”

When Bulwer-Lytton brought out his play Not so Bad as we Seem, his friends pleasantly altered its title to Not so Good as we Expected.  And when a lady’s newspaper advertised a work called “How to Dress on Fifteen Pounds a Year, as a Lady.  By a Lady,” Punch was ready with the characteristic parody:  “How to Dress on Nothing a Year, as a Kaffir.  By a Kaffir.”

Mr. Gladstone’s authority compels me to submit the ensuing imitation of Macaulay—­the most easily parodied of all prose writers—­to the judgment of my readers.  It was written by the late Abraham Hayward.  Macaulay is contrasting, in his customary vein of overwrought and over-coloured detail, the evils of arbitrary government with those of a debased currency:—­

“The misgovernment of Charles and James, gross as it had been, had not prevented the common business of life from going steadily and prosperously on.