was part of his constitution. He was often sunk in reveries, when the expression of his face, we are told, was almost imbecile. The commonest faults of his style are largely to be explained by this lethargy; they indicate that, for the moment, the working of his mind is not really brisk, but painful, and half-mechanical. He himself gives us a glimpse of the labour which composition often cost him. "It is one of the common distresses of a writer," he says (in the Adventurer), "to be within a word of a happy period, to want only a single epithet to give amplification its full force, to require only a correspondent term in order to finish a paragraph with elegance, and make one of its members answer to the other: but these deficiencies cannot always be supplied; and after a long study and vexation, the passage is turned anew, and the web unwoven that was so nearly finished." There we see the grinding out of a cumbrous sentence. But when any one challenged Johnson to talk, especially by saying something with which he did not agree, the lethargy vanished; his mind was at once alert; the thoughts rolled forth without check, vigorous, incisive, set off with abundance of apt illustration; and in this respect his best talk had a great advantage over his average writing.
Johnson's literary style must also be considered in its relation to the English predecessors by whom he had been influenced. In his invariable clearness, and in the strict propriety which marks his use of words, we see the influence of the literary generation
