"Another mountain," said Boswell, "I called immense. 'No,' replied Johnson, 'it is no more than a considerable protuberance.'"[1] It was his hatred of exaggeration and love of accurate language which provoked the correction—the same hatred and the same love which led him at college to check his comrades if they called a thing "prodigious."[2] But to us, nursed as we have been and our fathers before us in a romantic school, the language of Johnson and of his contemporaries about the wild scenes of nature never fails to rouse our astonishment and our mirth. Were they to come back to earth, I do not know but that at our extravagancies of admiration and style, our affectations in the tawdry art of "word-painting," and at our preference of barren mountains to the meadow-lands, and corn-fields, and woods, and orchards, and quiet streams of southern England, their strong and manly common sense might not fairly raise a still heartier laugh.
The ordinary reader is apt to attribute to an insensibility to beauty in Johnson what, to a great extent, was common to most of the men of his time. It is true that for the beauties of nature, whether wild or tame, his perception was by no means quick. Nevertheless, we find his indifference to barren scenery largely shared in by men of poetic temperament. Even Gray, who looked with a poet's eye on the crags and cliffs and torrents by which his path wound along as he went up to the Grande Chartreuse, yet, early in September, when the heather would be all in bloom, writes of crossing in Perthshire "a wide and dismal heath fit for an assembly of witches."[3] Wherever he wandered he loved to find the traces of men. It was not desolation, but the earth as the beautiful home of man that moved him and his fellows. Mentem mortalia tangunt. He found the Apennines not so horrid as the Alps, because not only the valleys but even the mountains themselves were many of them cultivated withing a little of their very tops.[4] The fifth Earl of Carlisle, a poet though not a Gray, in August, 1768, hurried faster even than the post across the Tyrol from Verona to Mannheim, "because there was nothing but rest that was worth stopping one moment for." The sameness of the scenery was wearisome to his lordship, "large rocky mountains, covered with fir-trees; a rapid river in the valley; the road made like a shelf on the side of the hill." He rejoiced when he took his
