generally believed to be dead. A hearty admirer of Johnson will not hesitate to express complete indifference to his writings. They have their admitted place among English classics, but a love for them is not a mark of literary orthodoxy. One consequence of this is not to be despised: there is no sham admiration for them. When a man professes a liking for Johnson’s prose, he has found it out for himself, and his talk is good to hear.
Some writers enjoy a steady increase of reputation; their fame grows by slow deposit, or is raised by forces not intermittent in their action. The fame of Shakespeare and of Milton is of this kind. Others are subject to violent fluctuations of esteem; they have been so much a part of their age, and are so entangled in its ideas, that what is permanent in them suffers, for a time, with what is local and accidental; a later generation rises against them and disowns them. This was the fate of Dante, of Ronsard, of Donne, and of Johnson. They were all monarchs in their day; and the human mind, out of mere self-respect, deposed them. But virtue does not grow old; and sooner or later they return, to claim, as chiefs of the republic of letters, a power more surely grounded on the consent of mankind.
