He was short-sighted to the point of myopia, and a landscape meant nothing to him; when he tried to describe one as he did in the chapter on the "happy valley" in _Rasselas_ he failed.

What he did not see he could not appreciate; perhaps it is too much to ask of his self-contained and unbending intellect that he should appreciate the report of it by other men.
(2) As we have seen, Johnson was not only great in himself, he was great in his friends.

Round him, meeting him as an equal, gathered the greatest and most prolific writers of the time.

There is no better way to study the central and accepted men of letters of the period than to take some full evening at the club from Boswell, read a page or two, watch what the talkers said, and then trace each back to his own works for a complete picture of his personality.

The lie of the literary landscape in this wonderful time will become apparent to you as you read.