His best known work--it still remains so--was his dictionary, and dictionaries, for all the licence they give and Johnson took for the expression of a personality, are the business of purely mechanical talents.

A lesser man than he might have cheated us of such delights as the definitions of "oats," or "net" or "pension," but his book would certainly have been no worse as a book.

In his early years he wrote two satires in verse in imitation of Juvenal; they were followed later by two series of periodical essays on the model of the _Spectator_; neither of them--the _Rambler_ nor the _Idler_--were at all successful.

_Rasselas_, a tale with a purpose, is melancholy reading; the _Journey to the Western Hebrides_ has been utterly eclipsed by Boswell's livelier and more human chronicle of the same events.

The _Lives of the Poets_, his greatest work, was composed with pain and difficulty when he was seventy years old; even it is but a quarry from which a reader may dig the ore of a sound critical judgment summing up a life's reflection, out of the grit and dust of perfunctory biographical compilations.