There was hardly one of the literary coterie over which he presided that was not doing better and more lasting work.
Nothing that Johnson wrote is to be compared, for excellence in its own manner, with _Tom Jones_ or the _Vicar of Wakefield_ or the _Citizen of the World_.

He produced nothing in writing approaching the magnitude of Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, or the profundity of Burke's philosophy of politics.

Even Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose main business was painting and not the pen, was almost as good an author as he; his _Discourses_ have little to fear when they are set beside Johnson's essays.

Yet all these men recognised him as their guide and leader; the spontaneous selection of such a democratic assembly as men of genius in a tavern fixed upon him as chairman, and we in these later days, who are safe from the overpowering force of personality and presence--or at least can only know of it reflected in books--instinctively recognize him as the greatest man of his age.

What is the reason?
Johnson's pre-eminence is the pre-eminence of character.