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Updated: June 6, 2025
The common marks of patriotism having been examined, and shown to be such as artifice may counterfeit, or folly misapply, it cannot be improper to consider, whether there are not some characteristical modes of speaking or acting, which may prove a man to be not a patriot.
The stature of our hero was tall and majestic, his limbs strong and well-proportioned, his features regular, his countenance open and ingenuous, bearing all those characteristical marks which physiognomists assert denote an honest and good-natured mind.
But who can possibly enumerate all the different combinations and situations by which our minds are here as it were stormed by the poet? Respecting the structure of the whole I will only make one observation. The story of Lear and his daughters was left by Shakspeare exactly as he found it in a fabulous tradition, with all the features characteristical of the simplicity of old times.
'Was it upon that occasion that he expressed no curiosity to see the room at Dumfermline, where Charles I. was born? Did he envy us the birth-place of the king? Near the end of his Journey, Dr. Johnson has given liberal praise to Mr. Braidwood's academy for the deaf and dumb . When he visited it, a circumstance occurred which was truly characteristical of our great Lexicographer.
I will not say with Pope, that every speech may be assigned to the proper speaker, because many speeches there are which have nothing characteristical; but perhaps, though some may be equally adapted to every person, it will be difficult to find any that can be properly transferred from the present possessor to another claimant. The choice is right, when there is reason for choice.
"Saw he not my doublet, I pray you?" said Sir Piercie; "for when I came to myself, I found that I was wrapped in my cloak, but without my under garment as your reverence may observe." So saying, he opened his cloak, forgetting, with his characteristical inconsistency, that he showed his shirt stained with blood.
Reduced as he was to a kind of last resort, he found me better qualified for his purpose than any other of Mr. Falkland's household. The manner in which he began this sort of correspondence was sufficiently characteristical. It was abrupt; but it was strongly stamped with essential benevolence.
Nothing of his writing was given to the publick this year, except the Prologue to his friend Goldsmith's comedy of The Good-natured Man. The first lines of this Prologue are strongly characteristical of the dismal gloom of his mind; which in his case, as in the case of all who are distressed with the same malady of imagination, transfers to others its own feelings.
In this the expectations of his friends were more consulted than his own inclination; for both his brother and he had feelings of that warm kind that could ill brook a study so dry as the law, especially in that department of it which was allotted to him. But the difference of their tempers made the characteristical distinction between them.
Nay, though Johnson loved a Presbyterian the least of all, this did not prevent his having a long and uninterrupted social connection with the Reverend Dr. James Fordyce, who, since his death, hath gratefully celebrated him in a warm strain of devotional composition . Amidst the melancholy clouds which hung over the dying Johnson, his characteristical manner shewed itself on different occasions.
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