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Ida of Athens, for instance, which shocked contemporaries, and which, by the way, has the very large first title of Woman, could only bring a blush to cheeks very tickle of that sere: a yawn might come much more easily. But her adventures are told in a style which is the oddest compound of Romantesque and Johnsonese. The bath was cool.
It is a sort of broken Johnsonese, a barbarous patois, bearing the same relation to the language of Rasselas, which the gibberish of the negroes of Jamaica bears to the English of the House of Lords. Sometimes it reminds us of the finest, that is to say, the vilest parts, of Mr. Gait's novels; sometimes of the perorations of Exeter Hall; sometimes of the leading articles of the Morning Post.
Speaking of Villiers's Rehearsal, Johnson said, "It has not wit enough to keep it sweet;" then paused and added translating English into Johnsonese "it has not vitality sufficient to preserve it from putrefaction." There is more of this in Johnson's Rambler and Idler papers than in his latest work, the Lives of the Poets.
The old pioneer's own language would have been far better than that which Filson used; for the latter's composition is a travesty of Johnsonese in its most aggravated form. For Filson see Durrett's admirable "Life" in the Filson Club Publications.
The piling up of reasons, the cumulation of argument setting off epigram against epigram that mark Johnson's literary style are its distinguishing features. He is profound, but always lucid. And lucidity is just what modern Johnsonese lacks. The word was coined by a man who had neither the patience to read Johnson nor the ability to comprehend him.
Truth, however, is not to be sacrificed to the accommodation of either, and he who should pronounce that our edifice has received its final embellishment would be disseminating falsehood without incurring favour, and risking the disgrace of detection without participating the advantage of success." An excellent morsel of Johnsonese prose belongs to a more recent date.
A feeling of disappointment will probably be raised in most readers who turn from these extravagant eulogies to the works themselves. They are full of somewhat vapid truisms, and their style is too ornate for the present age. Like so many writers of her day, she wrote Johnsonese rather than English. She loved long words, and amplified where she should have compressed.
When Irving began to express himself, there was very little straightforward simple writing being done, either in America or in England. The stuffed buckram of Johnsonese had been succeeded by the mincing hifalutin of Mrs. Anne Radcliffe and her like. It is at least to Irving's credit that his taste led him back half a century to the comparative simplicity and purity of the prim Augustan style.
Like an essay by Herbert Spencer, it views the matter from every side, anticipates every objection exhausts the subject. The literary style of Mary Wollstonecraft's book is Johnsonese, but its thought forms the base of all that has come after.
Thrale: 'When we were taken up stairs, a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed where one of us was to lie. Boswell blustered, but nothing could be got'. Piozzi Letters, i, 136. The expressions which came first to his tongue were simple, energetic, and picturesque. When he wrote for publication, he did his sentences out of English into Johnsonese. His letters from the Hebrides to Mrs.
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