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Updated: May 13, 2025
Modern prison life has in their eyes something of the charm and glamor of an ideal existence, like that in the Happy Valley from which Rasselas had the folly to escape. Whatever advantages to the public may be secured by abating the rigors of imprisonment and inconveniences incident to execution, there is this objection: it makes them less deterrent.
This cleft is the only entrance to a valley three or four miles long, which lies in the very heart of the mountains. It is inhabited by a few woodmen and their families, and but for the road which passes through, would be as perfect a solitude as the Happy Valley of Rasselas.
Like "Rasselas," it is a treatise, a narrative essay on the choice of a wife, the expansion and continuation of her strictures on education and fashionable life. This work appeared in 1808, when the writer was sixty-three years of age.
It is impossible and unnecessary to multiply illustrations. The only thing that need be added is that even in Rasselas and the essays, Johnson's slow-moving style is constantly relieved by those brief and pregnant generalizations of which he is one of the greatest masters in our language.
He had given shape and permanence to his native language by his Dictionary. Thousands upon thousands of people had read his Idler, his Rambler, and his Rasselas. Noble and wealthy men and beautiful ladies deemed it their highest privilege to be his companions.
"And as for practice, I don't suppose he'll want me to do more of that than anything else." "Well, dear, put them by." And Miss Snow did put them by, resuming Rasselas as she did so. Who darned the stockings of Rasselas and felt that the buttons were tight on his shirts? What a happy valley must it have been if a bride expectant were free from all such cares as these!
It is a series of moral essays, and whoever reads it must read it for the same reasons as he reads The Rambler. The remark Johnson absurdly made of Richardson's masterpiece is exactly true of his own Rasselas: "If you were to read it for the story your impatience would be so fretted that you would hang yourself."
They serve, even the wildest and the worst of them, to remind me of a morning drive, in the best of company, through that grand garden where our combined vocabularies of delight and wonderment were exhausted inside of fifteen minutes; and where we drove on and on, hour after hour, from climax to climax, lost in speechless amazement. Glen Eyrie is the valley of Rasselas I am sure it is.
There is supposed to be a happy valley in Abyssinia where the royal princes are confined in total seclusion, but with ample supplies for every conceivable want. Rasselas, who has been thus educated, becomes curious as to the outside world, and at last makes his escape with his sister, her attendant, and the ancient sage and poet, Imlac.
Lord Langleigh, too good a Cavalier, courteously refused the offers of the Council of State, and remained in France until the Restoration, when, with Henry, now Lord Masterton, and his wife, Lady Emily, he returned to Penford-bourne to spend the remainder of his days in his native land. Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia
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