public money yield (thanks mainly to Boswell) such a perpetual harvest for the public good. Not only did it keep the Doctor himself and provide a home for Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Desmoulins and Miss Carmichael and Mr. Levett, but it has kept us all going ever since. Dr. Johnson, after his pension, which he characteristically wished was twice as large, so that the newspaper dogs might make twice as much noise about it, was a thoroughly lazy fellow, who hated solitude with the terrible hatred of inherited melancholia. He loved to talk, and he hated to be alone. He said: "John Wesley's conversation is good, but he is never at leisure. He is always obliged to go at a certain hour. This is very disagreeable to a man who loves to fold his legs and have out his talk, as I do."

But, of course, Wesley-a bright and glorious figure of the last century, to whom justice will some day be done when he gets from under the huge human organization which has so long lain heavily on the top of him-Wesley had on his eager mind and tender conscience the conversion of England, whose dark places he knew; he could not stop all night exchanging intellectual hardihood with Johnson. Burke, too, had his plaguey politics, to keep Lord John Cavendish up to the proper pitch of an uncongenial enthusiasm, and all sorts of entanglements and even lawsuits of his own; Thurlow had the woolsack; Reynolds, his endless canvases and lady sitters; Gibbon, his history; Beauclerk, his assignations. One by one these eminent men would get up and steal away, but Johnson remained behind.

son.

To sum this up, I say, it is to his character, plus his mental endowments, as exhibited by his talk, as recorded by Boswell and others, that the great world of Englishmen owe their JohnSuch sayings as "Hervey was a vicious man, but he was very kind to me; if you call a dog Hervey I should love him," throb through the centuries and excite in the mind a devotion akin to, but different from, religious feeling. The difference is occasioned by the entire absence of the note of sanctity. Johnson was a good man and a pious man, and a great observer of days; but despite his bow to an archbishop, he never was in the way of becoming a saint. He lived fearfully, prayerfully, but without assurance or exaltation.

Another mode of the transmission of personality is by letters. To be able to say what you mean in a letter is a useful accomplishment, but to say what you mean in such a way as at the same time to say what you are is immortality. To publish a man's letters after his death is nowadays a familiar outrage; they often make interesting volumes, seldom permanent additions to our literature. Lord Beaconsfield's letters to his sister are better than most, but of the letter-writers of our own day Mrs. Carlyle stands proudly first-her stupendous lord being perhaps a good second. Johnson's letters deserve more praise than they have received. To win that praise they only require a little more attention. Dr. Birkbeck Hill has collected them in two stately volumes, and they form an excellent appendix to his great edition of the Life. They are in every style, from the monumental to the utterly frivolous, but they are always delightful and ever characteristic. Their friendliness—an excellent quality in a letter-is perhaps their most prominent feature. It is hardly ever absent. Next to their friendliness comes their playfulness; gayety, indeed, there is none. At heart our beloved Doctor was full of gloom, but though he was never gay, he was frequently playful, and his letters abound with an innocent and touching mirth and an always affectionate fun. Some of his letters-those, for example, to Miss Porter after his mother's death-are as moving as any ever written by man. They reveal, too, a thoughtfulness and a noble generosity it would be impossible to surpass. I beseech you to read Dr. Johnson's letters; they are full of literature, and with what is better than literature, life and character and comradeship. Had we nothing of Johnson but his letters, we should know him and love him.

Of his friend Sir Joshua's two most famous pictures I need not speak. One of them is the best known portrait in our English world. It has more than a trace of the vile melancholy the sitter inherited from his father, a melancholy which I fear turned some hours of every one of his days into blank dismay.

At last, by a route not, I hope, wearisomely circuitous, we reach Johnson's own books, his miscellaneous writings, his twelve volumes octavo, and the famous Dictionary.

It is sometimes lightly said, "Oh, nobody reads Johnson," just

as it is said, "Nobody reads Richardson, nobody reads Sterne, nobody reads Byron!" It is all nonsense; there is always somebody reading Johnson, there is always somebody weeping over Richardson, there is always somebody sniggering over Sterne and chuckling over Byron. It is no disrespect to subsequent writers of prose or poetry to say that none of their productions do or ever can supply the place of the "Lives of the Poets," of "Clarissa," of the Elder Shandy and his brother Toby, or of "Don Juan." Genius is never crowded out.

But I am willing enough to admit that Johnson was more than a writer of prose, more than a biographer of poets; he was himself a poet, and his poetry, as much as his prose, nay, more than his prose, because of its concentration, conveys to us the same dominating personality that bursts from the pages of Boswell like the genii from the bottle in the Arabian story.

Of poetic freedom he had barely any. He knew but one way of writing poetry, namely, to chain together as much sound sense and somber feeling as he could squeeze into the fetters of rhyming couplets, and then to clash those fetters loudly in your ear. This proceeding he called versification. It is simple, it is monotonous, but in the hands of Johnson it sometimes does not fall short of the moral sublime. "London" and the "Vanity of Human Wishes" have never failed to excite the almost passionate admiration of succeeding poets. Ballantyne tells us how Scott avowed he had more pleasure in reading "London" and the "Vanity of Human Wishes" than any other poetical compositions he could mention, and adds: "I think I never saw his countenance more indicative of high admiration than while reciting them aloud." Byron loved them; they never failed to move Tennyson to cries of approval. There is, indeed, that about them which stamps them great. They contain lines which he could easily have bettered, verbosities a child can point out; but the effect they produce, on learned and simple, on old and young, is one and the same. We still hear the voice of Johnson, as surely as if he had declaimed the verses into a phonograph. When you turn to them you are surprised to find how well you know them, what hold they have got upon the English mind, how full of quotations they are, how immovably fixed in the glorious structure of English verse.

Poor Sprat has perished despite his splendid tomb in the Abbey. Johnson has only a cracked stone and a worn-out inscription (for the Hercules in St. Paul's is unrecognizable), but he dwells where he would wish to dwell-in the loving memory of men.

HUGH BLACK

RELIGION AND COMMERCE

This speech was given by the Rev. Hugh Black (born in Scotland, 1868), of the Union Theological Seminary, at the 138th annual banquet of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York held at the Waldorf-Astoria, November 22, 1906.

MR. PRESIDENT, CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN OF THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE-I often hear of late days much about the many problems that are before this generation in America. We are fond of speaking of our many problems, and chief among them is the problem you call the problem of immigration. When I hear it discussed (and I cannot help hearing it discussed), I am inclined to feel as if it were a personal matter, for I am one of those million or more immigrants who are annually dumped upon your shores and constitute to you such a very great danger, though General Porter assures me that as the millions arrive the employers of labor are down at the docks fighting with each other as to who is to get them. [A cry: "That is right."] But the last time I stood here-had the privilege to be here, which was last year, as your guest-I was merely a visitor, as your president has said, upon these shores; but now I have a somewhat humble stake in the country. In a sense, a fairly wide sense, your Chamber of Commerce is responsible for this, for I suppose it is your great commercial prosperity which has made room for me and the many other immigrants. But, in a closer sense, you are responsible, for the chair which it is my honor to fill in the Union Theological Seminary of the city was founded by your president, Mr. Jesup [applause], who has, as you know, many wide interests, from an expedition to the North Pole to the establishment of a theological chair. But in