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Aetat. 41.]
Boswell's projected works.
261

Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison[1].'

Though The Rambler was not concluded till the year 1752, I shall, under this year, say all that I have to observe upon it. Some of the translations of the mottos by himself are admirably done. He acknowledges to have received 'elegant translations' of many of them from Mr. James Elphinston; and some are very happily translated by a Mr. F. Lewis[2], of whom I never heard more, except that

    would find the transfusion into another language extremely difficult, if not impossible. But a Rambler, Adventurer, or Idler, of Johnson, would fall into any classical or European language, as easily as if it had been originally conceived in it. Burney. Mrs. Piozzi (Anec. p. 125) recounts how Johnson recommended Addison's works as a model for imitation to Mr. Woodhouse, a poetical shoemaker. '"Give nights and days, Sir, (said he) to the study of Addison, if you mean either to be a good writer, or, what is more worth, an honest man." When I saw something like the same expression in his criticism on that author, I put him in mind of his past injunctions to the young poet, to which he replied, "That he wished the shoemaker might have remembered them as well."' Yet he says in his Life of Pope (Works, viii. 284), 'He that has once studiously formed a style rarely writes afterwards with complete ease.'

  1. ↑ I shall probably, in another work, maintain the merit of Addison's poetry, which has been very unjustly depreciated. Boswell. He proposed also to publish an edition of Johnson's poems (ante, p. 19), an account of his own travels (Post, April 17, 1778), a collection, with notes, of old tenures and charters of Scotland (Post, Oct. 27, 1779), and a History of James IV. of Scotland, 'the patron,' as he said, 'of my family' (Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 23, 1773).
  2. ↑ Lewis thus happily translates the lines in Martial,—

    'Diligat illa senem quondam: sed et ipsa marito.
    Tunc quoque cum fuerit, non videatur, anus.
    'Wrinkled with age, may mutual love and truth
    To their dim eyes recall the bloom of youth.'

    Rambler, No. 167.

    Some of Johnson's own translations are happy, as:—

    'Quam juvat immites ventos audire cubantem —
    Aut, gelidas hibernus aquas quum fuderit auster,
    Securum somnos, imbre juvante, sequi!

Johnson
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