O'er erring deeds and words a heavenly hue
Of words, like sunbeams, dazzling as they past
The eyes which o'er them shed tears feelingly and fast.
Childe Harold, Canto 3, Stanza 77.
This description was drawn by a bard who, not prejudiced against the lover of the New Heloise, still keenly saw the practical effects which his philosophy wrought in the mass of society, and how it tended to debase our moral and intellectual natures.[ 29] Byron well knew, and needed not to be told, that Rousseau's sentimentality was but a highly polished instinct; though, like the scornful and unpitying Democritus,[ 30] he would bitterly smile amidst the tombs, where man's pride and pleasures were alike laid desolate. But Johnson sought to alleviate the woes over which he wept; and no one ever sunk in sensuality from a despondency produced by his lamentations over human misery. In none of his varied writings has he lured others from the paths of virtue, or smoothed the road of perdition, or covered with flowers the thorns of guilt, or taught temptation sweeter notes, softer blandishments, or stronger allurements.[ 31] He never smiles, like Boileau, at vice, as if half pleased with the ludicrous images it impresses on his fancy; nor, with Swift, does he mangle human nature, and then scowl with a tyrant's exultation on the wounds he has inflicted.[ 32] He bemoans our miseries with the tender pity of a Cowper, who, in warning us of life's grovelling pursuits and empty joys, seeks, by withdrawing us from their delusive dominion, to prepare us for "another and a better world."
[!--Note--] ([1]) The Champion by Fielding. 1741. 12mo. vol. i. p. 258.
[!--Note--] ([2]) Dr. Drake, in his Essays on the Rambler, &c. enumerates eighty-two periodical papers published during that period. For the comparative state of female literature, see Dr. Johnson himself, in Rambler 173.
[!--Note--] ([3]) Rambler, Number 208.