You could not, said Dr. Johnson,
shelter with him in a shed for a few moments from the rain without
saying, "This is an extraordinary man."
His literary position depends chiefly on his amazing gift of expression,
on a command of language unapproached by any writer of his time. His
eloquence (in writing not in speaking; he is said to have had a
monotonous delivery) was no doubt at bottom a matter of race, but to his
Irish readiness and flash and colour he added the strength of a full
mind, fortified by a wonderful store of reading which a retentive and
exact memory enabled him to bring instantly to bear on the subject in
hand. No writer before him, except Defoe, had such a wide knowledge of
the technicalities of different men's occupations, and of all sorts of
the processes of daily business, nor could enlighten an abstract matter
with such a wealth of luminous analogy. It is this characteristic of his
style which has led to the common comparison of his writing with
Shakespeare's; both seem to be preternaturally endowed with more
information, to have a wider sweep of interest than ordinary men. Both
were not only, as Matthew Arnold said of Burke, "saturated with ideas,"
but saturated too in the details of the business and desire of ordinary
men's lives; nothing human was alien from them.
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