Someone has said of Dr. Johnson's trademark ponderous style that no imitator had ever failed to make himself ridiculous. The only possible response is that neither did Johnson always avoid making himself ridiculous. Last night, reading along in bed "The Life of Richard Savage," I came to the following passage:
Lord Tyrconnel affirmed that it was the constant practice of Mr. Savage to enter a tavern with any company that proposed it, drink the most expensive wines with great profusion, and when the reckoning was demanded, to be without money: if, as it often happened, his company were willing to defray his part, the affair ended, without any ill consequences; but if they were refractory, and expected that the wine should be paid for by him that drank it, his method of composition was, to take them with him to his own apartment, assume the government of the house, and order the butler in an imperious manner to set the best wine in the cellar before his company, who often drank till they forgot the respect due to the house in which they were entertained, indulged themselves in the utmost extravagance of merriment, practised the most licentious frolics, and committed all the outrages of drunkenness.
I feel somewhat confident that this is unintentionally funny. Something about the use of polysyllabic diction and odd elevated phrases to narrate "low" tavern behavior makes it so, and Exhibit A of the laughable effect might be the way in which the one crystalline string of words—"expected that the wine should be paid for by him that drank it"—is scrunched between "refractory" to describe pissed, stiffed drinking companions and "method of composition" to describe Savage's remedy when things got tense. By the way, regarding that remedy, it's a bit of a challenge to see through the draperies, but "assumed the government of the house" indicates that Savage plied his companions with his landlord's wine, not his own. Licentious frolics ensued and the trouble that began at the tavern was forgotten.
Just a few pages later, however, one comes to one of those passages that make me love Dr. Johnson. (He'd probably substitute "reverence" as a verb for "love.")
That Mr. Savage was too much elevated by any good fortune is generally known; and some passages of his Introduction to The Author to be Let sufficiently show that he did not wholly refrain from such satire as he afterwards thought very unjust when he was exposed to it himself; for, when he was afterwards ridiculed in the character of a distressed poet, he very easily discovered that distress was not a proper subject for merriment, or topic of invective. He was then able to discern that if misery be the effect of virtue, it ought to be reverenced; if of ill fortune, to be pitied; and if of vice, not to be insulted, because it is perhaps itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was produced. And the humanity of that man can deserve no panegyric who is capable of reproaching a criminal in the hands of the executioner.
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