Selected Essays
Twice a week for two years, with the printer's boy waiting at the door, Johnson produced a Rambler essay on sorrow, idleness, marriage, money, or the hunger of imagination, all while single-handedly writing the Dictionary. The Idler followed, looser and funnier. He raised the moral essay to a height no one has matched since: you come for the organ-toned sentences and leave having been personally described.
Dense, Latinate prose with long balanced sentences is the single most common frustration, readers calling it slow going for a modern eye. Several find the moralizing repetitive, one quitting less than a quarter of the way through and concluding Johnson “seems to be a one-trick pony,” circling back to the same virtues essay after essay. Another admits, “I lied when I clicked that I had finished this book.” Some find his voice stern and superior even when they concede he's right, one reader saying he can “border the line of him being a dick.” Readers who came in expecting the Rambler's reputed comic wit often leave disappointed, one writing the essays were “really funny but I didn't get into them at all.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
