There is nothing
plastic in his nature now. His manners and habits are completely formed;
and in them any further success can make little favorable change, whatever
it may effect for his mind or genius." [Footnote: Forster's Goldsmith]
We are not to be surprised, therefore, at finding him make an awkward
figure in the elegant drawing-rooms which were now open to him, and
disappointing those who had formed an idea of him from the fascinating ease
and gracefulness of his poetry.
Even the literary club, and the circle of which it formed a part, after
their surprise at the intellectual flights of which he showed himself
capable, fell into a conventional mode of judging and talking of him, and
of placing him in absurd and whimsical points of view. His very celebrity
operated here to his disadvantage. It brought him into continual comparison
with Johnson, who was the oracle of that circle and had given it a tone.
Conversation was the great staple there, and of this Johnson was a master.
He had been a reader and thinker from childhood; his melancholy
temperament, which unfitted him for the pleasures of youth, had made him
so. For many years past the vast variety of works he had been obliged to
consult in preparing his Dictionary had stored an uncommonly retentive
memory with facts on all kinds of subjects; making it a perfect colloquial
armory.
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