Johnson's Rambler and Eighteenth-Century Rhetoric

Abstract

'Extemporaneous and ad hoc are used by Paul Fussell in and Life of Writing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), pp. 160, 157; arbitrary is Cyril Knoblauch's term (p. 257) in Samuel and Composing Process, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 13 (1980): 243-62. Patrick 0'Flaherty, in Towards Understanding of Johnson's Rambler, Studies in English Literature, 18 (1978): 524-36, sees trying to explore (p. 526) complexities of various weighty subjects in a of probing (p. 528), endeavor which reportedly often ends in confusion and apparent vacillation. Thomas Curley also says that in Johnson's writings thinking amounted to act of empirical exploration (p. 86), and Curley in addition notes how the very idea of travel as a process of empirical validation ... was a dominant intellectual pattern in Georgian literature and certainly in Johnson's morality (p. 87), in and Life of Travel (Athens: Univ. of Georgia, 1976); Curley also describes characteristic movement of Johnson's mind as an inductive search for tentative generalizations about human lot (p. 86). Paul Alkon refers to rambling, disorderly essays and poems that characterize age of Johnson (p. 115), in Critical and Logical Concepts of Method from Addison to Coleridge, EighteenthCentury Studies, 5 (1971): 97-121. Charles Pierce notes how Johnson's Ramblers enact a struggle for self-understanding (Rambler 134 is called an especially fine example of this procedure), and Pierce also observes, This was characteristic movement of his mind-from particular to general, from psychological to moral-and it was also predominant rhetorical pattern of his periodical writing (p. 103), in The Religious Life of (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1983). Illogical is used expansively by Donald Green (p. 331) in 'Logical Structure' in Eighteenth-Century Poetry, Philological Quar-