Cowardice, inactivity, folly, levity, licentiousness, ingratitude, treachery, tyranny, and cruelty; all these qualities appear too evidently in the several incidents of his life, to give us room to suspect that the disagreeable picture has been anywise overcharged by the prejudices of the ancient historians.

These thoughts, springing from different minds, belonging to different systems, bearing different colours, never flow together of themselves into a unity of thought, knowledge, insight, or conviction, but rather cram the head with a Babylonian confusion of tongues; consequently the mind becomes overcharged with them and is deprived of all clear insight and almost disorganised.

The chief seats of all, however, the places on the dais and under the canopy, are reserved for the few who have excelled in the difficult art of portraying characters in which no single feature is extravagantly overcharged.

It is evidently meant as a sportive sally of ridicule on Johnson, whose style is thus imitated, without being grossly overcharged: 'It is easy to foresee, that the idle and illiterate will complain that I have increased their labours by endeavouring to diminish them; and that I have explained what is more easy by what is more difficult ignotum per ignotius.

At the moment, by his own valuation, any one buying him for a nickel would have been liberally overcharged.

It is said to be founded on a true story, a fact which may account for an intensity of gloom in its coloring, the darkness of which would otherwise seem almost unartistically overcharged.