In the _first_ we have
Julius Caesar: he relates his own transactions; but he relates them with
peculiar grace and dignity, and his narrative is supported by the
greatness of his character and atchievements. In the _second_ class we
have Marcus Antoninus: this writer has given us a series of reflections
on his own life; but his sentiments are so noble, his morality so
sublime, that his meditations are universally admired. In the _third_
class we have some others of tolerable credit, who have given importance
to their own private history by an intermixture of literary anecdotes,
and the occurrences of their own times: the celebrated _Huetius_ has
published an entertaining volume upon this plan, "_De rebus ad eum
pertinentibus_[482]." In the _fourth_ class we have the journalists,
temporal and spiritual: Elias Ashmole, William Lilly, George Whitefield,
John Wesley, and a thousand other old women and fanatick writers of
memoirs and meditations.'
I mentioned to him that Dr. Hugh Blair, in his lectures on Rhetorick and
Belles Lettres, which I heard him deliver at Edinburgh, had animadverted
on the Johnsonian style as too pompous; and attempted to imitate it, by
giving a sentence of Addison in _The Spectator_, No.
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