Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: is perhaps some suggestion of it in the garden of hope, Rambler, 67 (November 6, 1750). But there can be little question that, in the ‘History of Ten Days of Seged, KnrnrTff-KlRfafia'JfLfJrnrfn nf plpasnrp is a prototypp nf the, happy valley i1-gplf The name Seged (Segued) occurs in Lobo ; the place of the gar- den is Lake Dambea, in Ethiopia, and the garden is a garden of delights for the pleasure of the emperor. Moreover, the descriptions agree in numerous minute particulars, so that here seems to be a first sketch of what was elaborated in the later tale. III. CHARACTER AND INTERPRETATION OF THE WORK. It is clear at a p-lannp that Johnson’s Rasselas is no ordinary work of fiction. There is. fc the exceptionofth.fi journey of Imlac and the episode of Pekutl’s bythe Arabs, the narrative nf t.hp. journey nf from the happy valley and the account of the different persons he meets are unbroken by external evpnt.s nr fnteresls. Moreover, the love passion, so eminently characteristic of romantic fiction, has no glace in the stofybTthe prince of Abyssinia. - Finally, dramatic-/ power, essential to the novplist, is a,|m/,c n,hr.lly ir,- ing in A'issclas. Johnson himself speaks in the person of each of the characters at different times. From these and other evidences that might be mentioned, it is clear that Johnson’s purpose in writing Rasselas was not simply to interest and amuse. Rasselas has been called a work of philosophical . 1 Rambler, 204, 205 (February 29, March 3, 1752). fiction. But even this rather elaborate characterization is itsplf in need ot morp pxplicit definition. Fiction is not the ordinary vehicle of philosophy, and Rasselas may be called philosophical only in a somewhat general sense. A more explicit characterization of the story may per…