Mighty Morphin Historical Objects
			In his preface to 'A Dictionary of the English Language', Samuel Johnson writes that while a dictionary can acquire thousands of new words, the "phraseology" of language is like the changing order of columns of a building, an order which goes without the perception of the individual change of each stone, of each "word" in the building. With "phraseology," any nomenclature is highly thematic, stretching beyond alphabetization as a system of classification-- as does literature. This is to say that Johnson's literary projects exist alongside his reference projects, and inform them while repaying the use of some of their conventions. Episodic division of his own literary work, "The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia" may derive from his assembly of dictionaries; while emphasizing the novel's protagonist in the manner of Scott's Waverly aligns the novel with a conventional picaresque. Grand themes, "larger" than the phrases of language, include a prince for a picaroon character (normally it is a rogue or a philosopher like Imlac in "Rasselas" that is a servant of many masters). "Rasselas" is a thematic satire from a learned perspective of careful aesthetic treatment: including landscape descriptions requiring a view of the novel as a picturesque picaresque. The picturesque, the seed of Gothic sensibility, is rooted by a trend in the Eighteenth Century toward representations of rural scenery, with a representer fascination for the "natural" and the "wild". Most important is the fact that landscapes were made to look "wild" as well as that landscapers employed fake ruins. In "Rasselas", the prince says that, "I came hither not to measure fragments of temples, or trace choked aqueducts, but to look upon the various scenes of the present world." A view from a distance, a visual impression without knowing a site's apparent underlying structure, could allow an observer to insert a fake ruin in a rather perfunctory fashion. The underlying structure, "the knowledge behind landscape" is in turn supplied by Johnson, leaving Rasselas as a prince of different contexts who discourses on 'greatness' or converses with the philosopher Imlac-- exhibiting class actions contrary to a rogue or picaroon8O-- thus fake ruins and fake picaroons. It is through giving a proto-gothic, vivid, description of points of interest (present with artifacts of a "fake" past) in "The History of Rasselas " that Johnson sets the stage for later Nineteenth Century literature to redevelop and put into modem context, medieval, Gothic motifs, to blend them with a new way of seeing: one which would allow a different turn on the episodic format shared by "Rasselas" and allow new roles for main characters in novels of horror8l. Now Scott could lay the groundwork for Dark Shadows. As Rasselas's prince and princess and their group view pyramids and establish a developing Gothic, Imlac believes that apparitions truly exist and recognizes the terror associated with the perhaps claustrophobic passages to death chambers in the pyramids. The passageways of the pyramids signify a part-Epicurean, part-ethereal conception of matter that comprises all of the, as J. A. Cuddon writes, topography, sites, props, presences, and happenings of Gothic. One compares contorted passageways in the Eighteenth Century to winding stairways in the Nineteenth Century. The next generation of somber visions belongs to a novelist of the Gothic picaroon. Arthur Machen, preternatural novelist, writes about the technique of 17th Century landscape painting. Describing the rural scenery with this century's method, a painter's pictures gradually become more sinister and secretive with 'unpleasant' figures emerging in the foreground. These pictures are a precise representation of vampirism and horror from conception to super-nature, and they transpose the ruins of "Rasselas", as an imaginary past, onto the construction of alternative history, a story and a background for Gothic horror.			21. Hibbert, Christopher. The Personal History of Samuel Johnson. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers. p.134. 'And after,,;upper he would unfailingly walk round to Miss Williwns in BcAt Court for his nightly cup of tea, carrying a vast oak -,tick, or rather a small tree, which was over six feet in length and almost three in diameter at the upper end where the root had been trimmed to the size of an orange. 22. Charlton, William and Aidan Reynolds. Arthur Machen: A Short account of His Life and Work. London: John Baker, 1963. p. 18. He himself used to fashion his life and conversation to his pipe so far as was possible, though since his pipes were black, smelly and disreputable, the analogy is not to be pressed beyond the spirit. 80. Cuddon, J. A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary terms and Literary Theory. Third Edition. London and New York: Penguin Books publishers, 1991. p. 708. (the) picaresque novel. It tells the life a a knave or picaroon who is the servant of several masters. Through his experience this picaroon satirizes the society in which he lives.' 81. Ibid... pp. 381-86. Save the parts referring to Rasseleas, this statement is the general project of the gothic novel which came around 1780-1820.