Rasselas
Rasselas,Prince of Abyssinia, The History of, a didactic romance by Dr Johnson , published 1759 , and composed during the evenings of a week to help his dying mother and eventually to pay for her funeral. It is an essay on the ‘choice of life’, a phrase repeated throughout the work, usually in italics.
Rasselas, a son of the emperor of Abyssinia, weary of the joys of the ‘happy valley’ where the inhabitants know only ‘the soft vicissitudes of pleasure and repose’, escapes to Egypt, accompanied by his sister Nekayah, her attendant Pekuah, and the much-travelled old philosopher Imlac. Here they study the various conditions of men's lives, and after a few incidents of no great importance resolve to return to Abyssinia, in a ‘conclusion, in which nothing is concluded’. The charm of the work lies not in its plot, which is minimal, but in its wise and humane melancholy; in many ways it echoes the theme of The Vanity of...
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