In an age when elegant writing was the norm, Johnson's prose was both typical and exceptional. This is because, in the eighteenth century, writers (and those who practiced any of the arts) strove not to be "different" so much as to be better at the same things others accomplished. "Conformity" was not seen as a negative quality. To quote Johnson's predecessor Pope,

True Wit is Nature to advantage dressed,

What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed.

Though to us the essays of The Rambler may seem elevated and formal in style, as all writing from the time does, Johnson's approach is actually to establish an intimacy with his readers. Much of the material he deals with still strikes a chord with us today. He writes in the first person and projects a degree of humility about many of his personal feelings. In one of the numbers the thoughts he expresses about the multitude of books one encounters in a library and his reaction to them are similar to what I myself have felt. A simple observation such as the following gives the impression of a man not necessarily a great scholar but just an ordinary person reflecting on a fact of life that many people would not have thought of on their own, but can immediately identify with once they have read Johnson's words:

I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful, for not only every man has, in the mighty mass of the world, great numbers in the same condition as himself, to whom his mistakes and miscarriages, escapes and expedients, would be of immediate and apparent use; but there is such a uniformity in the state of man, considered apart from the adventitious and separable decorations and disguises, that there is scarce any possibility of good or ill but is common to humankind. (Rambler #60)

Though this is a much longer and more complex sentence than practically any author today would write, the idea is stated with such lucidity that the complication of that sentence recedes into the background. The style is ennobled, but in a natural and appealing way that even the twentieth-century reader can appreciate and can relate to.

The style also conveys the didactic approach we reflexively expect from writers of Johnson's era. But it's not a tedious didacticism, as such a style might easily lapse into when handled by a lesser author. Those same qualities are conveyed in his later prose writings, such as his Lives of the English Poets, as well as in Johnson's verse, including his best-known poems, "London" and "The Vanity of Human Wishes."