What is Johnson's style and vision in his Idler's essays?

Johnson wrote 91 of the Idler's 103 essays. He's a melancholic moralist as well as a satirist in these essays. Johnson wants to help us live better and wiser lives; he wants to be useful to his audience. As he says, with gentle satire, poking fun at his audience in the third Idler essay, his essays are for those:

who awake in the morning, vacant of thought, with minds gaping for the intellectual food, which some kind essayist has been accustomed to supply.

He lives in hope, or more precisely, in wishing, perhaps in vain, for the triumph of hope over experience, as he said of second marriage. One of his hopes, expressed in the third essay, is that people will learn to think for themselves and trust their own opinions.
Johnson's style is epigrammatic and exemplifies the balance prized in eighteenth century writing. We can see an example of this in Idler number 14, called "Robbery of Time." In the line below we can note the balancing of "kindness" in the first clause with "follies" in the second. The sentence also acts as a pithy saying, or, in other words, is epigrammatic. It is a wise saying we might want to remember:

If we will have the kindness of others, we must endure their follies.

The essay continues in the same measured, balanced style, summing different types of time wasters in a few short, pithy phrases.

He who cannot persuade himself to withdraw from society, must be content to pay a tribute of his time to a multitude of tyrants; to the loiterer, who makes appointments which he never keeps; to the consulter, who asks advice which he never takes; to the boaster, who blusters only to be praised; to the complainer, who whines only to be pitied; to the projector, whose happiness is to entertain his friends with expectations which all but himself know to be vain...