were as sheer waste of time as to speculate if he might not have enriched the world with 'something sublime' upon the Gunpowder Plot, or why he ceased early in life to 'warble the amatory lay.' Nevertheless, of Johnson's critical opinions from which men have agreed to differ, there are others that, being due neither to caprice nor to visitations of 'stark insensibility,' may not be so summarily dismissed. His inflexible preference of rhyme to blank verse, his disgust at Lycidas, his contempt for Gray's Odes, if we cannot share, we can, to some extent at least, explain by a consideration of the general canons of criticism disclosed in the Lives.

Criticism, then, according to Johnson, is not a matter of hard and fast rule. It is essentially a matter of perception, not of principle, whatever they may say who sneer at Addison's judgments as 'tentative and experimental rather than scientific.' One of the great defects of Cowley and his school is that their verse stands the test of the finger better than that of the ear; and the prime merit of Dryden's critical work consists in its being the criticism of a poet and not a 'dull collection of theorems.' Hence we reach the cardinal proposition, that the object of poetry is to gratify a particular taste: in a word, to please. Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the help of reason.' 'Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight; by their -power of attracting and detaining the attention. That book is good in vain which the reader throws away.' Once more: 'Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults: negligences and errors are single and local, but tediousness pervades the whole. Other faults are censured and forgotten, but the power of tedionsness propagates itself.' And here it may be proper to glance at Johnson's view of the relation subsisting between Morals and Art. That he who was emphatically a good man and not, like Savage, merely the friend of goodness, who was

.0 scarce less eminent as a moralist than as a lexicographer, who h saw that men are of necessity 'perpetually moral, but are

geometricians'—he might have added, or poets or painters— n only by chance,'-that such an one should be apt to confound at the ethical with the æsthetic, the good with the beautiful, n was to be expected. The tendency betrays itself perhaps,

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more strongly than anywhere else in the admirable Preface to i Shakespeare, where he imputes it as a fault to the dramatist t that 'he seems to write without any moral purpose,' and where he complains that he is not always 'careful to show in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked.' What is 0 really surprising is, that as he grew older Johnson's innate candour and vigour of intellect triumphed over the tendency and so far detached him from a highly congenial doctrine that, if he did not explicitly disavow it, he perceptibly inclined i towards a view indicated in the Life of Savage, where, so far from making morals the chief consideration, he had recommended The Wanderer only in the last resort as a poem that could at least promote no other purposes than those of virtue,' being written with a very strong sense of the efficacy of 1 religion': which he parenthetically and almost half-heartedly remarks, 'ought to be [and by implication is not] thought equivalent to many other excellencies.' True, he hoped that the Lives were so written as to 'tend to the promotion of piety.' True, he goes out of his way to compliment his favourite Richardson upon having excelled Rowe in moral effect. True, he could not resist the taking a parting shot at Gray, and therefore opined that The Bard—(which promoted no truth moral or political' that he could see)'might have been concluded with an action of better example' than suicide. But, upon the whole, in the Lives he is not only lenient to offences against decorum, which without overniceness he might have visited with severity, but his point of

view is quite different from what it had been fifteen years before. Pope's Essay on Man, for example, where 'vulgarity of sentiment' contends for supremacy with 'penury of knowledge,' is a singular combination of fallacies and truisms. No one knew that better than Johnson, who, with incomparable skill, has exposed the triteness of its maxims, and the tenuity of its reasoning. Yet with what generous enthusiasm he hails that ' egregious instance of the predominance of genius'! How he salutes its 'blaze of embellishment,' its 'sweetness of melody'! Listen to this 'model of encomiastic criticism': 'The vigorous contraction of some thoughts, the luxuriant amplification of others, the incidental illustrations, and sometimes the dignity, sometimes the softness, of the verses, enchain philosophy, suspend criticism, and oppress judgment by overpowering pleasure.' And while on the one hand Johnson seems to insist that not the subject but its treatment discovers the poet, on the other he is ever scrupulous to distinguish between the writer and the man. Unlike the worthy Matthew Bramble, he was not shocked to find a man have sublime ideas in his head and nothing but illiberal sentiments in his heart; for he knew that the loftiest poetry might be the work of an 'acrimonious and surly republican.' "With the philosophical or religious tenets of the author,' he says, in the life of Akenside, I have nothing to do my business is with his poetry.' 'That poetry and virtue,' he remarks in the life of Gray, 'go always together, is an opinion so pleasing that I can forgive him who resolves to think it true.' That is not the language of a man who is resolved to think it true himself.

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The production of a certain species of pleasure being the object of poetry, it next falls to be considered what qualities contribute to the desired result. Mere prettiness will not suffice. Pretty things, which are pretty and no more, are 'flowers fragrant and fair, but of short duration; or they are

Such

blossoms to be valued only as they foretell fruits.' compositions as West's Imitations of Spenser, however successful, 'are not to be reckoned among the great achievements of intellect,' though they may be 'proofs of great industry and great nicety of observation.' 'The noblest beauties of art are those of which the effect is co-extended with rational nature or at least with the whole circle of polished life; what is less than this can only be pretty, the plaything of fashion, and the amusement of a day.' In works, then, which, unlike such trifles, do not 'presuppose an accidental or artificial state of mind,' and which are to please for more than a day, the first essential ingredient is novelty. There must be something unexpected, something surprising. In Lycidas there is no art 'because there is nothing new.' 'The pleasures of the mind imply something sudden and unexpected: that which elevates must always surprise. What is perceived by slow degrees may gratify us with the consciousness of improvement, but will never strike with the sense of pleasure.' 'The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights.' Hence the radical defect of almost all occasional poetry. We have been all born; we have most of us been married; and so many have died before us that our deaths can supply but few materials for a poet. After so many inauguratory gratulations, nuptial hymns, and funeral dirges, he must be highly favoured by nature, or by fortune, who says anything not said before. Even war and conquest, however splendid, suggest no new images; the triumphal chariot of a victorious monarch can be decked only with those ornaments that have graced his predecessors.' Gray's Ode on the Prospect of Eton College similarly falls short of excellence because it 'suggests nothing to Gray which every beholder does not equally think and feel.' Yet even

' astonishment is a toilsome pleasure.' 'The recurrence of the

same images must tire in time.' There must, therefore, be not only novelty but variety, which is 'the great source of pleasure.' For 'uniformity must tire at last, though it be uniformity of excellence.' It is precisely the want of these two requisitesnovelty and variety-that renders devotional poetry for the most part unpleasing. "The paucity of its topics enforces perpetual repetition, and the sanctity of the matter rejects the ornaments of figurative diction.' 'The topics of devotion are few, and being few are universally known; but, few as they are, they can be made no more; they can receive no grace from novelty of sentiment, and very little from novelty of expression.' To put the matter in another way, as familiar things must be made new, so, to avoid the monotony of a perpetual succession of surprises, new things must be made familiar. He who successfully performs that double task exhibits 'the two most engaging powers of an author,' while 'for want of this artful intertexture and those necessary changes the whole of a book may be tedious, though all the parts are praised.' Thus, the reader of Johnson's favourite passage from The Mourning Bride, 'feels what he remembers to have felt before, but he feels it with a great increase of sensibility; he recognises a familiar image, but meets it again amplified and expanded, embellished with beauty and enlarged with majesty'; and the reader of Thomson's Seasons 'wonders that he never saw before what Thomson shews him, and that he never yet has felt what Thomson impresses.' Gray's Elegy abounds 'with images which find a mirror in every mind and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.' The four stanzas beginning, "Yet even these bones," are to me,' says Johnson, 'original: I have never seen the notions in any other place; yet he that reads them here persuades himself that he has always felt them.'

In the same way, the vocabulary of a poet must be formed