and most majestick pauses which our versification admits are upon the fourth and sixth syllables,’ he adds:—­’ Some passages [in Milton] which conclude at this stop [the sixth syllable] I could never read without some strong emotions of delight or admiration.’  ‘If,’ he continues, ’the poetry of Milton be examined with regard to the pauses and flow of his verses into each other, it will appear that he has performed all that our language would admit.’  Cowper was so indignant at Johnson’s criticism of Milton’s blank verse that he wrote:—­’Oh!  I could thresh his old jacket till I made his pension jingle in his pocket.’  Southey’s Cowper, iii. 315.

[156] One of the most natural instances of the effect of blank verse occurred to the late Earl of Hopeton.  His Lordship observed one of his shepherds poring in the fields upon Milton’s Paradise Lost; and having asked him what book it was, the man answered, ’An’t please your Lordship, this is a very odd sort of an authour:  he would fain rhyme, but cannot get at it.’  BOSWELL.  ’The variety of pauses, so much boasted by the lovers of blank verse, changes the measures of an English poet to the periods of a declaimer; and there are only a few skilful and happy readers of Milton, who enable their audience to perceive where the lines end or begin.  “Blank verse,” said an ingenious critick, “seems to be verse only to the eye."’ Johnson’s Works, vii. 141.  In the Life of Roscommon (ib. p. 171), he says:—­’A poem frigidly didactick, without rhyme, is so near to prose, that the reader only scorns it for pretending to be verse.’

[157] Mr. Locke.  Often mentioned in Mme. D’Arblay’s Diary.

[158] See vol. in. page 71.  BOSWELL.

[159] It is scarcely a defence.  Whatever it was, he thus ends it:-’It is natural to hope, that a comprehensive is likewise an elevated soul, and that whoever is wise is also honest.  I am willing to believe that Dryden, having employed his mind, active as it was, upon different studies, and filled it, capacious as it was, with other materials, came unprovided to the controversy, and wanted rather skill to discover the right than virtue to maintain it.  But inquiries into the heart are not for man; we must now leave him to his judge.’  Works, vii. 279.

[160] In the original fright. The Hind and the Panther, i. 79.

[161] In this quotation two passages are joined. Works, vii. 339, 340.

[162] ‘The deep and pathetic morality of the Vanity of Human Wishes’ says Sir Walter Scott, ’has often extracted tears from those whose eyes wander dry over the pages of professed sentimentality.’  CROKER.  It. drew tears from Johnson himself.  ‘When,’ says Mrs. Piozzi (Anec. p. 50), ’he read his own satire, in which the life of a scholar is painted, he burst into a passion of tears.  The family and Mr. Scott only were present, who, in a jocose way, clapped him on the back, and said:—­“What’s all this, my dear Sir?  Why you, and I, and Hercules, you know, were all troubled with melancholy.”  He was a very large man, and made out the triumvirate with Johnson and Hercules comically enough.  The Doctor was so delighted at his odd sally, that he suddenly embraced him, and the subject was immediately changed.’