possible significance of infinitesimal bits of evidence, and by disquisition upon general principles or the whole mass of contemporary literature, it is easy to swell volumes to any desired extent.  The result is sometimes highly interesting and valuable, as it is sometimes a new contribution to the dust-heaps; but in any case the design is something quite different from Johnson’s.  He has left much to be supplied and corrected by later scholars.  His aim is simply to give a vigorous summary of the main facts of his heroes’ lives, a pithy analysis of their character, and a short criticism of their productions.  The strong sense which is everywhere displayed, the massive style, which is yet easier and less cumbrous than in his earlier work, and the uprightness and independence of the judgments, make the book agreeable even where we are most inclined to dissent from its conclusions.

The criticism is that of a school which has died out under the great revolution of modern taste.  The booksellers decided that English poetry began for their purposes with Cowley, and Johnson has, therefore, nothing to say about some of the greatest names in our literature.  The loss is little to be regretted, since the biographical part of earlier memoirs must have been scanty, and the criticism inappreciative.  Johnson, it may be said, like most of his contemporaries, considered poetry almost exclusively from the didactic and logical point of view.  He always inquires what is the moral of a work of art.  If he does not precisely ask “what it proves,” he pays excessive attention to the logical solidity and coherence of its sentiments.  He condemns not only insincerity and affectation of feeling, but all such poetic imagery as does not correspond to the actual prosaic belief of the writer.  For the purely musical effects of poetry he has little or no feeling, and allows little deviation from the alternate long and short syllables neatly bound in Pope’s couplets.

To many readers this would imply that Johnson omits precisely the poetic element in poetry.  I must be here content to say that in my opinion it implies rather a limitation than a fundamental error.  Johnson errs in supposing that his logical tests are at all adequate; but it is, I think, a still greater error to assume that poetry has no connexion, because it has not this kind of connexion, with philosophy.  His criticism has always a meaning, and in the case of works belonging to his own school a very sound meaning.  When he is speaking of other poetry, we can only reply that his remarks may be true, but that they are not to the purpose.

The remarks on the poetry of Dryden, Addison, and Pope are generally excellent, and always give the genuine expression of an independent judgment.  Whoever thinks for himself, and says plainly what he thinks, has some merit as a critic.  This, it is true, is about all that can be said for such criticism as that on Lycidas, which is a delicious example of the wrong way of applying strong sense to inappropriate topics.  Nothing can be truer in a sense, and nothing less relevant.