Probably most people will think that the passage in question deserves a very slight fraction of the praise bestowed upon it; but the criticism, like most of Johnson’s, has a meaning which might be worth examining abstractedly from the special application which shocks the idolaters of Shakspeare.  Presently the party discussed Mrs. Montagu, whose Essay upon Shakspeare had made some noise.  Johnson had a respect for her, caused in great measure by a sense of her liberality to his friend Miss Williams, of whom more must be said hereafter.  He paid her some tremendous compliments, observing that some China plates which had belonged to Queen Elizabeth and to her, had no reason to be ashamed of a possessor so little inferior to the first.  But he had his usual professional contempt for her amateur performances in literature.  Her defence of Shakspeare against Voltaire did her honour, he admitted, but it would do nobody else honour.  “No, sir, there is no real criticism in it:  none showing the beauty of thought, as formed on the workings of the human heart.”  Mrs. Montagu was reported once to have complimented a modern tragedian, probably Jephson, by saying, “I tremble for Shakspeare.”  “When Shakspeare,” said Johnson, “has got Jephson for his rival and Mrs. Montagu for his defender, he is in a poor state indeed.”  The conversation went on to a recently published book, Kames’s Elements of Criticism, which Johnson praised, whilst Goldsmith said more truly, “It is easier to write that book than to read it.”  Johnson went on to speak of other critics.  “There is no great merit,” he said, “in telling how many plays have ghosts in them, and how this ghost is better than that.  You must show how terror is impressed on the human heart.  In the description of night in Macbeth the beetle and the bat detract from the general idea of darkness—­inspissated gloom.”

After Boswell’s marriage he disappeared for some time from London, and his correspondence with Johnson dropped, as he says, without coldness, from pure procrastination.  He did not return to London till 1772.  In the spring of that and the following year he renewed his old habits of intimacy, and inquired into Johnson’s opinion upon various subjects ranging from ghosts to literary criticism.  The height to which he had risen in the doctor’s good opinion was marked by several symptoms.  He was asked to dine at Johnson’s house upon Easter day, 1773; and observes that his curiosity was as much gratified as by a previous dinner with Rousseau in the “wilds of Neufchatel.”  He was now able to report, to the amazement of many inquirers, that Johnson’s establishment was quite orderly.  The meal consisted of very good soup, a boiled leg of lamb with spinach, a veal pie, and a rice pudding.  A stronger testimony of good-will was his election, by Johnson’s influence, into the Club.  It ought apparently to be said that Johnson forced him upon the Club by letting it be understood that, till