in writing are like those recorded by Boswell from his conversation; that is to say he does not, as a critic whose medium was normally the pen rather than the tongue would tend to do, search for fine shades of distinction, subdivide subtleties, or be careful to admit caveats or exceptions; he passes, on the contrary, rapid and forcible verdicts, not seldom in their assertions untenably sweeping, and always decided and dogmatic.  He never affects diffidence or defers to the judgments of others.  His power of concentration, of seizing on essentials, has given us his best critical work—­nothing could be better, for instance, than his characterisation of the poets whom he calls the metaphysical school (Donne, Crashaw, and the rest) which is the most valuable part of his life of Cowley.  Even where he is most prejudiced—­for instance in his attack on Milton’s Lycidas—­there is usually something to be said for his point of view.  And after this concentration, his excellence depends on his basic common sense.  His classicism is always tempered, like Dryden’s, by a humane and sensible dislike of pedantry; he sets no store by the unities; in his preface to Shakespeare he allows more than a “classic” could have been expected to admit, writing in it, in truth, some of the manliest and wisest things in Shakespearean literature.  Of course, he had his failings—­the greatest of them what Lamb called imperfect sympathy.  He could see no good in republicans or agnostics, and none in Scotland or France.  Not that the phrase “imperfect sympathy,” which expresses by implication the romantic critic’s point of view, would have appealed to him.  When Dr. Johnson did not like people the fault was in them, not in him; a ruthless objectivity is part of the classic equipment.  He failed, too, because he could neither understand nor appreciate poetry which concerned itself with the sensations that come from external nature.  Nature was to him a closed book, very likely for a purely physical reason.  He was short-sighted to the point of myopia, and a landscape meant nothing to him; when he tried to describe one as he did in the chapter on the “happy valley” in Rasselas he failed.  What he did not see he could not appreciate; perhaps it is too much to ask of his self-contained and unbending intellect that he should appreciate the report of it by other men.

(2)

As we have seen, Johnson was not only great in himself, he was great in his friends.  Round him, meeting him as an equal, gathered the greatest and most prolific writers of the time.  There is no better way to study the central and accepted men of letters of the period than to take some full evening at the club from Boswell, read a page or two, watch what the talkers said, and then trace each back to his own works for a complete picture of his personality.  The lie of the literary landscape in this wonderful time will become apparent to you as you read.  You will find Johnson enthroned, Boswell at his ear, round him