most roots and fruits; and that water was most to be prized which contained most fish.”  On this principle of the valuelessness of those pleasures which enter the mind through the eye, Dr. Johnson should have blamed the lovers of painting for dwelling with such fond admiration on the canvas of his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds.  In point of fact, Dr. Johnson had no more sympathy with the genius of the painter or the musician than with that of the Landscape gardener, for he had neither an eye nor an ear for Art.  He wondered how any man could be such a fool as to be moved to tears by music, and observed, that, “one could not fill one’s belly with hearing soft murmurs or looking at rough cascades.”  No; the loveliness of nature does not satisfy the thirst and hunger of the body, but it does satisfy the thirst and hunger of the soul.  No one can find wheaten bread or wine or venison or beef or plum-pudding or turtle-soup in mere sounds and sights, however exquisite—­neither can any one find such substantial diet within the boards of a book—­no not even on the pages of Shakespeare, or even those of the Bible itself,—­but men can find in sweet music and lovely scenery and good books something infinitely more precious than all the wine, venison, beef, or plum-pudding, or turtle-soup that could be swallowed during a long life by the most craving and capacious alderman of London!  Man is of a dual nature:  he is not all body.  He has other and far higher wants and enjoyments than the purely physical—­and these nobler appetites are gratified by the charms of nature and the creations of inspired genius.

Dr. Johnson’s gastronomic allusions to nature recal the old story of a poet pointing out to a utilitarian friend some white lambs frolicking in a meadow.  “Aye,” said, the other, “only think of a quarter of one of them with asparagus and mint sauce!” The story is by some supposed to have had a Scottish origin, and a prosaic North Briton is made to say that the pretty little lambs, sporting amidst the daisies and buttercups, would “mak braw pies.”

A profound feeling for the beautiful is generally held to be an essential quality in the poet.  It is a curious fact, however, that there are some who aspire to the rank of poet, and have their claims allowed, who yet cannot be said to be poetical in their nature—­for how can that nature be, strictly speaking, poetical which denies the sentiment of Keats, that

    A thing of beauty is a joy for ever?

Both Scott and Byron very earnestly admired Dr. Johnson’s “London” and “The Vanity of Human Wishes.”  Yet the sentiments just quoted from the author of those productions are far more characteristic of a utilitarian philosopher than of one who has been endowed by nature with

    The vision and the faculty divine,

and made capable, like some mysterious enchanter, of

    Clothing the palpable and the familiar
    With golden exhalations of the dawn.