the personages in the former, are so far above the common level, that we consider ourselves, in some measure, as aliens to them; whereas those who act in a lower sphere, are look’d upon by us as a kind of relatives, from the similitude of conditions; whence we are more intimately mov’d with whatever concerns us.”  A comparison of the first two paragraphs of this preface and the first four paragraphs of Johnson’s Rambler No. 60, if it does not discover the source of part of Johnson’s paper, will at least reveal how the defender of the fictional “secret history” and a famous champion of intimate biography played into each other’s hands.  Johnson’s appearing to follow the defender of French fiction here is all the more interesting when one recalls his alarm in Rambler No. 4 over the prevailing taste for novels that exhibited, unexpurgated, “Life in its true State, diversified only by the Accidents that daily happen in the World.”  Indeed if it were not for Fielding himself, one might imagine from Johnson’s unsteady and generally unsatisfactory criticism of prose fiction that the old neo-classical principles were completely out of date and useless.

Samuel Derrick, the editor of Dryden and friend of Boswell for whom Johnson “had a kindness” but not much respect, the “pretty little gentleman” described by Smollett’s Lydia Melford, translated the Memoirs of the Count Du Beauval from Le Mentor Cavalier, ou Les Illustres Infortunez de Notre Siecle ("Londres,” 1736) by the Marquis d’Argens.  Only the second paragraph of Derrick’s preface came from d’Argens, but the drift of the Frenchman’s ideas toward “le Naturel” is well sustained in Derrick’s praise, no doubt based on Warburton’s, of writers who present scenes that “are daily found to move beneath their Inspection.”  There are ties with the doctrines of 1641 even in this preface, but the transformation of vraisemblance and decorum was sufficiently advanced for the needs of the day.

Benjamin Boyce
Duke University

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

[1] Most scholars attribute the preface to Georges de Scudery, but it seems impossible to say whether he collaborated with his sister in writing the romance itself or whether the work was written entirely by her.

Cogan’s translation of Ibrahim and the preface appeared first in 1652.

[2] See the texts in Allan H. Gilbert’s Literary Criticism:  Plato to Dryden (N.Y.:  American Book Co., 1940) and the discussion in A.E.  Parsons’ “The English Heroic Play,” MLR, XXXIII (1938), 1-14.

[3] Clelia.  An Excellent New Romance.  The Fourth Volume ...  Rendered into English by G.H. (1677; Part IV, Book II), pp. 540-543.

[4] See An Apology for the Life of Mr. Bempfylde-Moore Carew ...  The Sixth Edition, p. xix; Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison (1754), p. 20.