the rapid flights of fancy, or the strong movements of passion.  That is, he was to the poet what the painter of still life is to the painter of history.  Common sense sympathizes with the impressions of things on ordinary minds in ordinary circumstances:  genius catches the glancing combinations presented to the eye of fancy, under the influence of passion.  It is the province of the didactic reasoner to take cognizance of those results of human nature which are constantly repeated and always the same, which follow one another in regular succession, which are acted upon by large classes of men, and embodied in received customs, laws, language, and institutions; and it was in arranging, comparing, and arguing on these kind of general results, that Johnson’s excellence lay.  But he could not quit his hold of the commonplace and mechanical, and apply the general rule to the particular exception, or show how the nature of man was modified by the workings of passion, or the infinite fluctuations of thought and accident.  Hence he could judge neither of the heights nor depths of poetry.  Nor is this all; for being conscious of great powers in himself, and those powers of an adverse tendency to those of his author, he would be for setting up a foreign jurisdiction over poetry, and making criticism a kind of Procrustes’ bed of genius, where he might cut down imagination to matter-of-fact, regulate the passions according to reason, and translate the whole into logical diagrams and rhetorical declamation.  Thus he says of Shakespeare’s characters, in contradiction to what Pope had observed, and to what every one else feels, that each character is a species, instead of being an individual.  He in fact found the general species or didactic form in Shakespeare’s characters, which was all he sought or cared for; he did not find the individual traits, or the dramatic distinctions which Shakespeare has engrafted on this general nature, because he felt no interest in them.  Shakespeare’s bold and happy flights of imagination were equally thrown away upon our author.  He was not only without any particular fineness of organic sensibility, alive to all the ‘mighty world of ear and eye’, which is necessary to the painter or musician, but without that intenseness of passion, which, seeking to exaggerate whatever excites the feelings of pleasure or power in the mind, and moulding the impressions of natural objects according to the impulses of imagination, produces a genius and a taste for poetry.  According to Dr. Johnson, a mountain is sublime, or a rose is beautiful; for that their name and definition imply.  But he would no more be able to give the description of Dover cliff in Lear, or the description of flowers in The Winter’s Tale, than to describe the objects of a sixth sense; nor do we think he would have any very profound feeling of the beauty of the passages here referred to.  A stately common-place, such as Congreve’s description of a ruin in The Mourning Bride, would have answered Johnson’s purpose just as well, or better than the first; and an indiscriminate profusion of scents and hues would have interfered less with the ordinary routine of his imagination than Perdita’s lines, which seem enamoured of their own sweetness—­