Johnson’s prose is true, indeed, and sound, and full of practical sense:  few men have seen more clearly into the motives, the interests, the whole walk and conversation of the living busy world as it lay before him; but farther than this busy, and to most of us, rather prosaic world, he seldom looked:  his instruction is for men of business, and in regard to matters of business alone.  Prudence is the highest Virtue he can inculcate; and for that finer portion of our nature, that portion of it which belongs essentially to Literature strictly so called, where our highest feelings, our best joys and keenest sorrows, our Doubt, our Love, our Religion reside, he has no word to utter; no remedy, no counsel to give us in our straits; or at most, if, like poor Boswell, the patient is importunate, will answer:  “My dear Sir, endeavour to clear your mind of Cant.”

The turn which Philosophical speculation had taken in the preceding age corresponded with this tendency, and enhanced its narcotic influences; or was, indeed, properly speaking, the loot they had sprung from.  Locke, himself a clear, humble-minded, patient, reverent, nay religious man, had paved the way for banishing religion from the world.  Mind, by being modelled in men’s imaginations into a Shape, a Visibility; and reasoned of as if it had been some composite, divisible and reunitable substance, some finer chemical salt, or curious piece of logical joinery,—­began to lose its immaterial, mysterious, divine though invisible character:  it was tacitly figured as something that might, were our organs fine enough, be seen.  Yet who had ever seen it?  Who could ever see it?  Thus by degrees it passed into a Doubt, a Relation, some faint Possibility; and at last into a highly-probable Nonentity.  Following Locke’s footsteps, the French had discovered that ’as the stomach secretes Chyle, so does the brain secrete Thought.’  And what then was Religion, what was Poetry, what was all high and heroic feeling?  Chiefly a delusion; often a false and pernicious one.  Poetry, indeed, was still to be preserved; because Poetry was a useful thing:  men needed amusement, and loved to amuse themselves with Poetry:  the playhouse was a pretty lounge of an evening; then there were so many precepts, satirical, didactic, so much more impressive for the rhyme; to say nothing of your occasional verses, birthday odes, epithalamiums, epicediums, by which ’the dream of existence may be so highly sweetened and embellished.’  Nay, does not Poetry, acting on the imaginations of men, excite them to daring purposes; sometimes, as in the case of Tyrtaeus, to fight better; in which wise may it not rank as a useful stimulant to man, along with Opium and Scotch Whisky, the manufacture of which is allowed by law?  In Heaven’s name, then, let Poetry be preserved.