JOHNSON'S UNFITNESS FOR POETICAL CRITICISM. 21

of course, meaning to impeach the uprightness of his character or his piety. It has been said, with great truth, that, as the poet must write in the spirit of self-sacrifice, so the reader of poetry who would rightly feel and enjoy it must in like manner pass out of himself into it. He must forget himself and his own prejudices and predilections and associations, and give himself up to the work he is reading, and try to take his stand on the author's point of view. So that the obstacles which checks the spread of true, genial poetry-of such poetry as carries us out of the purlieus of our own habitual notions into fresh fields of the imagination-is still the spirit of selfishness,-man's unwillingness to abandon his old inveterate preconceptions. Now, taking this principle,--the truth of which must be felt by all,-can there be a moment's hesitation as to Johnson's moral unfitness for poetical criticism? If the principle hold good as to the reader of poetry, how much more as to him who sets himself up for a judge to guide and even command the reading of others! To forget himself and his own prejudices and predilections and associations, to take his stand on the author's point of view, were impossibilities for a nature constituted like Johnson's. It dwelt in the impenetrable centre of his own habitual notions, in the thick fog of literary bigotry,-taking his stand in himself as the central point, and therefore, for the most part, beholding things in wrong proportions and in false lights. His poetic sympathies were few and contracted; and, instead of that catholic taste which is at once the true critic's power and his exceeding great reward, he was bitter and bigoted in his judgments and rugged in his feelings. What is the entire warp and woof of Boswell's curious biography of

him but a tissue of unbroken dogmatism?

Perhaps there never was a virtuous man with so much of selfishness. His appetite for argument was as voracious as his physical appetite. I will not say it was meat and drink to him, because his dogmatism was intermitted, and then only in the act of eating. Argumentative triumph was his ambition, his passion; and it would be edifying to observe into how many opinions, strange for a wise and good man, he was led by this overweening selflove, the adoration of his own opinions and tastes. It made him often the advocate even of shallow judgments magnified and mystified by swelling words, and sometimes of dangerous opinions; for instance, his absolute doctrine in these words:-" Contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical," because, among other sophistical reasons, "the essence of poetry is invention;-such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights. The topics of devotion are few." Contemplative piety cannot be poetical! the topics of devotion are few! Why, what in the world had become of the good man's Bible? Mark how Johnson's perpetual intrusion of his own personality, in some shape or other, made him censorious and scornful,-qualities fatal to all genial love of poetry. By it, and the added incense of flattery which his satellites were forever burning beneath his nostrils, the idea of self became an absorbing one. Look at the account of him in social life, seizing upon almost any opinion for the sake of opposition and disputation, with a dangerous recklessness of truth, as if it was a thing that could be safely so tampered with ; nsulting Garrick, ridiculing poor Goldsmith, treading

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HIS JUDGMENT OF MILTON'S POETRY.

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upon Boswell as if he were, in rough sport, rubbing his huge foot upon a spaniel's back, and then, after monopolizing nearly all the talk to himself, with an inimitable self-complacency exclaiming, "What a fine conversation we have had!"-an exclamation which, considering the monstrous disproportion, was about as appropriate as if, on turning down the last leaf of one of the longest of these lectures, I were to say to you, "What a fine con

versation we have had!"

Now, if an admirer of Dr. Johnson should be disposed to think that I have thrown off the bridle of my tongue, let it be remembered what authority his work on the poets has exercised. Let it be borne in mind how he has scattered his harsh and scornful judgments, pronouncing Milton's exquisite "Masque of Comus" a drama inelegantly splendid and tediously instructive; his sonnets, "the best only not bad;" "Lycidas," "vulgar and disgusting;" and undoing his reluctant eulogy of the "Paradise Lost" by declaring its perusal a duty rather than a pleasure, and that we retire harassed and overburdened, besides condemning its diction as harsh and barbarous, and waging perpetual war against what has been well styled eminently the English metre: how he could find in Milton's republicanism nothing but a selfish lawlessness; and how, after the lapse of more than a hundred years, he could venture to say of such a man as Milton, that, omitting public prayer, he omitted all. Let it be remembered, too, that the arch-critic could discover in Gray's fine odes nothing more than what he superciliously calls "a kind of strutting dignity, a glittering accumulation of ungraceful ornaments, image magnified by affectation, and lan

guage laboured into harshness;" and that he dismissed the true poetry of the hapless Collins with the contemptuous opinion that it may sometimes extort praise when it gives little pleasure. These were judgments, too, coming from one who claimed to be himself a poet, esteeming the high-sounding declamation of his "London" and "Vanity of Human Wishes" as poetry, and priding himself upon his hundred lines a day. For all the wrongunconscious wrong and wilful wrong-that Johnson has done the poets I might take a malicious vengeance in a retaliative censoriousness on some of his own poems. Indeed, I had written something of the sort; but some admirer of Johnson's might say that is ill-natured and has nothing to do with the matter. I think myself it would have something to do with it: but let it pass. About the same time the "Lives of the Poets" was published, another work was also given to the world, which, though at first coldly received, and by Johnson treated with contempt, was destined to render good service to the cause of English literature. Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry" has been esteemed by high authorities as one of the chief agencies in reviving a genuine feeling for true poetry in the public mind. The traditionary minstrelsy, ancient ballads, and historical songs were collected, restored, and remodelled, and thus redeemed from their obscurity. It was a poetry which, to its own early generation, had ministered to an important public use by softening, and perhaps chastening, the rudeness of a martial and unlettered people. It was now to serve a widely-different purpose:-to help in restoring nature where it had been displaced by artifice, to give life again to what had

PERCY'S "RELIQUES."

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grown cold, and to invigorate a poetry which was sickly from excessive refinement.

But this poetry, which Dr. Percy brought in his collection to the acquaintance of scholars and men of reading, had a life elsewhere. It was composed of winged words that had taken their flight from one generation to another. Its home was not so much in books as in floating tradition preserved by affectionate memory. It was a music in the air; for it might be heard sung by reapers in the field one harvest after another, by women lightening with its oftrepeated strains their household labours, by mothers singing over their children, or in some single chanting to a fireside group. It was a poetry dwelling chiefly in the North of Britain, secluded from Southern refinements. There was, for instance, a Scottish gardener's wife, who had an inexhaustible store of the ballads; some simple, solemn ditties, which when she chanted them could bring tears down an old man's cheeks, and others spirit-stirring, at sound of which the fire flashed in the dark eyes of her listening child. That deep dark-eyed Scottish bairn was Robert Burns. His ear was attuned in childhood to the old minstrelsy; the sounds sunk into his spirit to come forth again in after-years, his imagination giving them a more glorious poetry than they had ever echoed to before. The obligation of the poet to his other parent was careful religious instruction, which, if it did not furnish safeguards against sad excesses of his impetuous passions in after-life, at least saved him from ever sinking into the recklessness of a reprobate. He has recorded also a debt of his infant and boyish days to an old woman domesticated under the same humble roof, remarkable, he says, for her ignorance, credulity, and superstition, and having the largest collec