mistaken, but never trivial and insipid. It is more safe to trust to him
when he commends than when he dispraises; when he enlarges the
boundaries of criticism which his predecessors had contracted, than when
he sets up new fences of his own. The higher station we can take, the
more those petty limits will disappear, which confine excellence to
particular forms and systems. The critic who condemns that which the
generality of mankind, or even the few of those more refined in their
taste, have long agreed in admiring, may naturally conclude the fault to
be in himself; that there is in his mind or his organs some want of
capacity for the reception of a certain species of pleasure. When
Johnson rejected pastoral comedy, as being representative of _scenes_
adapted chiefly "to please barbarians and children," he might have
suspected that his own eye-sight, rather than pastoral comedy, was to
blame. When he characterized blank verse, "as verse only to the eye," he
might reasonably have questioned the powers of his own hearing. But
this, and more than this, we may forgive him, for his successful
vindication of Shakspeare from the faults objected to him by the French
critics.

It is in his biographical works that Johnson is most pleasing and most
instructive. His querulousness takes away much both from the
agreeableness and the use of his moral writings. Addison has represented
our nature in its most attractive forms; but Swift makes us turn with
loathing from its deformities, and Johnson causes us to shudder at its
misery.

Like most of the writers of that time, he made use of his poetry only as
the means of introducing himself to the public. We cannot regret, as in
the case of Goldsmith, that he put it to no further service. He took
little delight in those appearances either of nature or art, for which