the poet ought to have the eye of a painter. Nor had he much more sense
of the elegant in numbers and in sound. There were indeed certain rounds
of metrical arrangement which he loved to repeat, but he could not go
beyond them. How very limited his perceptions of this kind were, we may
be convinced by reading his strictures on Dionysius the Halicarnassian
in the Rambler, and the opinions on Milton's versification, which in the
Idler he has put into the mouth of a minute critic, only to ridicule
them, though they are indeed founded in truth. Johnson was not one of
those whom Plato calls the [Greek: philaekooi kai philotheamones], "who
gladly acknowledge the beautiful wherever it is met with, in sounds, and
colours, and figures, and all that is by art compounded from these;"
much less had he ascended "to that abstract notion of beauty" which the
same philosopher considers it so much more difficult to attain.[15]

In his tragedy, the dramatis personae are like so many statues "stept
from their pedestal to take the air." They come on the stage only to
utter pompous sentiments of morality, turgid declamation, and frigid
similes. Yet there is throughout, that strength of language, that heavy
mace of words, with which, as with the flail of Talus, Johnson lays
every thing prostrate before him. This style is better suited to his
imitations of the two satires of Juvenal. Of the first of these, "the
London," Gray, in a letter to Horace Walpole, says that "to him it is
one of those few imitations, that has all the ease and all the spirit of
an original." The other is not at all inferior to it. Johnson was not
insensible to such praise; and, could he have known how favourably Gray
had spoken of him, would, I doubt not, have been more just to that poet,
whom, besides the petulant criticism on him in his Life, he presumed in
conversation to call "a heavy fellow."

In his shorter poems it appears as if nature could now and then thrust