them; whereas those who act in a lower sphere, are look'd upon by us
as a kind of relatives, from the similitude of conditions; whence we
are more intimately mov'd with whatever concerns us." A comparison
of the first two paragraphs of this preface and the first four
paragraphs of Johnson's _Rambler_ No. 60, if it does not discover
the source of part of Johnson's paper, will at least reveal how the
defender of the fictional "secret history" and a famous champion of
intimate biography played into each other's hands. Johnson's
appearing to follow the defender of French fiction here is all the
more interesting when one recalls his alarm in _Rambler_ No. 4 over
the prevailing taste for novels that exhibited, unexpurgated, "Life
in its true State, diversified only by the Accidents that daily
happen in the World." Indeed if it were not for Fielding himself,
one might imagine from Johnson's unsteady and generally
unsatisfactory criticism of prose fiction that the old neo-classical
principles were completely out of date and useless.

Samuel Derrick, the editor of Dryden and friend of Boswell for whom
Johnson "had a kindness" but not much respect, the "pretty little
gentleman" described by Smollett's Lydia Melford, translated the
_Memoirs of the Count Du Beauval_ from _Le Mentor Cavalier, ou Les
Illustres Infortunez de Notre Siecle_ ("Londres," 1736) by the
Marquis d'Argens. Only the second paragraph of Derrick's preface
came from d'Argens, but the drift of the Frenchman's ideas toward
"le Naturel" is well sustained in Derrick's praise, no doubt based
on Warburton's, of writers who present scenes that "are daily found
to move beneath their Inspection." There are ties with the doctrines
of 1641 even in this preface, but the transformation of
_vraisemblance_ and _decorum_ was sufficiently advanced for the
needs of the day.