Monthly Review and the Critical Review took different sides.
Many readers pronounced the writer a pompous pedant, who would
never use a word of two syllables where it was possible to use a
word of six, and who could not make a waiting woman relate her
adventures without balancing every noun with another noun, and
every epithet with another epithet. Another party, not less
zealous, cited with delight numerous passages in which weighty
meaning was expressed with accuracy and illustrated with
splendour. And both the censure and the praise were merited.

About the plan of Rasselas little was said by the critics; and
yet the faults of the plan might seem to invite severe criticism.
Johnson has frequently blamed Shakspeare for neglecting the
proprieties of time and place, and for ascribing to one age or
nation the manners and opinions of another. Yet Shakspeare has
not sinned in this way more grievously than Johnson. Rasselas
and Imlac, Nekayah and Pekuah, are evidently meant to be
Abyssinians of the eighteenth century: for the Europe which
Imlac describes is the Europe of the eighteenth century; and the
inmates of the Happy Valley talk familiarly of that law of
gravitation which Newton discovered, and which was not fully
received even at Cambridge till the eighteenth century. What a
real company of Abyssinians would have been may be learned from
Bruce's Travels. But Johnson, not content with turning filthy
savages, ignorant of their letters, and gorged with raw steaks
cut from living cows, into philosophers as eloquent and
enlightened as himself or his friend Burke, and into ladies as
highly accomplished as Mrs Lennox or Mrs Sheridan, transferred
the whole domestic system of England to Egypt. Into a land of
harems, a land of polygamy, a land where women are married