mixed with something like personal attachment: but he was neither a
poet nor a judge of poetry. He might in one sense be a judge of
poetry as it falls within the limits and rules of prose, but not as
it is poetry. Least of all was he qualified to be a judge of
Shakespeare, who 'alone is high fantastical'. Let those who have a
prejudice against Johnson read Boswell's Life of him: as those whom
he has prejudiced against Shakespeare should read his Irene. We do
not say that a man to be a critic must necessarily be a poet: but to
be a good critic, he ought not to be a bad poet. Such poetry as a
man deliberately writes, such, and such only will he like. Dr.
Johnson's Preface to his edition of Shakespeare looks like a
laborious attempt to bury the characteristic merits of his author
under a load of cumbrous phraseology, and to weigh his excellences
and defects in equal scales, stuffed full of 'swelling figures and
sonorous epithets'. Nor could it well be otherwise; Dr. Johnson's
general powers of reasoning overlaid his critical susceptibility.
All his ideas were cast in a given mould, in a set form: they were
made out by rule and system, by climax, inference, and antithesis:--
Shakespeare's were the reverse. Johnson's understanding dealt only
in round numbers: the fractions were lost upon him. He reduced
everything to the common standard of conventional propriety; and the
most exquisite refinement or sublimity produced an effect on his
mind, only as they could be translated into the language of measured
prose. To him an excess of beauty was a fault; for it appeared to
him like an excrescence; and his imagination was dazzled by the
blaze of light. His writings neither shone with the beams of native
genius, nor reflected them. The shifting shapes of fancy, the
rainbow hues of things, made no impression on him: he seized only on
the permanent and tangible. He had no idea of natural objects but
'such as he could measure with a two-fool rule, or tell upon ten