contradiction to what Pope had observed, and to what every one else
feels, that each character is a species, instead of being an
individual. He in fact found the general species or DIDACTIC form in
Shakespeare's characters, which was all he sought or cared for; he
did not find the individual traits, or the DRAMATIC distinctions
which Shakespeare has engrafted on this general nature, because he
felt no interest in them. Shakespeare's bold and happy flights of
imagination were equally thrown away upon our author. He was not
only without any particular fineness of organic sensibility, alive
to all the 'mighty world of ear and eye', which is necessary to the
painter or musician, but without that intenseness of passion, which,
seeking to exaggerate whatever excites the feelings of pleasure or
power in the mind, and moulding the impressions of natural objects
according to the impulses of imagination, produces a genius and a
taste for poetry. According to Dr. Johnson, a mountain is sublime,
or a rose is beautiful; for that their name and definition imply.
But he would no more be able to give the description of Dover cliff
in Lear, or the description of flowers in The Winter's Tale, than to
describe the objects of a sixth sense; nor do we think he would have
any very profound feeling of the beauty of the passages here
referred to. A stately common-place, such as Congreve's description
of a ruin in The Mourning Bride, would have answered Johnson's
purpose just as well, or better than the first; and an
indiscriminate profusion of scents and hues would have interfered
less with the ordinary routine of his imagination than Perdita's
lines, which seem enamoured of their own sweetness--

Daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,