would "scarcely believe in the substance of their liberty, if they did
not see it cast a shadow of slavery over others."

With respect to Johnson's powers as a critic, we confess that he had but
little natural taste for poetry, as such; for that poetry of emotion
which produces in its cultivators and admirers an intensity of
excitement, to which language can scarcely afford an utterance, to which
art can give no body, and which spreads a dream and a glory around us.
All this Johnson felt not, and, therefore, understood not; for he wanted
that deep feeling which is the only sure and unerring test of poetic
excellence. He sought the didactic in poetry, and wished for reasoning
in numbers. Hence his undivided admiration of Pope and the French
school, who cultivated exclusively the poetry of idea, where each moral
problem is worked out with detailed, and often tedious, analysis; where
all intense emotion is frittered away by a ratiocinative process.
Johnson, we repeat, had no natural perception nor relish for the high
and excursive range of poetic fancy, and the age at which he composed
his criticisms on the English poets, was far advanced beyond that when
purely imaginative poetry usually affords delight. Hence, no doubt,
proceeded his capricious strictures on the odes of Gray to which
we, with painful candour, advert. In criticism and in poetry, for
indignation only poured forth the torrent of his song, he kept steadily
in view the interests of morality and virtue: these he would not
compromise for the glitter of genius, and for their maintenance of
these, the main objects of his own life and labour, he praised many an
author whom other more courtly critics have thought it not cruelty to
ridicule. He sums up his eulogium on a poet with the reflection, that he
left

No line which, dying, he could wish to blot.