[629]. The Allegory on Criticism (daughter of Labour and Truth, who gives up her task to Time, but is temporarily personated by Flattery and Malevolence) in No. 3 almost speaks itself in the parenthetical description just given. Cf. also 4, on Ancient and Modern Romances; 22, another Allegory on Wit and Learning; 23, on the Contrariety of Criticism; and 36, 37, on “Pastoral Poetry.”
[630]. He was no doubt thinking also of Gilbert West, in his Life of whom he introduces a caveat against West’s Imitations of Spenser as “successful” indeed and “amusing” but “only pretty.”
[631]. “The warmest admirers of the great Mantuan poet can extol him for little more than the skill with which he has ... united the beauties of the Iliad and Odyssey,” and he adds a longish exposure of the way in which Virgil, determined to imitate at all costs, has put in his borrowed matter without regard to keeping.
[632]. The chief remaining critical loci in the Rambler are the unlucky strictures in No. 168 on “dun,” “knife,” and “blanket” in Macbeth as “low”; and the remarks on unfriendly criticism in 176.
[633]. There are, of course, other passages in the Idler touching on Criticism,—59 on the Causes of Neglect of Books, 68, 69 on Translation, 77 on “Essay Writing,” 85 on Compilations. But they contain nothing of exceptional importance.
[634]. “Jonson, ... who besides that he had no imaginable temptation to falsehood, wrote at a time when the character and acquisitions of Shakespeare were known to multitudes. His evidence ought therefore to decide the controversy, unless some testimony of equal force could be opposed.”
[635]. With Johnson, as with some other writers, I have not thought it necessary to specify editions. I must, however, mention Mr J. H. Millar’s issue of the Lives (London, 1896) for the sake of the excellent Introduction on Johnson’s criticism.
[636]. There are blind attempts at it even in antiquity; but Dryden’s Lives of Lucian and Plutarch are, like other things of his elsewhere, the real originals here.
[637]. Let me draw special attention to “John.” I once, unwittingly or carelessly, called him “Thomas,” and I am afraid that I even neglected to correct the error in a second edition of the guilty book. A man who writes “Thomas” for “John,” in the case of a minor poet, can, I am aware, possess no virtues, and must expect no pardon. But I shall always henceforth remember to call him “Pomfret, Mr John.” “Let this expiate,” as was remarked in another case of perhaps not less mortal sin.
[638]. It was of course probably suggested by Dryden (Essay on Satire, “Donne ... affects the metaphysics”), but in Johnson’s hands is much altered and extended.