'He (Pope) nursed in his mind a foolish disesteem of Kings.' And again, 'He gratified that ambitious petulance with which he affected to insult the great[104].'
Dr Johnson himself is by no means remarkable for his respect to the great. In the preface to his folio Dictionary, he tells us, that it was written 'without any patronage of the great,' which is a mistake; for he had published a pamphlet, some years before, wherein he acknowledges, that Chesterfield had patronized him; and why the Doctor should retract his own words, it is hard to say; for Chesterfield continued his friend to the last; and such a man was very likely the strongest spoke in the Doctor's wheel. But his Lordship is now dead, and the Doctor is always and eminently grateful.
'It has been maintained by some, who love to talk of what they do not know, that pastoral is the most antient poetry.' But in the next period, 'pastoral poetry was the first employment of the human imagination[105].' The Doctor, therefore, by his own account, is one of those, who love to talk of (and what is yet worse, to assert) what they do not know. In North America, the natives have no conception of pastoral life among themselves, and their poetry, such as it is, hath no relation to that state of society.
Pastoral poetry 'is generally pleasing, because it entertains the mind with representations of scenes, familiar to almost every imagination, and of which all can equally judge whether they are well described, or not[106].'
This period is so closely interwoven with nonsense, that it will take some pains to disentangle it. Rural scenes are not familiar to almost every imagination. In England half the people are shut up in large towns, and such is the gross ignorance of some of them, that an old woman in London once asked, whether potatoes grew on trees. Neither is every man an equal judge even of what is familiar to him. Observe how the Rambler confounds the distinction between all, and almost every. The whole number is in the same stile.
'At this time a long course of opposition to Sir Robert Walpole had filled the nation with clamours for liberty, of which no man felt the want, and with care for liberty which was not in danger[107].'
No man was more violent than Dr Johnson in abusing Walpole. We have already seen some of those political definitions, which at this hour deform the Doctor's Dictionary. His late zeal for government could arise from self interest only. And to take his own words, he comes under suspicion as a wretch hired to vindicate the late measures of the Court[108]. He accuses Milton as a tool of authority, as a forger hired to assassinate the memory of Charles I. These charges came with a very bad grace from the Rambler. They are long since refuted in a separate publication, and yet they will be reprinted in every future edition of his book.
Will any man be the wiser, the better, or the merrier, by reading what follows—'Lyttleton was his (Shenstone's) neighbour, and his rival, whose empire, spacious and opulent, looked with disdain on the petty state that appeared behind it. For a while the inhabitants of Hagley affected to tell their acquaintance of the little fellow that was trying to make himself admired; but when by degrees the Leasowes forced themselves into notice, they took care to defeat the curiosity which they could not suppress, by conducting their visitants perversely to inconvenient points of view, and introducing them at the wrong end of a walk to detect a deception; injuries of which Shenstone would heavily complain[109].' The paragraph closes with a deep observation.
As the Doctor's own associates[110] have lamented the existence of this beautiful and important passage, I have only to say, that Poor Lyttleton (as the Doctor calls him) patronized Fielding, and that the Rambler patronizes William Shaw: That his Lordship was an elegant writer: That he did not adopt Johnson's new words: That Lexiphanes was dedicated to him: That he was a great and an amiable man: And that he is dead.
With all his affectation of hard words, the Doctor becomes at once intelligible when he wishes to reprobate a rival genius, or insult the ashes of a benefactor. In defiance of Addison, and a thousand other shallow fellows, he asserts that Milton 'both in prose and verse had formed his stile by a perverse and pedantick principle[111].'