of these are but brief quotations of Horatian phrases which came pat to his purpose. Gay's Trivia twice breaks Horace's rule: "There is no 'dignus vindice nodus,' no difficulty that required any supernatural interposition. . . . On great occasions and on small the mind is repelled by useless and apparent falsehood." Gay also lacked mens divinior, the dignity of genius. While Gray's The Bard has more force, more thought, and more variety than its original, The Prophecy of Nereus (Odes, I, 15), the copy has unhappily been produced at the wrong time. "The fiction of Horace was to the Romans credible; but its revival disgusts us with apparent and unconquerable falsehood. 'Incredulus odi.'" 2 This same violation of probability is assigned for his disapproval of Pope's Imitations of Horace: "Between Roman images and English manners there will be an irreconcilable dissimilitude, and the work will be generally uncouth and party-coloured; neither original nor translated, neither ancient nor modern." These objections of his to the working over of outworn material coincide with his life-long warfare upon the pedantry of classical imitations, which had become the bane of contemporary verse and furnished to so many men of the period a mere substitute for reality. Johnson, in the name of truth and nature, broke with neo-classical imitation, making in this direction, I think, his most important contribution to the progress of criticism. Boswell records two of Johnson's observations upon Horace which have value in explaining his theory of poetry. On the first occasion Boswell controverted Horace's maxim, mediocribus esse poëtis Non homines, non di, non concessere columnae, claiming esteem for "middle-rate" poetry and asserting that poetry should have different gradations of excellence and consequently of value. Johnson replied that, as there is no neces 1. Lives, II, 284; Horace, A. P. 191. 3. Lives, III, 247. 2. Lives, III, 438; Horace, A. P. 188. sity for poetry at all, it being merely a luxury, an instrument of pleasure, it can have no value unless when exquisite in its kind. This wholly aesthetic appreciation of poetical values may be placed beside his assertion, which I have already mentioned, that the occupation he loved best was to ride in a post-chaise beside a pretty woman, as a revelation of a greater flexibility in the old moralist's nature than is usually granted to him. It suggests too that he would have made short shrift of most of the frigid verse that passed as didactic poetry during the century. At another time, when Horace's phrase Nil admirari as the source of happiness was under discussion, he maintained that as one advances in life one gets what is better than admiration — judgment, to estimate things at their true value. Here speaks the realist, the man of disciplined mind, who conceived the function of literary criticism as the exercise of the judicial powers, the emphasis being put here rather than on the faculties of appreciation, in estimating literary merit. Quintilian receives but brief notices, but sufficient to prove that he had been the subject of careful study. Johnson's reference to his reading at the University as being "all manly, Sir," seems an echo of the Roman's advice concerning the young orator's preparation, "Let his mode of reading, however, be, above all, manly." Quintilian's Rhetorick was one of the works recommended to the young student in Johnson's Preface to Dodsley's Preceptor, 1748. Of Gray, Johnson remarks that he has a kind of strutting dignity, and is tall by walking on tiptoe; we meet, says Dr. Parr of this passage, with a similar thought in Quintilian. One or two casual references to Quintilianone citing him as authority for assigning the Medea to Seneca, another quoting his criticism of Lucan occur in the Lives of But wholly aside from these isolated references to Quintilian in Johnson's works, it may safely be inferred that the Latin critic's careful analysis of the principles of composition and sober review of Greek and Latin literature would be of prime importance to a man of Johnson's classical reading and lively interest in the history of literary activity. A good many formal treatises on composition and the education of young men, such as Dodsley's Preceptor, 1748, to which Johnson contributed a preface, Lord Kames's Elements of Criticism, 1762, and Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric, 1783, appeared during the middle years of the century and comprised a good share of the critical writing that was being done at the time. After an age of extensive literary production, the results of this literary activity must be summarized, and tabulated, by a professional critic of power and authority. Such a critic Quintilian was for the Age of Augustus far more than Horace, who in truth never attempted any carefully formulated criticism, so that the work of the former remains the most complete body of applied criticism in the Latin language. And the critical principles which represent the intellectual activity of this great epoch of Roman history must have had a proportional influence upon the modern period, which accepted as its own the critical standards set by the other. Even more should this be true of the critic who performed this same service for his own age. Quintilian's writings must have become a part of Johnson's intellectual being. Other Latin writers who were not primarily critics, such as Cicero, Seneca, and the Younger Pliny, produced incidentally a considerable amount of literary criticism, and Johnson unquestionably knew them all. One Latin writer, Macrobius (400 A.D.), was a favorite of his youth, making an especial appeal to the insatiable young scholar for his curiously outof-the-way allusions and incursions into all sorts of anti quarian research.1 In like manner, on account of its quaint pedantry and heterogeneous classical learning, he showed a fondness for Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, declaring that it was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise.2 Intellectual curiosity, which led him to study Low Dutch in his old age, was one of his distinguishing traits.3 As the last important representative of this tradition of classical scholarship and of a criticism based on a judgment formed by an acquaintance with Greek and Latin literature, Johnson has a good deal of significance in literary history. His learning placed him beside the great modern masters of the Latin tongue, and enabled him to frequent without embarrassment the company of any professed Grecian and to bear his share in the discourse. His mastery of these two languages, while indeed very great, qualified him to become, not a critic of texts, but rather the man of great learning; more the scholarly critic than the critical scholar, the collator of manuscripts and reviser of texts. In the literary criticism of antiquity he found those general principles which he regarded as essential to the production of any art of permanent value. Aristotle and Horace and Quintilian, the great classical masters, gave utterance to those underlying ideas upon which the structure of classical literature had been built, and found favorable soil for growth in Johnson's mind and temper. Longinus had become familiar to eighteenth-century readers through contemporary criticism, Johnson sharing in the somewhat uncomprehending recognition of the power and scope of the imagination. Indeed, because his fame in the world of letters was so great, his observations on the subject of the true sublime formed a kind of bridge connecting the two great epochs of literature between which he stood, maintaining a stalwart defence of the 2. Ibid. II, 21. 3. Ibid. IV, 21. 1. Bos. 1, 59. first and yet reflecting much of the varied intellectual life of the second. But more of this in another chapter. Out of classical criticism grew the doctrines of neo-classicism, which crystallized and in turn, during the course of the seventeenth century in France, began to disintegrate under pressure of hostile forces. Johnson's relation to classic French criticism is therefore so important for our purpose as to require somewhat detailed attention. Indeed, so great is his indebtedness to the greatest of these critics, Boileau, that it will be necessary to devote a separate chapter to an extended comparison of the work of these two men, whom we may name as the representative men of letters in their respective countries during periods corresponding to each other in form and development. The early years of the seventeenth century saw the French people quite under the control of a strongly centralized government, and the social life of the nation easily and naturally concentrated itself within the narrow limits of the capital, whose intellectual activities were easily turned into accepted channels. The age of experiment and expansion, after new modes of thought had been discovered and tested, now passed into one of rigid contraction in all lines of activity. What men conceived to be the eternal principles of correct writing had by this time established their tyranny over men of letters, and remained all-powerful until near the end of the century, when some gentlemen of liberal views succeeded in partially breaking through the tremendous power of established authority to claim recognition for the expression of individual feeling. The literary dictator became a public character, able through an authority delegated to him by political power to issue pronouncements with impunity; for behind Malherbe stood Henry IV and the whole power of an absolute government, and back of the newly formed French Academy were Richelieu and Louis XIII, eager to control the literary output of the |