...But for Johnson the imitative function of literature went side by side with its didactic function. "The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing." It seems at times as though Johnson's point is that poetry should instruct the reader in the facts...

...and Giuseppe Giarrizzo, Edward Gibbon e la cultura Europea del settecento (Naples, 1954), passim. 32. "The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing." (Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare, in Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, intro. Bertrand...

...his subject, shews plainly, that he has seen with his own eyes . . . '42 But, Johnson also claims, 'The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.'4' It is to this function of poetry, and to the demonstrated effect of a poem upon its audience,...

...test of experience to the standard criticism of the incorrectness of Shakespeare's 'mingled drama': 'That this is a practice contrary to the rules of...is always an appeal open from criticism to nature' (Preface to Shakespeare, Yale edn, VII, p. 67). Edmund Burke, too, accounted for our 'ideas' of the...

...of the design, sometimes produce seriousness and sorrow, and sometimes levity and laughter <Hu/26o>. That this is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism...is always an appeal open from criticism to nature 21 See also Rambler 1 56. -4 Events. <1:Lp/187>. The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry...

...admonition in "Preface to Shakespeare" states the instrumentalist precept in its most concise form: "The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing" (73). Even though the pragmatic tradition in England was more or less eclipsed by the advent of Romanticism...

...serious and ludicrous2 characters,3 and, in the successive evolutions of the design, sometimes produce seriousness and sorrow, and sometimes levity and laughter....is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.4 That the mingled drama may convey all the instruction of tragedy or comedy cannot be denied,...

...in the act of asserting both its inability to absorb this practice and its ability to do just that: "That this is a practice contrary to the rules of...is always an appeal open from criticism to nature" (15). Nor can Shakespeare's text be finalized for such a necessarily inadequate criticism, since Johnson's...

...has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind but in one composition.... That this is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism...always an appeal open from criticism to nature... Tragedy was not in those times a poem of more general dignity or elevation than comedy; it required...

...good; aesthetics, the beautiful; and pragmatics, the useful. Samuel Johnson (1709-84) believed that "the end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing," which is the feature that distinguishes belles lettres from other kinds of writing. As the century...