26.
[150] Johnson's Works, vii. 105.
[151] 'His political notions were those of an acrimonious and surly republican.' Ib. p. 116.
[152] 'What we know of Milton's character in domestick relations is, that he was severe and arbitrary.' Ib. p. 116.
[153] 'His theological opinions are said to have been first, Calvinistical; and afterwards, perhaps when he began to hate the Presbyterians, to have tended towards Arminianism.... He appears to have been untainted by any heretical peculiarity of opinion.' Ib. p. 115.
[154] Mr. Malone things it is rather a proof that he felt nothing of those cheerful sensations which he has described: that on these topicks it is the poet, and not the man, that writes. BOSWELL.
[155] See ante, i. 427, ii. 124, and iv. 20, for Johnson's condemnation of blank verse. This condemnations was not universal. Of Dryden, he wrote (Works, vii. 249):--'He made rhyming tragedies, till, by the prevalence of manifest propriety, he seems to have grown ashamed of making them any longer.' His own Irene is in blank verse; though Macaulay justly remarks of it:--'He had not the slightest notion of what blank verse should be.' (Macaulay's Writings and Speeches, ed. 1871, p. 380.) Of Thomson's Seasons, he says (Works, vii. 377):--'His is one of the works in which blank verse seems properly used.' Of Young's Night Thoughts:--'This is one of the few poems in which blank verse could not be changed for rhyme but with disadvantage.' Ib. p. 460. Of Milton himself, he writes:--'Whatever be the advantages of rhyme, I cannot prevail on myself to wish that Milton had been a rhymer; for I cannot wish his work to be other than it is; yet, like other heroes, he is to be admired rather than imitated.' Ib. vii. 142. How much he felt the power of Milton's blank verse is shewn by his Rambler, No. 90, where, after stating that 'the noblest and most majestick pauses which our versification admits are upon the fourth and sixth syllables,' he adds:--' Some passages [in Milton] which conclude at this stop [the sixth syllable] I could never read without some strong emotions of delight or admiration.' 'If,' he continues, 'the poetry of Milton be examined with regard to the pauses and flow of his verses into each other, it will appear that he has performed all that our language would admit.' Cowper was so indignant at Johnson's criticism of Milton's blank verse that he wrote:--'Oh! I could thresh his old jacket till I made his pension jingle in his pocket.' Southey's Cowper, iii. 315.
[156] One of the most natural instances of the effect of blank verse occurred to the late Earl of Hopeton. His Lordship observed one of his shepherds poring in the fields upon Milton's Paradise Lost; and having asked him what book it was, the man answered, 'An't please your Lordship, this is a very odd sort of an authour: he would fain rhyme, but cannot get at it.' BOSWELL. 'The variety of pauses, so much boasted by the lovers of blank verse, changes the measures of an English poet to the periods of a declaimer; and there are only a few skilful and happy readers of Milton, who enable their audience to perceive where the lines end or begin. "Blank verse," said an ingenious critick, "seems to be verse only to the eye."' Johnson's Works, vii. 141. In the Life of Roscommon (ib. p. 171), he says:--'A poem frigidly didactick, without rhyme, is so near to prose, that the reader only scorns it for pretending to be verse.'
[157] Mr. Locke. Often mentioned in Mme. D'Arblay's Diary.
[158] See vol. in. page 71. BOSWELL.
[159] It is scarcely a defence. Whatever it was, he thus ends it:-'It is natural to hope, that a comprehensive is likewise an elevated soul, and that whoever is wise is also honest. I am willing to believe that Dryden, having employed his mind, active as it was, upon different studies, and filled it, capacious as it was, with other materials, came unprovided to the controversy, and wanted rather skill to discover the right than virtue to maintain it. But inquiries into the heart are not for man; we must now leave him to his judge.' Works, vii. 279.
[160] In the original fright. The Hind and the Panther, i. 79.
[161] In this quotation two passages are joined. Works, vii. 339, 340.
[162] 'The deep and pathetic morality of the Vanity of Human Wishes' says Sir Walter Scott, 'has often extracted tears from those whose eyes wander dry over the pages of professed sentimentality.' CROKER. It. drew tears from Johnson himself. 'When,' says Mrs. Piozzi (Anec. p. 50), 'he read his own satire, in which the life of a scholar is painted, he burst into a passion of tears. The family and Mr. Scott only were present, who, in a jocose way, clapped him on the back, and said:--"What's all this, my dear Sir? Why you, and I, and Hercules, you know, were all troubled with melancholy." He was a very large man, and made out the triumvirate with Johnson and Hercules comically enough. The Doctor was so delighted at his odd sally, that he suddenly embraced him, and the subject was immediately changed.'
[163] In Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature, ed.