Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett | Page 7

more brilliant in imagination, seldom fairly pitted himself against
Johnson. He was a younger man, and held the sage in too much
reverence to encounter him often with any deliberate and determined
purpose of contest. He frequently touched the shield of the general
challenger, not with the sharp, but with the butt-end of his lance. He

said, on one occasion, when asked why he had not talked more in
Johnson's company, "Oh! it is enough for me to have rung the bell to
him!"
In all Johnson's works you see the traces of the triumphant
conversationalist--of one who has met with few to contradict, and
scarcely one to rival him. Hence the dogmatic strength and certainty,
and hence, too, the one-sidedness and limitation of much of his
writings. He does not "allow for the wind." He seems to anticipate no
reply, and to defy all criticism. One is tempted to quote the words of
Solomon, "He that is first in his own cause seemeth just, but his
neighbour cometh and searcheth him." No such searching seems ever to
have entered into Johnson's apprehensions. His sentences roll forth like
the laws of the Medes and Persians; his praise alights with the
authoritativeness of a sun-burst on a mountain; summit; and when he
blames, he seems to add, like an ancient doomster, the words, "I
pronounce for doom." With Burke, it was very different. Accustomed
to parliamentary debate in its vicissitudes and interchange--gifted, too,
with a prophetic insight into coming objections, which "cast their
shadows before," and with an almost diseased subtlety of thinking, he
binds up his answers to opponents with every thesis he propounds; and
his paragraphs sometimes remind you of the plan of generals in great
emergencies, putting foot soldiers on the same saddles with
cavalry--they seem to ride double.
This is not the place, nor have we room, to dilate on Johnson's obvious
merits and faults--his straight-forward sincerity--his strong manly
sense--the masterly force with which he grasps all his subjects--the
measured fervour of his style--the precision and vivacity of his shorter
sentences--the grand swell and sonorousness of his longer; on his
frequent monotony--his sesguipedalia verba--the "timorous meaning"
which sometimes lurks under his "boldest words;" or on the deep
chiaroscuro which discolours all his pictures of man, nature, society,
and human life. We have now only to speak of his poetry. That is,
unfortunately, small in amount, although its quality is so excellent as to
excite keen regret that he had not, as he once intended, written many
more pieces in the style of "London," and the "Vanity of Human

Wishes." In these, the model of his mere manner is Pope, although
coloured by Juvenal, his Latin original; but the matter and spirit are
intensely his own. In "London," satire seems swelling out of itself into
something stronger and statelier--it is the apotheosis of that kind of
poetry. You see in it a mind purer and sterner than Dryden's, or Pope's,
or Churchill's, or even Juvenal's; "doing well to be angry" with a
degenerate age, and a false, cowardly country, of which he deems
himself unworthy to be a citizen. If there is rather too much of the
saeva indignatio, which Swift speaks of as lacerating his heart, it is a
nobler and less selfish ire than his, and the language and verse which it
inspires are full of the very soul of dignity. In the "Vanity of Human
Wishes," he becomes one of those "hunters whose game is man" (to use
the language of Soame Jenyns, in that essay on "The Origin of Evil,"
which Johnson, in the _Literary Review_, so mercilessly lashed); and
from assailing premiers, parliaments, and the vices of London and
England, he passes, in a very solemn spirit, to expose the vain hopes,
wishes, and efforts of humanity at large. Parts of this poem are written
more in sorrow than in anger, and parts more in anger than in sorrow.
The portraits of Wolsey, Bacon, and Charles the Twelfth, are admirable
in their execution, and in their adaptation to the argument of the piece;
and the last paragraph, for truth and masculine energy is unsurpassed,
we believe, in the whole compass of ethical poetry. We are far from
assenting to the statement we once heard ably and elaborately
advocated, "that there had been no strong poetry in Britain since the
two satires of Johnson;" and we are still further from classing their
author with the Shakspeares, Miltons, Wordsworths, and Coleridges of
song; but we are nevertheless prepared, not only for the sake of these
two satires, of his prologue, and of some other pieces in verse, but on
account of the general spirit of much of his prose, to pronounce him
potentially, if not actually, a great poet.

JOHNSON'S POEMS.
LONDON:
A POEM IN IMITATION