ss of
Shakespeare: if it has since become so no small share of that result
may be ascribed to Johnson. We forget that, because, as he said of
Dryden, it is the fate of a critic who convinces to be lost in the
prevalence of his own discovery. Never certainly has the central
praise of Shakespeare, as the master of truth and universality, been
better set forth than by Johnson. Our ears are delighted, our powers
of admiration quickened, our reasons convinced, as we read the
succession of luminous and eloquent paragraphs in which he tries
Shakespeare by the tests of time, of nature, of universality, and finds
him supreme in all. Nor did Johnson ever write anything richer in
characteristic and memorable sentences, fit to be quoted and thought
over by themselves. "Nothing can please many and please long but just
representations of general nature." "Shakespeare always makes nature
predominant over accident. . . . His story requires Romans but he
thinks only on men"; "there is a kind of intellectual remoteness
necessary for the comprehension of any great work"; "nature (_i. e._
genius, what a man inherits at birth) {215} gives no man knowledge";
"upon the whole all pleasure consists in variety"; "love has no great
influence upon the sum of life." It is startling to find Johnson
anticipating Mr. Bernard Shaw, and more startling still to be told in a
study of the author of _Romeo and Juliet_ that love "has little
operation in the drama of a poet who caught his ideas from the living
world." But when we put ourselves in Johnson's position and compare
Shakespeare with the reigning dramatists of France and England, we
shall see that it is in fact not the least striking thing about
Shakespeare that he has so many plays in which the love interest
scarcely appears.

The service Johnson rendered to the study of Shakespeare is, however,
by no means confined to these general considerations. No man did more,
perhaps, to call criticism back from paths that led to nowhere, or to
suggest directions in which discoveries might be made. The most marked
contrast between him and earlier critics is his caution about altering
the received text. He first stemmed the tide of rash emendation, and
the ebb which began with him has continued ever since. The case for
moderation in this respect has never been better stated than in his
words: "It has been my settled principle that the reading of {216} the
ancient books is probably true, and the