e are informed that the accent in
blank verse ought properly to rest upon every second syllable throughout
the whole line. A little variety must, he admits, be allowed to avoid
satiety; but all lines which do not go in the steady jog-trot of
alternate beats as regularly as the piston of a steam engine, are more
or less defective. This simple-minded system naturally makes wild work
with the poetry of the 'mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies.' Milton's
harsh cadences are indeed excused on the odd ground that he who was
'vindicating the ways of God to man' might have been condemned for
'lavishing much of his attention upon syllables and sounds.' Moreover,
the poor man did his best by introducing sounding proper names, even
when they 'added little music to his poem:' an example of this feeble,
though well-meant expedient, being the passage about the moon, which--

The Tuscan artist views,
At evening, from the top of Fiesole
Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, &c.

This profanity passed at the time for orthodoxy. But the misfortune was,
that Johnson, unhesitatingly subscribing to the rules of Queen Anne's
critics, is always instinctively feeling after the grander effects of
the old school. Nature prompts him to the stateliness of Milton, whilst
Art orders him to deal out long and short syllables alternately, and to
make them up in parcels of ten, and then tie the parcels together in
pairs by the help of a rhyme. The natural utterance of a man of strong
perceptions, but of unwieldy intellect, of a melancholy temperament, and
capable of very deep, but not vivacious emotions, would be in stately
and elaborate phrases. His style was not more distinctly a work of art
than the style of Browne or Milton, but, unluckily, it was a work of bad
art. He had the misfortune, not so rare as it may sound, to be born in
the wrong century; and is, therefore, a giant in fetters; the amplitude
of stride is still there, but it is checked into mechanical regularity.
A similar phenomenon is observable in other writers of the time. The
blank verse of Young, for example, is generally set to Pope's tune with
the omission of the rhymes, whilst Thomson, revolting more or less
consciously against the canons of his time, too often falls into mere
pompous mouthing. Shaftesbury, in the previous generation, trying to
write poetical prose, becomes as pedantic as Johnson, though in a
different style; and Gibbon's mannerism is a fa