hers have scarcely been superseded, though much fuller
information has since come to light; and they are all well worth
reading. But the criticism, like the politics, is woefully out of date.
Johnson's division between the shams and the realities deserves all
respect in both cases, but in both cases he puts many things on the
wrong side of the dividing line. His hearty contempt for sham pastorals
and sham love-poetry will be probably shared by modern readers. 'Who
will hear of sheep and goats and myrtle bowers and purling rivulets
through five acts? Such scenes please barbarians in the dawn of
literature, and children in the dawn of life, but will be for the most
part thrown away as men grow wise and nations grow learned.' But
elsewhere he blunders into terrible misapprehensions. Where he errs by
simply repeating the accepted rules of the Pope school, he for once
talks mere second-hand nonsense. But his independent judgments are
interesting even when erroneous. His unlucky assault upon 'Lycidas,'
already noticed, is generally dismissed with a pitying shrug of the
shoulders. 'Among the flocks and copses and flowers appear the heathen
deities; Jove and Phoebus, Neptune and AEolus, with a long train of
mythological imagery, such as a college easily supplies. Nothing can
less display knowledge, or less exercise invention, than to tell how a
shepherd has lost his companion, and must now feed his flocks alone; how
one god asks another god what has become of Lycidas, and how neither god
can tell. He who thus grieves can excite no sympathy; he who thus
praises will confer no honour.'

Of course every tyro in criticism has his answer ready; he can discourse
about the aesthetic tendencies of the _Renaissance_ period, and explain
the necessity of placing one's self at a writer's point of view, and
entering into the spirit of the time. He will add, perhaps, that
'Lycidas' is a test of poetical feeling, and that he who does not
appreciate its exquisite melody has no music in his soul. The same
writer who will tell us all this, and doubtless with perfect truth,
would probably have adopted Pope or Johnson's theory with equal
confidence if he had lived in the last century. 'Lycidas' repelled
Johnson by incongruities, which, from his point of view, were certainly
offensive. Most modern readers, I will venture to suggest, feel the same
annoyances, though they have not the courage to avow them freely. If
poetry is to be judged exclusively