Johnson decided literary questions like a lawyer, not like a legislator.
He never examined foundations where a point was already ruled. His whole
code of criticism rested on pure assumption, for which he sometimes gave
a precedent or authority, but rarely troubled himself to give a reason
drawn from the nature of things. He judged of all works of the
imagination by the standard established among his own contemporaries.
Though he allowed Homer to have been a greater man than Virgil, he seems
to have thought the Æneid to have been a greater poem than the Iliad.
Indeed, he well might have thought so; for he preferred Pope’s _Iliad_
to Homer’s. He pronounced that after Hoole’s translation of _Tasso_,
Fairfax’s would hardly be reprinted. He could see no merit in our fine
old English ballads, and always spoke with the most provoking contempt
of Dr. Percy’s fondness for them.
Of all the great original works which appeared during his time,
Richardson’s novels alone excited his admiration. He could see little or
no merit in _Tom Jones_, in _Gulliver’s Travels_, or in _Tristram
Shandy_. To Thomson’s _Castle of Indolence_ he vouchsafed only a line of
cold commendation--of commendation much colder than what he has bestowed
on _The Creation_ of that portentous bore, Sir Richard Blackmore. Gray
was, in his dialect, a barren rascal. Churchill was a blockhead. The
contempt which he felt for Macpherson was, indeed, just; but it was, we
suspect, just by chance. He criticized Pope’s epitaphs excellently. But
his observations on Shakspeare’s plays, and Milton’s poems, seem to us
as wretched as if they had been written by Rymer himself, whom we take
to have been the worst critic that ever lived.