ause it synthesizes the
conflicting attitudes towards Johnson which prevailed immediately
after his death. Courtenay, like many others, saw in Johnson a
powerful mixture of great virtues and vices; and though he is not
impartial, he effects, through his honesty, an admirable balance
between Johnson's strengths and weaknesses. The final forty lines of
the _Review_ constitute one of the most balanced of all contemporary
tributes to Johnson as a human being.

For the most part, the commendatory section of the poem is an
unsystematic tracing of Johnson's moral and literary merits.
Courtenay's rhapsodizing on the _Dictionary_, the _Rambler_, and the
_Lives of the Poets_ is conventional. Clearly, he admired the wide
scope of Johnson's learning and his ability to communicate his
knowledge of men and manners in his writings. But his admiration
occasionally betrays him; for instance, in describing the "brilliant
school" through which Johnson's influence was perpetuated, he
overestimated the extent to which Reynolds, Malone, Burney, Jones,
Goldsmith, Steevens, Hawkesworth, and Boswell were indebted to
Johnson's writings.[15] Usually, however, he was on firmer ground.
Courtenay was the only writer before Boswell to praise Johnson's Latin
verse, a body of poetry virtually ignored by other contemporary
biographers and memorialists.[16] Furthermore, he employs footnotes
skillfully. Though they impede the progress of the poem, they do
support poetic statement with factual evidence and explain and amplify
certain points made in the verses.

The clearest evidence for the care which Courtenay took with the
_Review_ can be found upon examination of his revisions. He made few
substantial changes in the second edition, but the third edition
contains important revisions. Courtenay added ten lines and five
footnotes in the final version, and lightened some of the scorn in the
first portion by substituting weaker phrases for stronger ones. He
also enclosed lines seven through twenty in quotation marks to make it
appear that the sentiment expressed therein was not his own, but a
judgment he had heard elsewhere.

But the most significant revisions are concerned with organization. By
transferring segments of certain verse paragraphs to others, he
achieves a more unified portrait of Johnson. By means of such
revision, he forms his general evaluation of Johnson's writing into
one unit and his comments on individual works into another, where
be