rn criticism towards the sort of
qualities--the easy, indolent power, the searching sense of actuality,
the combined command of sanity and paradox, the immovable independence
of thought--which went to the making of the _Lives of the Poets_. There
is only, perhaps, one flaw in the analogy: that, in this particular
instance, the mountain was able to crack nuts a great deal better than
any squirrel that ever lived.

That the _Lives_ continue to be read, admired, and edited, is in itself
a high proof of the eminence of Johnson's intellect; because, as serious
criticism, they can hardly appear to the modern reader to be very far
removed from the futile. Johnson's aesthetic judgments are almost
invariably subtle, or solid, or bold; they have always some good quality
to recommend them--except one: they are never right. That is an
unfortunate deficiency; but no one can doubt that Johnson has made up
for it, and that his wit has saved all. He has managed to be wrong so
cleverly, that nobody minds. When Gray, for instance, points the moral
to his poem on Walpole's cat with a reminder to the fair that all that
glisters is not gold, Johnson remarks that this is 'of no relation to
the purpose; if _what glistered_ had been _gold_, the cat would not have
gone into the water; and, if she had, would not less have been drowned.'
Could anything be more ingenious, or more neatly put, or more obviously
true? But then, to use Johnson's own phrase, could anything be of less
'relation to the purpose'? It is his wit--and we are speaking, of
course, of wit in its widest sense--that has sanctified Johnson's
peversities and errors, that has embalmed them for ever, and that has
put his book, with all its mass of antiquated doctrine, beyond the reach
of time.

For it is not only in particular details that Johnson's criticism fails
to convince us; his entire point of view is patently out of date. Our
judgments differ from his, not only because our tastes are different,
but because our whole method of judging has changed. Thus, to the
historian of letters, the _Lives_ have a special interest, for they
afford a standing example of a great dead tradition--a tradition whose
characteristics throw more than one curious light upon the literary
feelings and ways which have become habitual to ourselves. Perhaps the
most striking difference between the critical methods of the eighteenth
century and those of the present day, is the difference in sympathy. The