lton in such phrases
as "the vast abrupt," "the palpable obscure," "the void immense," "the
wasteful deep," where, by the use of an adjective in place of a
substantive, the danger of a definite and inadequate conception is
avoided.

Milton, therefore, describes the concrete, the specific, the individual,
using general and abstract terms for the sake of the dignity and scope
that they lend. The best of our Romantic poets follow the opposite
course: they are much concerned with abstract conceptions and general
truths, but they bring them home by the employment of concrete and
specific terms, and figures so familiar that they cannot easily avoid
grotesque associations. These grotesque associations, however trivial,
are the delight of humour: Alexander's dust will stop a beer-barrel;
divine ambition exposes

what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell.

The comments made by Johnson on a certain well-known passage in _Macbeth_
are an excellent example of the objections urged against the Romantic
method--a method whereby, says Johnson, poetry is "debased by mean
expressions." He takes for text the invocation of Night by Lady Macbeth--

Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, "Hold, hold!"

Johnson's criticisms, which take up a whole paper in _The Rambler_, may
be conveniently stated in summary. The epithet _dun_, he says, is "an
epithet now seldom heard but in the stable, and _dun_ night may come and
go without any other notice but contempt." A _knife_, again, is "an
instrument used by butchers and cooks in the meanest employments; we do
not immediately conceive that any crime of importance is to be committed
with a _knife_." In the third place, although to wish to elude the eye of
Providence is "the utmost extravagance of determined wickedness," yet
even this great conception is debased by two unfortunate words when the
avengers of guilt are made to _peep_ through a _blanket_.

It is easy, in this case at least, to defend Shakespeare. There is no
need to make much of the fact that Johnson attributes the speech to
Macbeth. The essence of the crime is that it is the treacherous and
cowardly crime of an assassin, committed on a guest while he sleeps.
Implements of war are out of place here; it is the ve