ainst Johnson. Alike to the new
Liberalism ever more and more drenched in sentiment, to the new
Conservatism ever more and more looking for a base in history, to
Romanticism in literature with its stir, colour and emotion, to science
with its new studies and new methods, the works of Johnson almost
inevitably appeared as the dry bones of a dead age. He had laughed at
the Romans: and behold the Romans had played a great part in the
greatest of Revolutions. He had laughed at "noble prospects" and
behold the world was gone after them, and his, "Who _can_ like the
Highlands?" was drowned in the poetry of Scott and Byron, and made
{175} to appear narrow and vulgar in the presence of Wordsworth. Only
in one field did any great change take place likely to be favourable to
Johnson's influence. The religious and ecclesiastical revival which
was so conspicuous in England during the first half of the nineteenth
century was naturally inclined to exalt Johnson as the only strong
Churchman, and almost the only definite Christian among the great
writers of the eighteenth century. The fact, too, that the most
conspicuous centre of the revival was Oxford, where Johnson's name had
always been affectionately remembered, helped to send its votaries back
to him. But this alliance could not be more than partial. The Oxford
Movement soon degenerated into Mediaevalism and Ritualism, and no man
was less fitted than Johnson to be the prophet of either. The genius
of common sense was the very last leader their devotees could wish for.
And as the revival became increasingly a reaction, relying more and
more on supposed precedent and less on the essential reason of things,
it inevitably got further away from Johnson who cared everything for
reason and nothing at all for dubious history.

But it was not merely the changes that came over the general mind of
the nation that went against Johnson; it was still more the revolution
in his own special branch of literature. {176} He was the last great
English critic who treated poets, not as great men to be under stood,
but as school-boys to be corrected. He still applied, as the French
have always done, a preordained standard to the work he was discussing,
and declared it correct or not according to that test. The new
criticism inaugurated by Coleridge aimed at interpretation rather than
at magisterial regulation; and no one will now revert to the old. We
never now find an English critic writi