e Agincourt was rejected because there were men in it; and the
description of Dover Cliff because the boats and the crows "impede yon
fall." They do "not impress your mind at once with the horrible idea of
immense height. The impression is divided; you pass on by computation
from one stage of the tremendous space to another."

Probably most people will think that the passage in question deserves a
very slight fraction of the praise bestowed upon it; but the criticism,
like most of Johnson's, has a meaning which might be worth examining
abstractedly from the special application which shocks the idolaters of
Shakspeare. Presently the party discussed Mrs. Montagu, whose Essay upon
Shakspeare had made some noise. Johnson had a respect for her, caused in
great measure by a sense of her liberality to his friend Miss Williams,
of whom more must be said hereafter. He paid her some tremendous
compliments, observing that some China plates which had belonged to
Queen Elizabeth and to her, had no reason to be ashamed of a possessor
so little inferior to the first. But he had his usual professional
contempt for her amateur performances in literature. Her defence of
Shakspeare against Voltaire did her honour, he admitted, but it would do
nobody else honour. "No, sir, there is no real criticism in it: none
showing the beauty of thought, as formed on the workings of the human
heart." Mrs. Montagu was reported once to have complimented a modern
tragedian, probably Jephson, by saying, "I tremble for Shakspeare."
"When Shakspeare," said Johnson, "has got Jephson for his rival and Mrs.
Montagu for his defender, he is in a poor state indeed." The
conversation went on to a recently published book, _Kames's Elements of
Criticism_, which Johnson praised, whilst Goldsmith said more truly, "It
is easier to write that book than to read it." Johnson went on to speak
of other critics. "There is no great merit," he said, "in telling how
many plays have ghosts in them, and how this ghost is better than that.
You must show how terror is impressed on the human heart. In the
description of night in _Macbeth_ the beetle and the bat detract from
the general idea of darkness--inspissated gloom."

After Boswell's marriage he disappeared for some time from London, and
his correspondence with Johnson dropped, as he says, without coldness,
from pure procrastination. He did not return to London till 1772. In the
spring of that and the following year he renewed