ir natural order, and are
mellifluous beyond those of almost any other verse writer. If the
Passions are not described with splendour, there is no such thing as
splendour. If the beauties which he sought and attained are unnatural
and extravagant, then the tests of correctness and good taste which have
been hitherto set up must be abandoned.

This severe criticism is the more extraordinary because Johnson
professed a warm personal friendship for Collins; he professes
admiration of his talents, learning, and taste, as well as of his
disposition and heart, and speaks of his afflicting ill health with a
passionate tenderness which has seldom been equalled in beauty, pathos,
and force of language. That he could love him personally with such
fondness, but be blind to his splendid and unrivaled genius, is utterly
beyond my power to account for. Who can say that Johnson wanted taste
when we read his sublime and acute criticisms on Milton, Dryden, and
Pope? Was it that he roused all the faculties of his judgment when he
spoke of these great men of past times; yet, that when he descended to
his contemporaries, he indulged his feelings rather than his intellect,
and suffered himself to be overcome by the evil passions of envy and
contempt? His natural taste was, probably, not the best; when his
criticisms were perfect he had tasked his intellect rather than his
feelings. He was a man of general wisdom and undoubted genius, but not a
very nice scholar, and he prided himself upon his every-day sense, his
practical knowledge, rather than those visionary musings which he
thought a dangerous indulgence of imagination. He could not put the
compositions of Collins among the mere curiosities of literature, but he
permitted himself to depreciate habits of mental excursion which he had
not himself cultivated.

It was not till more than twenty years after Collins's death that his
Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands was recovered. The two Wartons
had seen it, and spoke highly of it to Johnson and others. About 1781,
or 1782, a copy was found among the papers of Dr. Carlysle, with a chasm
of two or three stanzas. The public deemed it equal to the expectations
which had been raised of it; for my part I will confess that I was
always deeply disappointed at it. There are in it occasional traces of
Collins's genius and several good lines--but none grand--none of that
felicitous flow and inspired vigour which mark the Ode to the Passions
a