Note 641 — Chapter I · FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON. (continued 2)

For instance, here is one which I have hunted for years—Essay on the New Species of Writing founded by Fielding, with a word or two on Modern Criticism (London? 1751). The better-known Canons of Criticism of Thomas Edwards (4th ed., London, 1750) may serve as a specimen of another kind. It is an attack on Warburton’s Shakespeare, uncommonly shrewd in all senses of the word, but, as Johnson (Boswell, Globe ed., p. 87 note) justly enough said, of the gad-fly kind mainly. A curious little book, which I do not remember to have seen cited anywhere, is the Essay upon Poetry and Painting of Charles Lamotte (Dudlin (sic), 1742). La Motte, who was an F.S.A., a D.D., and chaplain to the Duke of Montagu, and who has the still rarer honour of not appearing in the Dict. Nat. Biog., never, I think, refers to his namesake, but quotes Voltaire and Du Bos frequently. He is very anxious for “propriety” in all senses, and seems a little more interested in Painting than in Poetry. As to the latter, he is a good example of the devouring appetite for sense and fact which had seized on the critics of this time (save a few rebels) throughout Europe. The improbabilities of Tasso and of “Camoenus, the Homer and Virgil of the Portuguese,” afflict him more, because they amuse him less, than they do in Voltaire’s own case, and to any liberty with real or supposed history he is simply Rhadamanthine. “That which jars with probability—that which shocks Sense and Reason—can never be excused in Poetry.” Mrs Barbauld and The Ancient Mariner sixty years before date!