Note 155 — THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D.

See ante, i. 427, ii. 124, and iv. 20, for Johnson's condemnation of blank verse. This condemnations was not universal. Of Dryden, he wrote (Works, vii. 249):—'He made rhyming tragedies, till, by the prevalence of manifest propriety, he seems to have grown ashamed of making them any longer.' His own Irene is in blank verse; though Macaulay justly remarks of it:—'He had not the slightest notion of what blank verse should be.' (Macaulay's Writings and Speeches, ed. 1871, p. 380.) Of Thomson's Seasons, he says (Works, vii. 377):—'His is one of the works in which blank verse seems properly used.' Of Young's Night Thoughts:—'This is one of the few poems in which blank verse could not be changed for rhyme but with disadvantage.' Ib. p. 460. Of Milton himself, he writes:—'Whatever be the advantages of rhyme, I cannot prevail on myself to wish that Milton had been a rhymer; for I cannot wish his work to be other than it is; yet, like other heroes, he is to be admired rather than imitated.' Ib. vii. 142. How much he felt the power of Milton's blank verse is shewn by his Rambler, No. 90, where, after stating that 'the noblest and most majestick pauses which our versification admits are upon the fourth and sixth syllables,' he adds:—' Some passages [in Milton] which conclude at this stop [the sixth syllable] I could never read without some strong emotions of delight or admiration.' 'If,' he continues, 'the poetry of Milton be examined with regard to the pauses and flow of his verses into each other, it will appear that he has performed all that our language would admit.' Cowper was so indignant at Johnson's criticism of Milton's blank verse that he wrote:—'Oh! I could thresh his old jacket till I made his pension jingle in his pocket.' Southey's Cowper, iii. 315.