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 480 Essay on

��to Gray, when he condemns the apostrophe, in which Father Thames is desired to tell who drives the hoop, or tosses the ball, and then adds, that Father Thames had no better means of knowing than himself; when he compares the abrupt beginning of the first stanza of the bard to the ballad of JOHNNY ARMSTRONG, 'Is there ever a man in all Scotland* ;' there are, perhaps, few friends of Johnson, who would not wish to blot out both the passages. It may be questioned whether the remarks on Pope's Essay on Man can be received without great caution. It has been already mentioned 2, that Crousaz, a professor in Switzerland, eminent for his Treatise of Logic, started up a professed enemy to that poem. Johnson says, 'his mind was one of those, in which philosophy and piety are happily united. He looked with distrust upon all metaphysical systems of theology, and was persuaded, that the positions of Pope were intended to draw mankind away from Revelation, and to represent the whole course of things as a necessary concatenation of indissoluble fatality 3 .' This is not the place for a controversy about the Leibnitzian system. Warburton, with all the powers of his large and comprehensive mind, published a Vindication of Pope ; and yet Johnson says, that ' in many passages a religious eye may easily discover This sentence is severe, and, perhaps, dogmatical. Crousaz wrote an Examen of THE ESSAY ON MAN, and afterwards a Commentary on every remarkable passage ; and though it now appears that Mrs. Elizabeth Carter translated the foreign Critic 5, yet it is certain that Johnson encouraged the work, and, perhaps, imbibed those early prejudices which adhered to him to the end of his life. He shuddered at the idea of irreligion. Hence we are told in the Life of Pope, 'Never were penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily

is not soft. His verses always roll is abridged and altered.

but they seldom flow.' Works, viii. 4 Ib. p. 288.

22. 5 Ante, p. 374. Dryden spells the

1 Life, i. 403 ; Works, viii. 483, 486. word critick ; Addison, critique ;

2 Ante, p. 374. Pope, critiqiie and critick. John-

3 Works, viii. 287. The quotation son's Dictionary.

disguised

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