Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/163

Rh can be produced by fixed resolve and hard labour, a great work of imagination cannot.

Johnson was a much more liberal judge of poetry than Boileau and the critics of the French school. Yet Boileau, he says, ‘will be seldom found mistaken,’ and he agrees with Boileau in his opinion of devotional poetry. He treats this matter at large in the essay on Waller. His argument, which is closely reasoned and eloquently expressed, must be quoted in full:

Poetry pleases by exhibiting an idea more grateful to the mind than things themselves afford. This effect proceeds from the display of those parts of nature which attract, and the concealment of those which repel, the imagination: but religion must be shewn as it is;