Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/164

160 and addition equally corrupt it, and such as it is, it is known already.

This is powerful argument, but perhaps it proves more than Johnson intended. If a subject can be too serious for poetry, then poetry, it would seem, must be confined to graceful fiction. If repentance is not at leisure for cadences and epithets, neither is love, nor any other passion. To this Johnson might perhaps have replied that the poet, who can retire from the presence