extraordinary—that his name is akin to a myth, and that he wrote no plays at all! Every new aspirant in this struggle for distinction aims to push his predecessor from his stool. Hero-worship sinks to nothing compared with this interminable author-worship. We are not permitted for a week together to think for ourselves, but so crammed by successive volumes as to have no power of literary digestion left. And, however worthy of all honour the object may be, we become weary of such busy, yet useless or trifling adorers, and are tempted to exclaim in an agony of impatience—when is this clatter of criticism to end?
Men of talents can often throw interest into even a hackneyed subject; and thus Dr. Johnson did not disdain to participate in the work of inferior writers. But he looked at the poet as a great whole. He felt his vastness and saw his weaknesses, but would not place him upon the literary dissecting table to be sliced into a thing of words, syllables, or phrases, for the gratification of the carrion critics around him. Taking the range of a capacious and original mind, he has said in that preface, which will endure as long as the volumes it introduced, all that one great man can say in honour of another still greater. Inferior artists were left to hunt up smaller matters. Research, such as the occasion required—long, laborious, minute, often irksome—defied his eyes, his patience, and his time of life.
Upon his colleague in the edition, Mr. George Steevens, devolved this portion of the duty. As a critic, he had several qualifications—a scholar, a wit, of ready perceptions, an appetite for work, and
