Johnson was not in the least likely to fall into that solemn error which supposes that the populace, because they read few books, are not able to recognize the play of fancy.
Sometimes he takes an almost mischievous delight in judging poetical situations by the standard of common sense and daily practice. For instance, he calls Henry and Emma, Prior’s adaptation of The Nut-brown Maid, ‘a dull and tedious dialogue, which excites neither esteem for the man, nor tenderness for the woman. The example of Emma, who resolves to follow an outlawed murderer wherever fear and guilt shall drive him, deserves no imitation; and the experiment by which Henry tries the lady’s constancy is such as must end either in infamy to her, or in disappointment to himself.’ These Cowper calls ‘his old fusty-rusty remarks upon Henry and Emma,’ yet adds: ‘I agree with him, that morally considered both the knight and his lady are bad characters, and that each exhibits an example which ought not to be followed. The man dissembles in a way that would have justified the woman had she renounced him; and the woman resolves to follow him at the expense of delicacy, propriety, and even modesty itself. But when the critic calls it a dull dialogue, who but a critic will believe him?’ These two verdicts are not much at odds; where they differ, modern opinion would probably support Johnson. Prior’s poem is not only dull, but absurd. The wonderful simplicity and directness of the original Nut-brown Maid is exchanged for the stilted nonsense of a blue-stocking rhetorician, and, to make her language yet more incredible, a realistic plot is substituted for the delightfully playful setting of the fifteenth-century poem. In the original the man
