slight illustration. No modern monarch can be much exalted by hearing that, as Hercules had his club, he has his navy.’ Even Pope, though he does not very often enter what Johnson calls ‘the dark and dismal regions of mythology,’ yet never enters them without provoking the censure of the critic. Addison, in The Campaign, had derided mythological aids to a feeble poem:
When actions unadorn’d are faint and weak,
Cities and countries must be taught to speak.
Gods may descend in factions from the skies,
And rivers from their oozy beds arise.
‘It is therefore strange,’ says Johnson, speaking of Windsor Forest, ‘that Pope should adopt a fiction not only unnatural but lately censured. The story of Lodona is told with sweetness; but a new metamorphosis is a ready and puerile expedient: nothing is easier than to tell how a flower was once a blooming virgin, or a rock an obdurate tyrant.’
These protests, which recur in many forms, and on many occasions, are indicative of Johnson’s attitude. The men of the Renaissance had been captured by the beauty of the classical mythology; they could not revive it as a system of thought, but they felt the charm of the dream from which the world had been awakened, and they ‘cried to sleep again.’ But the aroused imagination would not be denied its full play upon life, and these ancient forms and fables fell gradually out of esteem. They became conventions and trappings of poetry rather than a mode of poetic insight. The history of English poetry from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century is the history of their decline. The Elizabethans borrowed from Ovid and Virgil; Dryden did more than that; he put himself to school to the Latin poets, and applied
