ceremonial procession of Triton, Camus, and St. Peter an example of Milton’s imagination at its best? In short, does the beauty and wonder of the poem derive from the allegorical scheme to which Johnson objected? But I am almost frightened at my own temerity, and must be content to leave the question unanswered.
There were certain of the English poets whom Johnson, it is plain, disliked, even while he admired their work. His account of them is inevitably tinged by this dislike; yet his native generosity and justice never shine out more brightly than in the praises that he gives them. He disliked Milton; and no one has ever written a more whole-hearted eulogy of Paradise Lost. Unless I am deceived, he disliked many things in the character of Addison, yet any one who would praise Addison nobly and truly will find himself compelled to echo Johnson’s praises. A more profound difference of feeling separated him from Swift. He excuses himself from writing a fuller account of Swift’s life, on the ground that the task had already been performed by Dr. Hawkesworth. But Hawkesworth’s Life is a mere piece of book-making, and it seems likely that Johnson was glad to be saved from a duty that had no attractions for him. The contrast between himself and Swift may be best expressed in their own words: ‘I heartily hate and detest that animal called man,’ said Swift, ‘although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.’ Johnson’s attitude was the reverse of this. He used to say that the world was well constructed, but that the particular people disgraced the elegance and beauty of the general fabric. Yet it was he, not the hearty lover of ‘John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth,’ who had the deeper sense of the tie that binds man to man. That men should dare to
