...century for their defective poetry and criticism of poetry. True, Johnson is capable of saying : ' Surely no man could have fancied that he read Lycidas with pleasure had he not known the author ! ' True, he is capable of maintaining ' that the description of the temple in Congreve's...

...work today. In one of his volcanic outbursts of critical dogmatism Johnson says, most unjustly, that no man could have fancied that he read Lycidas with pleasure had he not known the author. It would be far less unjust, and probably a close approximation to the truth, to say that...

...every line he wrote. In one of his outbursts of dogmatic criticism Johnson says, most unjustly, that no man could have fancied that he read Lycidas with pleasure had he not known the author. It would be far less unjust, and probably a close approximation to the truth, to say that...

...and therefore disgusting : . . . and its inherent improbability always forces dis-satisfaction .... surely no man could have fancied that he read ' Lycidas ' with pleasure had he not known its author." This critic is not a half-educated reviewer but the great Dr. Johnson in his " Life of Milton." The...

...ecclesiastical pastor, a superintendent of a Christian flock. Such equivocations are always unskilful; but here they are indecent, and at least approach to impiety,...Lycidas with pleasure had he not known its author.' Dr Johnson's blunt censure of Lycidas, ' the first critique of the poem by a major English literary...

...with some kind of courteous solicitation, he might well feel that he could put it to society at large: "Surely no man could have fancied that he read Lycidas with pleasure, had he not known its author." Johnson has made similarly accommodating analyses of Samson Agonistes, in the Rambler, and of The Rape...

...couldn't there be more complex cases where our conviction might be undermined experimentally? For example, 'no man could have fancied that he read "Lycidas" with pleasure had he not known its author' (Johnson). Wasn't it the implications of this remark or remarks like it that Richards was experimentally...

...shows contempt for Milton and invites his readers to share in that contempt. No one, Johnson continues, "could have fancied that he read Lycidas with pleasure, had he not known its author."" (Already in the mid eighteenth century you can experience the literary person's moral judgement upon...

...ecclesiastical pastor, a superintendent of a Christian flock. Such equivocations are always unskillful; but here they are indecent, and at least approach to impiety,...however, I believe the writer not to have been conscious. (Johnson 1964: 96) Milton's poem is being criticized because the moral characterization of Christianity...

...Christian flock. Such equivocations are always unskillful; but here they are indecent, and at last approach to impiety, of which, however, I believe the writer not to have been conscious.""' What Johnson is objecting to in general is true of this passage. Milton has mingled a trifling fiction...