Johnsoniana - 1884 Author:James Boswell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: It was not very easy however for people not quite intimate with Dr. Johnson, to get exactly his opinion of a writer's merit, as he would now and then divert hims... more »elf by confounding those who thought themselves obliged to say to-morrow what he had said yesterday; and even Garrick, who ought to have been better acquainted with his tricks, professed himself mortified, that one time when he was extolling Dryden in a rapture that I suppose disgusted his friend, Mr. Johnson suddenly challenged him to produce twenty lines in a series that would not disgrace the poet and his admirer. Garrick produced a passage that he had once heard the Doctor commend, in which he now found, if I remember rightly, sixteen faults, and made Garrick look silly at his own table. When I told Mr. Johnson the story, " Why, what a monkey was David now (says he), to tell of his own disgrace I" And in the course of that hour's chat he told me, how he used to teize Garrick by commendations of the tomb scene in Con- greve's " Mourning Bride," protesting that Shakespeare had in the same line of excellence nothing as good: " All which is strictly true (said he); but that is no reason for supposing Congreve is to stand in competition with Shakespeare: these fellows know not how to blame, nor how to commend" I forced him one day, in a similar humour, to prefer Young's description of Night to the so much admired ones of Dryden and Shakespeare, as more forcible, and more general Every reader is not either a lover or a tyrant, but every reader is interested when he hears that " Creation sleeps; 'tis as the general pulse Of life stood still, and nature made a pause; An awful pause—prophetic of its end." " This (said he) is true; but remember that taking the compositions of Young in general, they are but like bright ste...« less