Such a succession may be traced from Swift to Addison, from
Addison to Pope, and--with marked reservations--from Pope to Goldsmith.
It would be unjust to charge all, or indeed any, of these with the
narrowness of view betrayed in Johnson's verdicts on individual writers.
To arrive at this perfection of sourness was a work of time; and the
nature of Addison and Goldsmith at least was too genial to allow of
any approach to it. But, with all their difference of temperament, the
method of the earlier critics is hardly to be distinguished from that
of Johnson. There is the same orderliness of treatment--first the
fable, then the characters, lastly the sentiment and the diction; the
same persistency in applying general rules to a matter which, above
all others, is a law to itself; the same invincible faith in "the
indispensable laws of Aristotelian criticism". It is this that, in
spite of its readiness to admire, makes Addison's criticism of _Paradise
Lost_ so dreary a study; and this that, in an evil hour, prompted
Goldsmith to treat the soliloquy of Hamlet as though it were a
schoolboy's exercise in rhetoric and logic.
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