own work) comes up for judgement. In a passage of splendid directness and sincerity Johnson deals with Pope’s habitual disguises: ‘He very frequently professes contempt of the world, and represents himself as looking on mankind, sometimes with gay indifference, as on emmets of a hillock below his serious attention, and sometimes with glowing indignation, as on monsters more worthy of hatred than of pity. These were dispositions apparently counterfeited. How could he despise those whom he lived by pleasing, and on whose approbation his esteem of himself was superstructed? Why should he hate those to whose favour he owed his honour and his ease? Of things that terminate in human life the world is the proper judge: to despise its sentence, if it were possible, is not just; and if it were just is not possible. Pope was far enough from this unreasonable temper; he was sufficiently “a fool to Fame,” and his fault was that he pretended to neglect it. His levity and his sullenness were only in his letters; he passed through common life, sometimes vexed and sometimes pleased, with the natural emotions of common men.’
An old-established public reputation is not, in Johnson’s opinion, a thing that can be lightly set aside. Books find their proper level. ‘Of a work so much read,’ he says, speaking of Addison’s Cato, ‘it is difficult to say any thing new. About things on which the public thinks long it commonly attains to think right.’ And again, speaking of Gray, he states the doctrine boldly and fully: ‘In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism
