their lessons to the facts of his own day. Pope’s Imitations of Horace are modern in every detail. But even Pope loved at times to dress himself in the vanities of learning; and the lesser poetry of the eighteenth century is encrusted with dead mythology. All this Johnson opposed; and he, more than any other single writer, delivered poetry from what had now become a tedious bondage, and cleared the way for a more scientific and imaginative treatment of ancient fable by the poets who came after him. He could not foresee this later development; nor did he himself attach any possible value to fictions that deal with what he calls ‘exploded beings.’ When once their use as ornament was disallowed, his own profound and sincere religious convictions forbade him to seek for truth in them, or to tolerate them in connexion with serious subjects and real events. His criticism on the epitaph which Pope had written for Rowe’s tomb in Westminster Abbey shows how strongly and consistently he felt on this matter. One of the lines of the epitaph ran—
Peace to thy gentle shade, and endless rest!
‘To wish Peace to thy shade,’ says Johnson, ‘is too mythological to be admitted into a Christian temple; the ancient worship has infected almost all our other compositions, and might therefore be contented to spare our epitaphs. Let fiction, at least, cease with life, and let us be serious over the grave.’
Another ancient piece of poetic machinery was invariably condemned by Johnson. Pastoral allegory, which was brought into modern literature by the Renaissance imitators of Theocritus and Virgil, seemed to him to be a mere trick for supplying the form of poetry
