killed the plants. Death is also privation, yet who has made any difficulty of assigning to Death a dart and the power of striking?’
A good deal of ridicule is bestowed by Johnson, in one place and another, on the favourite plea of the poets, that their work owes its excellence to causes beyond their control. He makes fun of Milton for fearing that ‘an age too late, or cold climate,’ may depress his poetic powers. In a fit of wicked humour he tries to comfort the author of Paradise Lost. ‘General causes,’ he says, ‘must operate uniformly in a general abatement of mental power; if less could be performed by the writer, less likewise would content the judges of his work. Among this lagging race of frosty grovellers he might still have risen into eminence by producing something which “they should not willingly let die.” However inferior to the heroes who were born in better ages, he might still be great among his contemporaries, with the hope of growing every day greater in the dwindle of posterity: he might still be the giant of the pygmies, the one-eyed monarch of the blind.’ In his criticism of Pope’s epitaphs Johnson nevertheless allows a kind of inspiration to poets; though he will not allow any poet to allege the absence of it by way of excuse. ‘It will not always happen,’ he says, ‘that the success of a poet is proportionate to his labour. The same observation may be extended to all works of imagination, which are often influenced by causes wholly out of the performer’s power, by hints of which he perceives not the origin, by sudden elevations of mind which he cannot produce in himself, and which sometimes rise when he expects them least.’ The author of the Dictionary knew as well as another man that if a great work of compila-
