tion can be produced by fixed resolve and hard labour, a great work of imagination cannot.
Johnson was a much more liberal judge of poetry than Boileau and the critics of the French school. Yet Boileau, he says, ‘will be seldom found mistaken,’ and he agrees with Boileau in his opinion of devotional poetry. He treats this matter at large in the essay on Waller. His argument, which is closely reasoned and eloquently expressed, must be quoted in full:
Let no pious ear be offended if I advance, in opposition to many authorities, that poetical devotion cannot often please. The doctrines of religion may indeed be defended in a didactick poem, and he who has the happy power of arguing in verse will not lose it because his subject is sacred. A poet may describe the beauty and the grandeur of Nature, the flowers of the Spring, and the harvests of Autumn, the vicissitudes of the Tide, and the revolutions of the Sky, and praise the Maker for his works in lines which no reader shall lay aside. The subject of the disputation is not piety, but the motives to piety; that of the description is not God, but the works of God.
Contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical. Man admitted to implore the mercy of his Creator and plead the merits of his Redeemer is already in a higher state than poetry can confer.
The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises, and delights. The topicks of devotion are few, and being few are universally known; but, few as they are, they can be made no more; they can receive no grace from novelty of sentiment, and very little from novelty of expression.
