when he wrote, in his notes on Macbeth—‘He that peruses Shakespeare looks round alarmed, and starts to find himself alone.’ In his mature age he could not bear to read the closing scenes of King Lear and Othello. His notes on some of Shakespeare’s minor characters, as, for instance, his delightful little biographical comment on the words ‘Exit Pistol,’ in King Henry V., show with what keenness of zest he followed the incidents of the drama and with what sympathy he estimated the persons.[1] It is difficult to find a meaning for those who assert that Johnson was insensible to what he himself called ‘the transcendent and unbounded genius’ of Shakespeare.
His Preface was not altogether pleasing to idolaters of Shakespeare even in his own age. It was virulently attacked, and although he published no reply, his defence of himself is expressed in a letter to Charles Burney. ‘We must confess the faults of our favourite,’ he says, ‘to gain credit to our praise of his excellencies. He that claims, either in himself or for another, the honours of perfection, will surely injure the reputation which he designs to assist.’ The head and front of Johnson’s offending was that he wrote and spoke of Shakespeare as one man may fitly speak of another. He claimed for himself the citizenship of that republic
- ↑ ‘The comick scenes of the history of Henry the fourth and fifth are now at an end, and all the comick personages are now dismissed. Falstaff and Mrs. Quickly are dead; Nym and Bardolph are hanged; Gadshill was lost immediately after the robbery; Poins and Peto have vanished since, one knows not how; and Pistol is now beaten into obscurity. I believe every reader regrets their departure.’
