SOURCE: Griffith, Philip Mahone. “Joseph Warton's Criticism of Shakespeare.” TSE: Tulane Studies in English 14 (1965): 17-27.

[In the following essay, Griffith explores Joseph Warton's criticism of Shakespeare, which appeared in the form of five essays in the Adventurer, arguing that Warton's criticism is representative of the contemporary trends in Shakespearean criticism.]

Joseph Warton's five papers on Shakespeare, contributed to the Adventurer between September 25, 1753, and January 5, 1754, have received perhaps more persistent notice from literary historians than any other essays in the entire journal. Like most of Warton's literary criticism, these papers, critics have observed, reveal his ambivalence between a strict neoclassicism and a more liberalizing romanticism.¹ It is well to remind ourselves, however, especially in this quadri-centenary year of his birth, that Shakespeare's “genius was fully recognized in the Eighteenth Century,” that “from beginning to end, there is one long chorus of universal praise, so loud, so strong, so persistent, so unmistakable, that there is left no room for the slightest shadow of a doubt.”² Warton's position, much like that of his far better known fellow-contributor to Hawkesworth's Adventurer, Samuel Johnson, is finely representative of eighteenth century critical sentiment about Shakespeare; and it is for this reason, among others, that I have chosen him on this occasion. Speaking of Johnson's criticism of Shakespeare, Professor W. K. Wimsatt has recently observed:

Just how this division in Johnson's appreciation was possible—how he got to the heart of Shakespeare—perceived the progress and tenor of the drama—except through the aesthetic surface, the particulars of actions and works, may be difficult to understand. Doubtless, we confront here some incompleteness of conversion, an unresolved tension between the neoclassic conscience and the liberating impulse. Johnson the lexicographer would of course be most painfully sensitive to the jaggedness of the verbal idiom—the maverick particularities.³

It is well to remark at the outset that Warton's appreciation of Shakespeare is also exactly characterized by the same “unresolved tension.”

Of Warton's five essays on Shakespeare, two are on the Tempest,⁴ and three on King Lear.⁵ His inclusion of such extended criticism in a periodical constitutes an innovation. “Historically,” it has been said, “Warton's five essays enjoy the distinction of being the first connected series of papers in an Eighteenth Century periodical, to deal solely with the criticism of Shakespeare.”⁶ As early, however, as 1744, the youthful poet Warton had glorified the “romantic” charm of Shakespeare in what seems clearly a reaction against neo-classic correctness: “What are the lays of artful Addison, / Coldly correct, to Shakespeare's warblings wild?”⁷ And, throughout his commentary on Virgil, published by Dodsley at London in 1753, the same year of his contribution to the Adventurer, Warton had praised Shakespeare's brilliance in characterization.⁸ But it is in the Adventurer that Warton makes his chief contribution to Shakespearean criticism.

Warton begins his series on Shakespeare, No. 93, with the observation that “writers of a mixed character, that abound in transcendent beauties and in gross imperfections, are the most proper and most pregnant subjects for criticism.” Shakespeare exhibits “more numerous examples of excellencies and faults, of every kind, than are, perhaps, to be discovered in any other author”; and Warton's purpose will be to “examine his merit as a poet, without blind admiration, or wanton invective.” This is a judicious beginning for Warton in the manner of Johnson after him; it places him midway between the sometimes violent derogation of Rhymer and the reverential attitude of Coleridge. Shakespeare's principal defects, according to Warton, are that he violates the classical Unities and that his diction is sometimes “obscure and turgid.” His characteristic excellencies are (1) a “lively creative imagination,” (2) his “strokes of nature and passion,” and (3) his “preservation of the consistency of his characters.” These excellencies, particularly the third, far outweigh the poet's transgressions against the mechanical rules of Time and Place, which are often strictly observed, writes Warton, by a “genius of the lowest order.” An ability to portray characters naturally and uniformly is rare and enjoyed by only two authors: Homer and Shakespeare.⁹

Of all the plays of Shakespeare, the Tempest is the “most striking instance of his creative power.” Here Shakespeare has “given the reins to his boundless imagination, and has carried the romantic, the wonderful, and the wild, to the most pleasing extravagance.” This, it has been said, is Warton's “first clearly distinguishable definition of the term ‘imagination,’” a relating of the imagination to the marvellous, to the remote and strange.¹⁰ The remainder of this essay is devoted to proving, by judicious examples—what Warton calls “master-strokes”—from the play, that Shakespeare's “chief” excellence is in the consistency of his dramatic portraits. Warton praises at greatest length the mysterious, yet probable, nature of Ariel and the appropriateness of his ideas and images, which Warton calls a “beauty of the same kind with that which is so justly admired in the Adam of Milton.” Pope's glory, on the other hand, would be greater if “we could suppose [him] to have been unacquainted” with the Tempest when he wrote that part of The Rape of the Lock in which the Sylphs are threatened by Pope's Ariel with punishment for carelessness (verses 123-136).¹¹ Warton's didactic strain is prominent here in his approval of Shakespeare's making Ariel serve a moral purpose. The essay ends with a “romantic” effusion over Caliban's “the isle is full of noises” speech that indicates the interest Wharton, like Dryden and Addison before him, takes in Shakespeare's “fairy way of writing”: “The poet is a more powerful magician,” Warton writes, “than his own Prospero: we are transported into fairyland; we are wrapt in a delicious dream, from which it is misery to be disturbed; all around is enchantment!”¹²

Warton's second paper on the Tempest, No. 97, begins with Horace's observation on the difficulty of creating and preserving a wholly original character. In this, says Warton, Shakespeare has “wonderfully succeeded” with Caliban, “the creature of his own imagination, in the formation of which he could derive no assistance from observation or experience.” Addison had written in Spectator No. 279 (one of the Paradise Lost papers): “It shows a greater Genius in Shakespeare to have drawn his Calyban, than his Hotspur and Julius Caesar: The one was to be supplied out of his own Imagination, whereas the other might have been formed upon Tradition, History and Observation.” Shakespeare's success, according to Warton, is accomplished by a shrewd selection of relevant details whereby Caliban is endowed with the vices of his progenitors, with their savagery, malevolence and ignorance, qualities redeemed by the poetry. When, for instance, Caliban enjoins silence on the drunken Stephano, he commands, “Pray you, tread softly that the blind mole may not hear a foot fall.” This, says Warton, is “at once highly poetical and exactly suited to the wildness of the speaker.” Here, in his analysis of Caliban, Warton is clearly indebted to Dryden, who had written in 1679:

He seems there to have created a person which was not in nature, a boldness which at first sight would appear intolerable; for he makes him a species of himself, begotten by an incubus on a witch. … Whether or no his generation can be defended, I leave to philosophy; but of this I am certain, that the poet has most judiciously furnished him with a person, a language, and a character, which will suit him, both by father's and mother's side: he has all the discontents and malice of a witch, and of a devil, besides a convenient proportion of the deadly sins; gluttony, sloth, and lust are manifest; the dejectedness of a slave is likewise given him, and the ignorance of one bred up in a desert island. His person is monstrous, as he is the product of unnatural lust; and his language is as hobgoblin as his person; in all things he is distinguished from other mortals.¹³

Warton, moreover, would have Caliban's “fierce and implacable spirit” maintained to the very end; that Shakespeare has “put into his mouth, words that imply repentence and understanding” Warton finds injudicious. Shakespeare, from Warton's point of view, here violates his own “chief excellence”—“the preservation of the consistency of his characters.”

Miranda and Prospero receive enthusiastic but less detailed treatment than the supernatural characters. Miranda is a fine example of Shakespeare's genius for achieving much in little. Of her offer to bear the logs that her father has enjoined upon her lover, Ferdinand, Warton says: “It is by selecting such little and almost imperceptible circumstances, that Shakespeare has more truly painted the passions than any other writer: affection is more powerfully expressed by this simple wish and offer of assistance, than by the unnatural eloquence and witticisms of Dryden, or the amorous declamations of Rowe.” Warton's remarks on Prospero are thoroughly conventional; he chiefly admires the “moral” observations in the famous “Our revels now are ended” speech.

Warton concludes his papers on the Tempest by summing up his general feeling about Shakespeare's defects and excellencies. He praises Shakespeare's “uniformity of character, that leading beauty in dramatic poesy,” and he finds that, “though almost constantly violated” elsewhere, the unities of time, place, and action in the Tempest are “exactly observed.” One has the feeling that Warton's choice of this play for extended analysis was, indeed, felicitous; it enabled him to maintain his uneasy equilibrium between an old and a new aesthetic.

The first of Warton's three essays on King Lear, No. 113, begins with the observation that “one of the most remarkable differences betwixt ancient and modern tragedy, arises from the prevailing custom of describing only those distresses that are occasioned by the passion of love.” He deplores the fact that this custom has contributed to degrade the theatre, “that noble school of virtue,” into an “academy of effeminacy.” Warton's feeling here that love is too frequently the subject of tragedy is part of a larger neo-classic critical complaint during the century: that love is an element incompatible to tragedy.¹⁴ Even Racine and Corneille, says Warton, have falsified ancient tragic fables in order to gratify their audiences with the theme of sexual passion. Warton's contention, Boileau to the contrary, that it is quite possible to write a successful tragedy in which romantic love is not the chief interest is supported, he feels, by Shakespeare's Hamlet, Macbeth, Caesar, and, “above all,” by Lear. The examination of Lear becomes, then, the purpose of Warton's second series of essays on Shakespeare.

Lear's misfortunes, Warton asserts, are of a “very uncommon nature, and are not touched upon by any other dramatic author”; “they are occasioned by a rash resolution of an aged monarch of strong passions and quick sensibility, to resign his crown and to divide his kingdom amongst his three daughters.” After a brief outline of the plot Warton states his main object: “I shall confine myself at present to consider singly, the judgment and art of the poet in describing the origin and progress of the distraction of Lear.” In this, Shakespeare has succeeded better than any other author, even Euripides. Warton's examination of Lear's madness is central, of course, to the tragic effect and enables him to concentrate on character and at the same time to give an adequate synopsis of the tragic pattern. He chiefly admires the brilliant manner in which Shakespeare can express by a single line the “inexpressible anguish of his mind,” rather than by “the long and laboured speech” that Rowe, Corneille, Dryden, Addison, or Marlowe would have used. “Nature, Sophocles, and Shakespeare,” he writes, “represent the feelings of the heart in a different manner; by a broken hint, a short exclamation, a word, or a look.”

Warton's response to the pathetic in Lear is a response to his own individual sensibility. He is deeply moved and can scarcely speak in what he calls the “cold terms of criticism.” Lear's question to Goneril, for example—Ar't not asham'd to look upon this beard?”—Warton has “never read without tears.” And one is reminded of Johnson's own strongly emotional response when he wrote (in a note to Lear in his edition of 1765): “… I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.”¹⁵ This shift from a critical dependence on reason and the rules to individual sensibility, the feeling that anything in art that is serious becomes eligible to sublimity if it succeeds in moving, is significantly representative of a new trend in English literary criticism from 1750 on.¹⁶

Warton continues his discussion of the origin and growth of Lear's madness in No. 116 with a close examination of the famous heath scene in Act III. Critics like Addison had previously censured the various artificial devices of contemporary playwrights.¹⁷ Warton agrees that such devices have frequently been introduced into tragedy by “barren and mechanical play-wrights, as proper objects to impress terror and astonishment, where the distress has not been important enough to render it probable that nature would interpose for the sake of the sufferers, and where these objects themselves have not been supported by suitable sentiments.” In Shakespeare, however, the device of thunder is not melodramatic but has been used “with great judgment and good effect … to heighten and impress the distresses of Lear.” Warton quotes several of Lear's speeches on the heath for the purpose of showing how Shakespeare has drawn an “artful and pathetic comparison” between the severity of the tempest without and the tempest within Lear's gradually disintegrating reason.

Warton comments again on Shakespeare's genius for expressing much in little. Lear's response to Kent's request to take shelter—“Wilt break my heart?”—reveals, in four words, what “another writer, less acquainted with nature, would have displayed at large.” Warton is also impressed by the effect of adversity on Lear in calling forth humanitarian and compassionate speeches on the distresses of others, sentiments “worthy to be written in characters of gold in the closet of every monarch upon earth.” The language of the disguised Edgar and of the Fool here also “heighten the pathetic to a very high degree,” whereas in other hands they “must have sunk into burlesque.”

Warton defends his constant use of quotations as necessary “to exhibit a perfect picture of the secret workings and changes of Lear's mind.” His defense is a condemnation of futile “general criticism” and a justification of his own critical method: “General criticism,” he writes, “is on all subjects useless and unentertaining; but is more than commonly absurd with respect to Shakespeare, who must be accompanied step by step, and scene by scene, in his gradual developments of characters and passions, and whose finer features must be singly pointed out, if we would do compleat [thus] justice to his genuine beauties.”¹⁸

Warton's final paper on Lear, No. 122, is concerned with the madness and death of the protagonist. Since madness is the result of a “close and continued attention of the mind to a single object,” the critic writes, “Shakespeare judiciously represents the resignation of his crown to daughters so cruel and unnatural, as the particular idea which has brought on the distraction of Lear.” Warton analyses the manner in which Lear is constantly made to allude to this one factor which has destroyed his reason: the loss of his power. Following the practice defended in the previous essay on Lear, he cites over a dozen passages to prove his point. Warton's position here, it is interesting to note, provoked a controversy in the pages of Arthur Murphy's Gray's-Inn Journal, where Murphy argued that filial ingratitude (the “Behaviour of his Children”) is the chief cause of Lear's madness. Murphy's refutation of Warton takes the form of a close examination of the play, scene by scene, in Warton's own manner. Dr. Johnson, some years later, agreed with Murphy on this point.¹⁹

Again, Warton's sensibility responds to the “pathetic” in Lear. Of the scene in which Cordelia asks Lear's blessing and in which Lear responds “Pray do not mock me: I am a very foolish, fond old man,” Warton comments: “I hope I have no readers that can peruse his answer without tears.”

The concluding paragraph is devoted to a summary of the defects in Lear. Warton here evidently remembered his introductory remarks to the Tempest essays, in which he proposed to examine Shakespeare's “merit as a poet, without blind admiration.” Just as he had praised the strict observance of the unities in the Tempest, he now objects to the Gloucester underplot on the ground that it destroys the “unity of the fable.” With greater justice, perhaps, he condemns the blinding of Gloucester on the stage as creating effects beyond the legitimate range of true tragedy. Gloucester's imagining that he has leaped down Dover Cliff is condemned as being utterly improbable, even when allowance is made for his blindness. The cruelty of Regan and Goneril is “too savage and unnatural: for it is not sufficient to say,” Warton insists, “that this monstrous barbarity is founded on historical truth.”²⁰ “Some passages” in Lear, Warton feels, are “too turgid and full of strained metaphors,” a complaint made in his initial essay and echoed by many other judicial critics, including, most prominently, Samuel Johnson.

Johnson, indeed, on March 8, 1753, had solicited Warton's contribution in the “Province of Criticism and Literature” for John Hawkesworth's journal;²¹ and Johnson's high praise of Warton in Adventurer No. 92²² may well provide an apt summary of the critical methods involved in the later papers on Shakespeare.

In the papers of criticism which you have given to the public, I have remarked a spirit of candour and love of truth, equally remote from bigotry and captiousness; a just distribution of praise amongst the antients and the moderns; a sober deference to reputation long established, without a blind adoration of antiquity; and a willingness to favour later performances, without a light or puerile fondness for novelty.²³

Notes

1. Professor George Sherburn, it seems to me, best summarized this transition historically: “It is wise to remember that the best brains of the mid-century—Hume, Gibbon, Reynolds, and Dr. Johnson—were in many respects the most fervent ‘classicists’ of the whole century. The drift was away from authority, tradition, and formalism, to diversity, to originality, and to admiration of a ‘creative and glowing imagination, acer spiritus ac vis.’ This drift, fortunately or unfortunately, was not entirely conscious: it was inconsistently maintained, and the opposition to parts of the tendency were stated with shrewdness and above all with magisterial emphasis.” (The Restoration and Eighteenth Century (1660-1789), volume III of A Literary History of England, ed. Albert C. Baugh (New York, 1948), p. 988. Sherburn's reference to the imagination is from Warton's Essay on Pope, 1756).

2. Herbert S. Robinson, English Shakespearian Criticism in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1932), p. 237. Robinson's is the most comprehensive treatment of Warton's Shakespearean criticism and of Shakespearean criticism throughout the century; his book has been badly neglected. See especially pages 83-92; 271-274. D. Nichol Smith's two books have been less helpful: Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare (New York, 1962, originally, 1903); Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1928). Arthur Sherbo has skillfully placed Samuel Johnson among Shakespearean critics, including Warton. See Samuel Johnson, Editor of Shakespeare, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, volume XLII, Urbana, 1956.

3. Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare (New York, 1960), p. xxi.

4. Nos. 93 (September 25, 1753) and 97 (October 9, 1753). The text of the Adventurer cited throughout this paper is based on the folio edition, the earliest substantive edition. For the new edition (marked “Second Edition”), published in 1754 in four volumes in duodecimo, the major contributors—Hawkesworth, Johnson, and Warton—made extensive revision of their papers. I have incorporated what appear to me substantive authorial alterations. In my unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, “A Study of the Adventurer (1752-1754),” University of North Carolina, 1961, Appendix A, pp. 279-308, I made a control study of the variants in all the Adventurer essays. I am presently indebted, however, to Dr. L. F. Powell's work as editor of Johnson's papers for The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, Conn., 1963), volume II, and to the brilliant review-article of this second volume of the Yale Johnson by Professor Fredson Bowers (Modern Philology, LXI, 1964, 238-309). My own full-length study of the Adventurer will be published by Mouton and Co., The Hague.

   Warton had also projected a critical paper (or papers) on Othello, perhaps as his final contribution, but was unable to include it. His final paper, No. 139 (March 5, 1754), was a summary paper, an account of the design of the critical papers in the Adventurer, in accord with Johnson's admonition that each major contributor “must wind up his bottom.” See the letter of John Payne, the publisher, to Warton, February 2, 1754, cited by Powell, Yale Johnson, II, 328-329.

5. Nos. 113 (December 4, 1753) 116 (December 15, 1753), and 122 (January 5, 1754).

6. Robinson, p. 91.

7. In The Enthusiast, or the Lover of Nature. Warton's indebtedness to Milton's L'Allegro should be apparent here.

8. In Works of Virgil in Latin and English (London, 1753), IV, 190-91, 240, 420, 443.

9. Addison had made the same observation, even more strongly, years before: “Our inimitable Shakespeare [thus] is a Stumbling-block to the whole Tribe of these rigid Criticks. Who would not rather read one of his Plays, where there is not a single Rule of the Stage observed, than any Production of a modern Critick, where there is not one of them violated?” (Spectator No. 592, September 10, 1714.) Note here Warton's division of poets into “orders” as in his later Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 1756. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., reminds us that G. W. Stone [in “David Garrick's Significance in the History of Shakespearean Criticism,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association], LXV (March (1950), 183-197] “has adduced a wealth of illustration to show how the realistic and emotive acting of Garrick, replacing the traditional declamatory style, had by 1765 already promoted a shift in popular criticism, from the neoclassic censure of plots and marking of beauties and faults, to a chorus of interest in Shakespeare's character portrayal.” See Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, p. 70. Hereafter cited as “Wimsatt.” Warton stands somewhere in between.

10. Hoyt Trowbridge, “Joseph Warton on the Imagination,” MP [Modern Philology], XXXV (1937), 73. But Trowbridge reminds us that only a few weeks later (in Adventurer No. 101) Warton can object to Milton's romantic picture of Eden in Paradise Lost because it is not natural, not derived from truth. It is typical of him, says Trowbridge, that he should have “extolled extravagancy and … a few weeks later, with equal confidence, have demanded discretion.” (Trowbridge, p. 79).

11. Warton had written extensively of Pope's “borrowings” in Adventurer No. 63.

12. Addison's romantic sympathies are expressed in Spectator No. 419. Warton's debt, and the debt of all succeeding critics of Shakespeare, to Dryden ought to be obvious.

13. “The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy,” Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson (London, 1961), I, 252-53.

14. See Clarence C. Green, The Neo-Classic Theory of Tragedy in England During the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1934), pp. 181-87.

15. Wimsat, p. 98. Here, perhaps, it is well to remind readers that Warton excluded Pope, in the controversial Essay of 1756, from those poets of the first order, the truly “sublime and pathetic” poets. Professor Sherburn provided a sobering corrective, however, when he wrote: “It is customary to read Joseph Warton's dedication to his Essay on Pope and having read no further pronounce him a revolutionary. But Warton always regarded Pope as among the first half-dozen poets of England: his dedication simply calls attention to the fact that Pope, while the greatest of poets in the genres he attempted [the satiric and didactic], did not attempt the highest genres.” (Sherburn, p. 988).

16. See Edward Niles Hooker, “The Discussion of Taste from 1750 to 1770, and the New Trends in Literary Criticism,” PMLA, XLIX (1934), 577-92.

17. As in Spectator Nos. 44 and 592. Addison speaks particularly in No. 592 of the “new thunder” and of the use of snow in a performance of Lear.

18. Warton had written in his edition of Virgil (1753): “I know not what apology to make to the reader for such a number of quotations: but I have always thought that general criticism, without producing particular passages, was both useless and unentertaining.” Works of Virgil, I, 389. George B. Schick has shown that Warton's debt to preceding classical scholars and critics of Virgil is greater than his acknowledgements would seem to indicate. See “Joseph Warton's Critical Essays in His ‘Virgil,’” N & Q [Notes & Queries], n. s., XIII, (1961), 255-56.

19. Gray's-Inn Journal No. 65 (January 12, 1754). During the following week Murphy published a perceptive letter from an anonymous correspondent protesting both his criticism and that of Warton and suggesting a compromise: “The Critic in the Adventurer was somewhat wanting in Justice to the Poet, by mentioning the Loss of Royalty as the sole Cause of Lear's Madness, without taking Notice at the same Time of the forcible Idea he must have of the Ingratitude of his Two Daughters; and I think Mr. Ranger [Murphy's eidolon] also wrong, in excluding intirely [thus] his Opinion. What I purpose here is, to point out both the Ideas working strongly in his Mind, and what the Author intended as conducive to the Moral of his Play.” (No. 66, January 19, 1754). This anonymous correspondent was Thomas Fitzpatrick, according to Jesse Foot, The Life of Arthur Murphy, Esq. (London, 1811), p. 68. I am using the 1756 edition of Murphy's journal, which has been established as the “basic text because that edition most nearly represents the original journal.” See Roy Edwin Aycock, “A Study of Arthur Murphy's Gray's-Inn Journal (1752-1754),” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1960, p. 10.

    Johnson agreed with Murphy: “There is another controversy among the critics concerning this play. It is disputed whether the predominant image in Lear's disordered mind be the loss of his kingdom or the cruelty of his daughters. Mr. Murphy, a very judicious critic, has evinced by induction of particular passage that the cruelty of his daughters is the primary source of his distress, and that the loss of royalty affects him only as a secondary and subordinate evil. He observes with great justness that Lear would move our compassion but little, did we not rather consider the injured father than the degraded king.” (Wimsatt, p. 98).

20. Many of these matters were considered by Johnson later, in the notes to his 1765 edition of Shakespeare. Most significantly, Johnson praised the essential rather than neo-Aristotelian unity of the play. “There is no scene,” he wrote, “which does not contribute to the aggravation of the distress or conduct of the action, and scarce a line which does not conduce to the progress of the scene. So powerful is the current of the poet's imagination that the mind which once ventures within it is hurried irresistibly along.” The cruelty of his daughters and the “seeming improbability of Lear's conduct” Johnson defends historically by calling attention to the “barbarity and ignorance of the age to which this story is referred.”

    Johnson answers Warton directly in these terms: “My learned friend Mr. Warton, who has in the Adventurer very minutely criticized this play, remarks that the instances of cruelty are too savage and shocking, and that the intervention of Edmund destroys the simplicity of the story. These objections may, I think, be answered by repeating that the cruelty of the daughters is an historical fact, to which the poet has added little, having only drawn it into a series by dialogue and action. But I am not able to apologize with equal plausibility for the extrusion of Gloucester's eyes, which seems an act too horried to be endured in dramatic exhibition, and such as must always compel the mind to relieve its distress by incredulity. Yet let it be remembered that our author well knew what would please the audience for which he wrote. The injury done by Edmund to the simplicity of the action is abundantly recompensed by the addition of variety, by the art with which he is made to co-operate with the chief design, and the opportunity which he gives the poet of combining perfidy with perfidy and connecting the wicked son with the wicked daughters, to impress this important moral, that villainy is never at a stop, that crimes lead to crimes and at last terminate in ruin.” (Wimsatt, pp. 96-97).

    It will be remembered that it is here that Johnson supports Tate's version of the play with its happy ending and, somewhat uneasily, gives his preference for the operation of poetic justice. (Wimsatt, pp. 97-98).

    I do not intend to convey the impression that Warton, unlike Johnson, does not appeal to the historical method in his criticism; he does, notably in Adventurer Nos. 49 and 133.

21. The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1952), I, 47-8.

22. Dr. L. F. Powell long ago established “Johnson's Part in the Adventurer,” RES, III (1927), 420-29. Dr. Powell gives some additional information in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, Conn., 1963), II, 323-38, which contains the text of Johnson's Adventurer papers.

23. This paper was read, in a much shorter version, at a meeting of the South Central Modern Language Association, Lubbock, Texas, November, 1964.