"There has of late arisen a practice of giving to adjectives, derived from substantives, the termination of participles; such as the cultured plain, the daisied bank; but I was sorry to see, in the lines of a scholar like Gray, the honied Spring. The morality is natural, but too stale; the conclusion is pretty."
Writing about Thomas Gray's "Ode to Spring," Johnson is caught up in the trends apparent in the text. Johnson objects to forming adjectives from the substantive -- the subject -- because of its seeming arrogance of form. He appreciates Gray's accomplishments in the phrase "honied Spring," but he cannot ignore the blatant ignorance of adjectival function.
"Dryden may be properly considered as the father of English criticism, as the writer who first taught us to determine upon principles the merit of composition. Of our former poets the greatest dramatist wrote without rules, conducting through life and nature by a genius that rarely misled, and rarely deserted him. Of the rest, those who knew the laws of propriety had neglected to teach them."
Of John Dryden, Johnson credits criticism. He attributes the form as a particularly challenging one during Dryden's day because of the lack of agreed-upon convention. The form was intuitive, making criticism particularly challenging because there were few standards upon which to base a commentary other than personal experience. Nevertheless Dryden's work contributed to the establishment of form.
"In the window of his mother's apartment lay Spenser's Fairy Queen; in which he very early took delight to read, till, by feeling the charms of verse, he became, as he relates, irrecoverably a Poet."
Johnson describes Abraham Cowley's decision to write poetry like a conversion experience. Cowley was transformed into a poet by a practice of studying Spenser's work. This attribution of inspiration to such a major influence leads to Cowley's own identification as a figurehead in society.
"But one language cannot communicate its rules to another; where metre is scanty and imperfect some help is necessary. The music of the English heroic line strikes the ear so faintly that it is easily lost, unless all the syllables of every line co-operate together; this co-operation can be only obtained by the preservation of every verse unmingled with another as a distinct system of sounds, and this distinctness is obtained and preserved by the artifice of rhyme."
Johnson observes how Milton accepted a formidable challenge in bringing poetry into the realm of English, a language which carries subtlety. This heroic verse requires a keen eye for consistency, of which skill Milton was the original. He needed to marry the variety of syllables with rhyme in order to achieve an internal coherence in his English poems.
