_1769._—“Fortune has blest this forest with the geniuses of the age; Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Carter, Mrs. Dunbar, etc., etc., and Lord Lyttelton are at Sunning Wells, and sport sentiment from morn till noon, from noon till dewy eve. I molest ’em not; contenting myself in my rustic simplicity. ’Tis a stupidity that may be felt, I don’t doubt, but not by me. Mrs. Montagu has commenced author, in vindication of Shakespeare, who wants none; therefore her performance must be deemed a work of supererogation. Some commend it. I’ll have it, because I can throw it aside when I’m tired.” Johnson treated it with greater brutality. He had once compared Mrs. Montagu with Queen Elizabeth, and had recognized in the former the greater qualifications. Now, he denounced the essay when he had only looked into it. He had taken up an end of the web, and finding packthread, thought it useless, as he said, to go further in search of embroidery. Reynolds thought it did her honour, which Johnson allowed, but he spoiled the admission by asserting that it would do honour to no one else. Garrick said she had pointed out Voltaire’s blunders; to which Johnson replied, that it wasn’t worth while, and that there was no merit in the way of doing it. Subsequently, he declared: “Neither I, nor Beauclerk, nor Mrs. Thrale could get through the book!”—a declaration which was unfounded, as far as Mrs. Thrale was concerned; for she protested that she had read it with pleasure. The great man, in short, talked nonsense, but dressed it in fine words. “There was no real criticism in it,” he said, “showing the beauty of thought, as formed in the workings of the human heart.” Mrs. Montagu did not feel called on to exhibit any such beauty or any such superstructure. She exposed the blundering arrogance of Voltaire, who first praised Shakespeare, for the annoyance of his own countrymen, and then, finding the French inclined to accept the praise, aspersed brutally the poet whom he had pillaged without mercy. Johnson thought little of Garrick, probably because Garrick approved the object of Mrs. Montagu’s Shakespearian essay, and because the lady gave very high praise to Garrick as an actor. Johnson thought it was fit that she should say much, and that he should say nothing, in Garrick’s praise. Accomplished Bruin, however, said much to the great player’s disparagement. He maintained that Garrick had been overpaid for what he had done for Shakespeare. “Sir, he has not made Shakespeare better known. He cannot illustrate Shakespeare!” When Johnson afterward wrote to Mrs. Thrale, that speaking of “Shakespeare and Nature” rightly brought Mrs. Montagu into his mind, he is supposed to be inconsistent, when he was, it may be, only satirical. He certainly uttered a judgment on the essay, which is not to be gainsaid, when he maintained, according to Mr. Seward, that the work was “ad hominem, conclusive against Voltaire,” and that “she had done, sir, what she intended to do.”