This contrast, as Stauffer remarks, renders Courtenay's praise more powerful.[14] More important, the play between scorn and praise reflects the ambivalence which colors contemporary accounts of Johnson. We are now accustomed to the notion of great art as the product of a flawed life. But in the eighteenth century, an age largely devoted to the idea of discreet biography which concealed or minimized the subject's weaknesses, a man like Johnson presented formidable problems to the biographer and his readers. Although Courtenay merely versified material which other writers had discussed in much more detail, his poem is important because it synthesizes the conflicting attitudes towards Johnson which prevailed immediately after his death. Courtenay, like many others, saw in Johnson a powerful mixture of great virtues and vices; and though he is not impartial, he effects, through his honesty, an admirable balance between Johnson's strengths and weaknesses. The final forty lines of the _Review_ constitute one of the most balanced of all contemporary tributes to Johnson as a human being. For the most part, the commendatory section of the poem is an unsystematic tracing of Johnson's moral and literary merits. Courtenay's rhapsodizing on the _Dictionary_, the _Rambler_, and the _Lives of the Poets_ is conventional. Clearly, he admired the wide scope of Johnson's learning and his ability to communicate his knowledge of men and manners in his writings. But his admiration occasionally betrays him; for instance, in describing the "brilliant school" through which Johnson's influence was perpetuated, he overestimated the extent to which Reynolds, Malone, Burney, Jones, Goldsmith, Steevens, Hawkesworth, and Boswell were indebted to Johnson's writings.[15] Usually, however, he was on firmer ground. Courtenay was the only writer before Boswell to praise Johnson's Latin verse, a body of poetry virtually ignored by other contemporary biographers and memorialists.[16] Furthermore, he employs footnotes skillfully. Though they impede the progress of the poem, they do support poetic statement with factual evidence and explain and amplify certain points made in the verses. The clearest evidence for the care which Courtenay took with the _Review_ can be found upon examination of his revisions. He made few substantial changes in the second edition, but the third edition contains important revisions. Courtenay added ten lines and five footnotes in the final version, and lightened some of the scorn in the first portion by substituting weaker phrases for stronger ones. He also enclosed lines seven through twenty in quotation marks to make it appear that the sentiment expressed therein was not his own, but a judgment he had heard elsewhere.