Like most of the writers of that time, he made use of his poetry only as the means of introducing himself to the public. We cannot regret, as in the case of Goldsmith, that he put it to no further service. He took little delight in those appearances either of nature or art, for which the poet ought to have the eye of a painter. Nor had he much more sense of the elegant in numbers and in sound. There were indeed certain rounds of metrical arrangement which he loved to repeat, but he could not go beyond them. How very limited his perceptions of this kind were, we may be convinced by reading his strictures on Dionysius the Halicarnassian in the Rambler, and the opinions on Milton's versification, which in the Idler he has put into the mouth of a minute critic, only to ridicule them, though they are indeed founded in truth. Johnson was not one of those whom Plato calls the [Greek: philaekooi kai philotheamones], "who gladly acknowledge the beautiful wherever it is met with, in sounds, and colours, and figures, and all that is by art compounded from these;" much less had he ascended "to that abstract notion of beauty" which the same philosopher considers it so much more difficult to attain.[15] In his tragedy, the dramatis personae are like so many statues "stept from their pedestal to take the air." They come on the stage only to utter pompous sentiments of morality, turgid declamation, and frigid similes. Yet there is throughout, that strength of language, that heavy mace of words, with which, as with the flail of Talus, Johnson lays every thing prostrate before him. This style is better suited to his imitations of the two satires of Juvenal. Of the first of these, "the London," Gray, in a letter to Horace Walpole, says that "to him it is one of those few imitations, that has all the ease and all the spirit of an original." The other is not at all inferior to it. Johnson was not insensible to such praise; and, could he have known how favourably Gray had spoken of him, would, I doubt not, have been more just to that poet, whom, besides the petulant criticism on him in his Life, he presumed in conversation to call "a heavy fellow." In his shorter poems it appears as if nature could now and then thrust herself even into the bosom of Johnson himself, from whom we could scarcely have looked for such images as are to be found in the following stanzas. By gloomy twilight half reveal'd, With sighs we view the hoary hill, The leafless wood, the naked field, The snow-stopp'd cot, the frozen rill. No music warbles through the grove, No vivid colours paint the plain; No more with devious steps I rove Through verdant paths, now sought in vain. Aloud the driving tempest roars, Congeal'd impetuous showers descend; Haste, close the window, bar the doors, Fate leaves me Stella and a friend. Sappho herself might have owned a touch of passionate tenderness, that he has introduced into another of these little pieces: