...referring to Gray's poem, The Bard, he remarks : "To select a singular event and swell it to a giant's bulk by fabulous appendages of spectres and predictions...only as we find something to be imitated or declined. " (1780.) The dictum that we are affected only as we believe is open to grave doubt. We are often thrown...

...unconquerable falsehood. Incredulus odi. * To select a singular event, and swell it to a giant's bulk by fabulous appendages of spectres and predictions,...that The Bard promotes any truth, moral or political. po f — His stanzas are too long, especially his epodes ; the ode is finished before the ear has learned...

...shown in his criticism of Gray's Bard: "To select a singular event, and swell it to a giant's bulk by fabulous appendages of spectres and predictions,...forsakes the probable may always find the marvellous." The common growth of mother earth sufficed for him as for Wordsworth. The distinction 1 Boswell, ed....

...his basic position on truth and pleasure: "To select a singular event, and swell it to a giant's bulk by fabulous appendages of spectres and predictions,...as we find something to be imitated or declined." But Johnson makes handsome amends to Gray in his concluding paragraph, on the "Elegy." As always, Johnson...

...failing to do good than to praise another for its power of moral suasion or mnemonic consecration: "I do not see that The Bard promotes any truth, moral or political." At most, he recommended, authors ought to "keep themselves harmless" and to "exert the litde influence...

...tradition begins with those eighteenth-century readers of "The Bard" whom Johnson was concerned to refute: "I do not see that The Bard promotes any truth, moral or political" (1n, 438, emphasis added). But Gray's nineteenth-century editor, John Mitford, found a central political...

...Grays Gedicht, „it has little use: we are affected only äs we believe; we are improved only äs we find something to be imitated or declined. I do...not see that The Bard promotes any truth, moral or pohtical", demonstiert deutlich die vorherrschende klassizistische Gegenposition, vgl. Lives ofthe...

...Gray's odes ; and in summing up against one of them, The Bard, he delivers himself as follows :— " I do not see that The Bard promotes any truth, moral or political." But in the same essay he does justice to the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, because the sentiments...