Then he gave many texts from the lessons and gospel of
the day, as affording fit subjects for discourses. He ridiculed the
absurdity of refusing to believe every thing that you could not understand;
and mentioned a rebuke of Dr. Parr's to a man of the name of Frith, and
that of another clergyman to a young man, who said he would believe nothing
which he could not understand:--'Then, young man, your creed will be the
shortest of any man's I know.'
"As we walked up Mr. Cambridge's meadows towards Twickenham, he criticised
Johnson and Gray as poets, and did not seem to allow them high merit. The
excellence of verse, he said, was to be untranslatable into any other words
without detriment to the beauty of the passage;--the position of a single
word could not be altered in Milton without injury. Gray's
personifications, he said, were mere printer's devils' personifications--
persons with a capital letter, abstract qualities with a small one. He
thought Collins had more genius than Gray, who was a singular instance of a
man of taste, poetic feeling, and fancy, without imagination. He contrasted
Dryden's opening of the 10th satire of Juvenal with Johnson's:--
"'Let observation, with extensive view,
Survey mankind from Ganges to Peru.
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