This chapter turns to the emotional sources of Johnson’s poetical criticism. The chapter examines the contrast between Johnson’s response to the overblown dramas of Dryden and his enthusiasm for the power of Alexander’s Feast (1697). Attention then moves to Johnson’s taste for poetry deriving from genuine sorrow when this is compared with the confected grievings of Milton’s Lycidas. But Johnson’s emotional consciousness eschews excess. His neo-Latin verse, for example, seems to shield Johnson from memories that might be too painful to express in English. Reinforcing this vulnerability are Johnson’s emotional state on the death of his wife and his disordered feelings at the news of the widowed Mrs. Thrale’s marriage to Piozzi. Unbearable loss is then explored by reference to a scene from Rasselas and through a passage from the Preface to Shakespeare on tragedy. The deaths of Shakespeare’s heroines caused him intense pain; the combination of tragic with comic scenes as “mingled” drama supplied its own intensity, as Hamlet illustrates.