This chapter suggests how Johnson gained from his acquaintance with the criticism of John Dennis. Johnson’s remarks on Shakespeare, Addison and Pope are all shaped by his reflections on the older critic, whose work Johnson quotes more fully than he does any other. Johnson’s response to Dennis is usually to disagree; but there is also respect, and acknowledgment that Dennis had good points to make about Pope’s Essay on Criticism, a poem that was for Johnson a success. Dennis’s reflections on Shakespeare and his complaints that Shakespeare failed to obey decorum trigger Johnson’s most eloquent passages in the Preface. In Johnson’s note to King Lear, where Johnson is lamenting the death of Cordelia, it is to Dennis that Johnson turns when calibrating his own uncertain yet distressed reactions to the play. Similarly, Dennis’s attack on the most celebrated of eighteenth-century tragedies, Addison’s Cato, offered the opportunity for a vivid comparison between a poet of manners and a “poet of nature.” There is truth as well as satire in Johnson’s description of Dennis as a “formidable assailant.” Johnson fulfills an obligation of fairness to his critical past.

This chapter surveys the origins of aesthetics in eighteenth-century literary criticism, as major poets were examined in the light of concepts such as ‘beauty’. The treatment of art as a topic for moral thought gave a more polite, philosophical turn to the hitherto raucous and satirical character of early eighteenth-century critical practice. The chapter examines the development of thought about form and psychology encouraged by seventeenth-century French critics, followed by Addison, Shaftesbury, and later thinkers such as Burke, who presaged the gothic. Particular attention is given to Hume, Alison and Gerard, together with other Scots theorists of ‘belles lettres’. The discussion charts the increasing influence on criticism of such terms as ‘sublime,’ ‘taste,’ ‘genius,’ ‘originality,’ ‘imagination, and ‘art’ itself. An important element is the place of creative writers as aesthetic theorists, such as Pope, Joseph Warton, and Edward Young. Nor is the period’s greatest critic, Samuel Johnson, immune to the vocabulary of aesthetics. The contribution of visual artists is illustrated by the writings of Hogarth and Reynolds, while a final section examines theory’s relation to practice.