OLIVEE GOLDSMITH S LIFE AND TIMES. [BOOK in.
1766. actor was certainly exerted against it. That Johnson had
JEUS. not a taste for the finest productions of genius,* Garrick
was soon afterward very busy to explain. With lago's
ingenious mischief, with Hal's gay compliance in Falstaff's
vices, such a critic might be at home ; but from Lear in the
storm, and from Macbeth on the blasted heath, he must be
content ton be far away. He could, there, but mount the
high horse, and bluster about imperial tragedy. The tone
was caught by the actor's friends; is perceptible throughout
his correspondence; f is in the letters of Warburton, and
in such as I have quoted of the Wartons; and gradually,
to even Johnson's disturbance, passed from society into the
press, and became a stock theme with the newspapers.
Garrick went too far, however, when he suffered the libeller
Kenrick, not many months after his published attack on
Johnson, to exhibit upon his theatre a play called Faktafs
Wedding; and to make another attempt, the following
season, with a piece called the Widowed Wife. The first
was damned, and, till Shakspeare's fat Jack is forgotten,
is not likely to be heard of again; the second passed into
oblivion more slowly: J but Garrick was brought, by both,
into personal relations with the writer which he lived to
have reason to deplore. Meanwhile, and for some little
time to come, what Joseph Warton had written was but too
true. Garrick and Johnson were entirely off; and in a
* His extraordinary argument in support of the unapproached excellence of a
passage in Oongreve's Mourning Bride (which he held to be superior to anything
in Shakspeare, because the latter "never had six lines together without a fault,"
JBoswell, in. 97) is well known; but notwithstanding this and other abundant
proofs of his insensibility to the., higher and more subtle parts of Shakspeare'.s
genius, his edition was an excellent one, and did noble service to the poet's text—
such was his knowledge of language, and the power of his strong common, sense.
f Garriclc Correspondence, i. 205. But see what Mrs. Piimi say«, Anecdotes,
57-9.
t See Davies's Life of Garrick, ii. 132; and Murphy's .Ufa, ii. 32,33.