Dick Minim

I reread today Johnson's amazing satire of critics, the hilarious narrative of Dick Minim in Idler 60. I forgot that Johnson ridicules what I think we all hate (or should hate) about reading poetry but still succumb to even today: the tendency to not only find the sound echoing the sense, but also the deeper tendency to see the lines as celebrating (as it were) the fact of their own composition--which makes them precisely about what the critic with his "skill" can make evident for you. In other words, Johnson shows us the way critics can read for their own self-aggrandizement by passing this off as precisely the "meaning" of the lines:

...He [Minim] is the great investigator of hidden beauties, and is particularly delighted when he finds "the sound an echo to the sense." He has read all our poets with particular attention to this delicacy of versification, and wonders at the supineness with which their works have been hitherto perused, so that no man has found the sound of a drum in this distich,

When pulpit, drum ecclesiastic,
Was beat with fist instead of a stick;

and that the wonderful lines upon honour and a bubble have hitherto passed without notice,

Honour is like the glassy bubble,
Which costs philosophers such trouble,
Where one part crack'd, the whole does fly,
And wits are crack'd to find out why.

In these verses, says Minim, we have two striking accommodations of the sound to the sense. It is impossible to utter the two lines emphatically without an act like that which they describe; bubble and trouble causing a momentary inflation of the cheeks by the retention of the breath, which is afterwards forcibly emitted, as in the practice of blowing bubbles. But the greatest excellence is in the third line, which is crack'd in the middle to express a crack, and then shivers into monosyllables. Yet has this diamond lain neglected with common stones, and among the innumerable admirers of Hudibras the observation of this superlative passage has been reserved for the sagacity of Minim.