The miserable detractor will, of
course, instantly begin to rave about such a habit being common:
well and good; but was it ever before described in print, or all
connected with it dissected? He may then vociferate something
about Johnson having touched:- the writer cares not whether
Johnson, who, by the bye, during the last twenty or thirty years,
owing to people having become ultra Tory mad from reading Scott's
novels and the "Quarterly Review," has been a mighty favourite,
especially with some who were in the habit of calling him a half
crazy old fool--touched, or whether he did or not; but he asks
where did Johnson ever describe the feelings which induced him to
perform the magic touch, even supposing that he did perform it?
Again, the history gives an account of a certain book called the
"Sleeping Bard," the most remarkable prose work of the most
difficult language but one, of modern Europe,--a book, for a notice
of which, he believes, one might turn over in vain the pages of any
review printed in England, or, indeed, elsewhere.--So here are two
facts, one literary and the other physiological, for which any
candid critic was bound to thank the author, even as in Romany Rye
there is a fact connected with Iro Norman Myth, for the disclosing
of which, any person who pretends to have a regard for literature
is bound to thank him, namely, that the mysterious Finn or Fingal
of "Ossian's Poems" is one and the same person as the Sigurd
Fofnisbane of the Edda and the Wilkina, and the Siegfried Horn of
the Lay of the Niebelungs.
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