I will at present hear no more of his labours

 Nobody has ever risen quite so rapidly through that chart on the right that puts subjects in order of how many labels they have here as Dr. Johnson and I fear I might be losing what few readers I have if they're not as fixated on him as I am. This post presumably sees him sail by the likes of Michael Donaghy, Carol Ann Duffy and Thomas Hardy but there's still some way to go to get up there with Shakespeare, Larkin and others that I've been writing about for years.

Whatever he's accused of, whether in his own time or by the amended moral orthodoxies of 250 years later, it's often not as bad as it looks and quite often he's not guilty, that was not what he meant and, indeed, ahead of his time.

I'm always drawn to comments on poets, less to see what they tell us about poets but to see what they tell us about their authors' idea of what a poet is.

In Rasselas, discussed by Fred Parker in The skepticism of Rasselas in the Cambridge Companion, Imlac says, 'To be a poet is very difficult. So difficult that I will at present hear no more of his labours.'

They don't all find it difficult. It might not be difficult at all for some but a few paragon examples make it look easy to be very good. Talent is what is mainly required and no amount of hard work will make up for the lack of it.

What Fred Parker takes to be the import of Imlac's view is the,

impossibility of summing up, of stepping outside the condition of humanity for long enough to draw any final conclusions, of rising to general truths which will always be the same.

which sounds like such a conclusion, however paradoxical, in itself. And maybe it's something like the condition that was to give rise to Keats and his 'negative capability' that I always like to bring in when I can. 

Serious allegations of racism and imperialism are brought against Johnson and Rasselas, as one might expect of an C18th Tory describing Abyssinia. He is accsued of equating the Enlightenment with 'imperial progress' but Clement Hawes, in an essay full of 'historiography, universalism and 'idiosyncratic phiolological reconstruction' that I'm not going to set out again here, argues that Johnson was more flexible and ahead of Theodore Adorno. And I'm not entirely surprised to hear that because thinkers and science and art do 'stand on the shoulders of giants', not everything is progress. All those Marxists so beloved on campus circa 1978-81, and before and since, might have been the king's new clothes, theorizing themselves to a standstill whereas Dr. Johnson concentrates on the world as it is and does his best to make sense of it. That makes him anti-imperialist and anti-slavery whereas those disciples of Marx perhaps made a replacement empire of their own stodgy writing and became slaves to it.