Samuel Johnson lived in another world
But love is only one of many passions; and as it has no great influence upon the sum of life, it has little operation in the dramas of a poet who caught his ideas from the living world and exhibited only what he saw before him.
- Dr. Johnson’s Preface to his edition of Shakespeare’s works (1765). I take my text from W. K. Wimsatt’s Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare (1960)
