Abstract
In 1789 the critic and poet Robert Potter published as part of his The Art of Criticism as exemplified in Dr. Johnson's Lives of the most eminent English Poets a fanciful conversation between Joseph Warton and Samuel Johnson. Potter, at the beginning of the piece, straightforwardly accounts for this fancy: After having been occupied in perusing Dr. Warton's Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, and Dr. Johnson's Lives of the English Poets, the comparison I had made of those two eminent writers, presented to my mind the following vision.' To twentiethcentury readers, this particular pairing and the amount of space (over fifty pages) devoted to the conversation might seem odd, but eighteenthcentury readers would have recognized the critical positions of the two disputants and known that Warton and Johnson were antagonists in a long-lived and on-going critical debate that had peaked recently with the publication of Johnson's Lives and the long-awaited second volume of Warton's Essay (1782). The nature of this dispute is identified quickly in Potter's dream vision:
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