...and who praised Shakespeare's comedie style because it achieved a middling bourgeois currency — "a common intercourse of life, among those who speak...only to be understood, without ambition of elegance ... a conversation above grossness and below refinement." Let us add that his wellknown appeals to...

...injury by the adamant of Shakespeare. If there be, what I believe there is, in every nation a stile which never becomes obsolete, a certain mode of phraseology so consonant and congenial to the analogy2 and principles of its respective language as to remain settled and unaltered;3 this stile...

...represents the eternal spirit of English. "If there be, what I believe there is, in every nation, a stile which never becomes obsolete, a certain mode of phraseology...language as to remain settled and unaltered; this stile is probably to be sought in the common intercourse of life . . . There is a conversation above...

...positions Shakespeare as the mediating term: If there be, what I believe there is, in every nation, a stile which never becomes obsolete, a certain mode of phraseology...language as to remain settled and unaltered; this stile is probably to be sought in the common intercourse of life, among those who speak only to be...

...language seems purely Utopian. He writes If there be, what I believe there is, in every nation, a stile which never becomes obsolete, a certain mode of phraseology...language as to remain settled and unaltered; this stile is probably to be sought in the common intercourse of life, among those who speak only to be...

...Even for literary purposes, Johnson considers that 'a stile which never becomes obsolete' is primarily 'to be sought in the common intercourse of life, among...only to be understood, without ambition of elegance', and he rebukes 'the polite' for rejecting vulgar usage 'when the vulgar is right' (Johnson 1765: xviii)....

...be more than a step on the way to something else. For the first time the language achieved "a stile which never becomes obsolete, a certain mode of phraseology...respective language as to remain settled and unaltered." It was therefore for the first time worthy of an attention not merely antiquarian. This is one of the...

...Johnson: "If there be, what I believe there is, in every nation a style which never becomes obsolete . . . this style is probably to be sought in the common...only to be understood without ambition of elegance" (306). This did not mean that Shakespeare replicated the vulgar language of the uneducated. Instead,...