Teaser quote: When Sir Egerton Brydges read that for the first time, as a young man, he shat the bed with rage. Fifty years later he was still so mad he wrote an essay (thirty-one pages in the copy I have), basically saying Johnson had no soul, no feelings, and that Collins compares favorably to virtually every other poet who ever lived, including Aeschylus and Euripides. I’m exaggerating only slightly. The critic really does come off unhinged, reminding me of Walter Bronson’s comment (1898), excusing the ecstasy of one of Collins’s early reviewers: “If this is not criticism, at least it is rapture.”