Jean H. Hagstrum Thus literary research is often based upon a desire to determine the extent of an authors originality. If “the highest praise of genius is original invention’ — and no dictum of Johnson is more characteristic than this — it follows that criticism must be silent until it is determined just how original the author was; and that can be discovered only by means of scholarly tools. The apparatus criticus, which displays what the author knew, quoted, copied and echoed, has never been justified on better grounds than these. At least when he wrote his most important critical document, the Preface to Shakespeare Johnson considered historical investigation of literature to be of far greater dignity than determining the rank of any particular performance.
