# Gray's Biography

By [fixed star](https://paragraph.com/@fixed-star) · 2022-10-21

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There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson's "Gray's Biography" that can be written in all the rooms that are far from a library, but are also full of books for private reading. "... I am glad to agree with ordinary readers, because readers' common sense is free from literary prejudice, so that they can make a final judgment on the belonging of the laurel of poetry beyond the dogma created by carved taste and knowledge."

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This sentence clearly expresses the literacy of ordinary readers and makes their goals seem more noble. In this way, such a time consuming but hardly effective pastime has finally won the praise of such a great man. Dr. Johnson's implication is that ordinary readers are different from critics or scholars. He had no decent education and no extra talent. For him, reading is only for fun, not for imparting knowledge, nor for the sake of decent speech. In this way, out of some instinct, the ordinary reader created something complete for himself from the miscellaneous materials he could access: a portrait, the outline of a certain era, and a set of views on the way of writing. While he was reading, he kept building up some kind of rickety structure, which seemed to be real. Whether he was loved, amused or criticized, all these gave him a moment of satisfaction.

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*Originally published on [fixed star](https://paragraph.com/@fixed-star/gray-s-biography)*