Samuel Johnson should be best known as the father of modern literary criticism. Before him, there were mostly what we would today call works of literary theory, such as Sir Philip Sidney’s “Art of Poetry”, which explained the nature of literature. That had mostly been the case in literary studies since antiquity. Commentary was reserved for the Bible and the works of theologians. Johnson, on the other hand, made observations about the author and about lines within the texts of Shakespeare and all the other major poets in English in the century before he wrote so as to make the texts more accessible and therefore pleasurable for the reader and so led to the false conclusion that criticism was a parasitic discipline that lived off the literature upon which it commented rather than was the application of the personality, wisdom and wit of the commentator to make these secular texts come alive by providing comments on them.