executed was censured by a shoemaker who happened to 
     stop in his way at the Venus of Apelles.

     Johnson continues in this vein, pointing out further 
rivalries between the new novel and the older modes of book 
learning:

          In the romances formerly written, every transaction 
     and sentiment was so remote from all that passes among 
     men, that the reader was in very little danger of making 
     any applications to himself; the virtues and crimes were 
     equally beyond his sphere of activity; and he amused 
     himself with heroes and with traitors, deliverers and 
     persecutors, as with beings of another species, whose 
     actions were regulated upon motives of their own, and 
     who had neither faults nor excellencies in common with