Another salvaged post (originally 1/25/2009):
It certainly sounds like Johnson. It actually puts me in mind of Moses Hadas, thought not as wickedly clever (‘I have read your book, and much like it’). And though it isn’t ancient, it’s still of interest.
There’s a common quotation attributed to Samuel Johnson, in a form such as this:
“Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.”
No one, as far as I know, has found the source, and doing my own hunting I found an interesting Latin version in the Classical Journal XXV, March-June 1822) in elegiacs:
BONA ET NOVA
Edidit Otto libros, in queis bona multa videbis ;
Et nova multa libris miscuit Otto suis.
Laude tamen caruit : vis me tibi dicere, quare ?
Non bona quae nova sunt, non nova quae bona sunt.
I can’t be sure of the author.
I did find one person who ascribed the familiar English version to “Soapy Sam”, who was not Samuel Johnson but the orator and famed anti-evolutionist (and T.H. Huxley debate-opponent) Samuel Wilberforce. That turned up nothing.
The earliest use of the sentiment that I could dig up comes from letter XIV by the mysterious Rev. Martin Sherlock (1792) in which, passing judgment on the letters of Lord Chesterfield, he notes that all of his advice could be found in French schoolbooks and closes as follows:
“In general, throughout the work, what is new is not good; and what is good is not new.”
I’d love to find out who, if anyone, can be said to have originated the phrase, and I would love for it to be Johnson. But in my investigations it seems to be popular in both senses of the word, and despite that still useful. I’ll stow it in my bag of rhetorical tricks.