cited by name; and his own wife, Miss Boothby, and Mrs. Piozzi are referred to, though unnamed, in other places. But his greatest obligation was to Savage, to whose information, afforded nearly forty years before these exquisite Lives were undertaken, he makes valuable and (to the credit of Savage's truthfulness) frequent reference.

In thus appealing to his authorities, he no doubt kept in view the caution he had addressed to Warton and others many years before, on the danger and weakness of trusting too readily to information. "Nothing," he says, "but experience could evince the frequency of false information, or enable any man to conceive that so many groundless reports should be propagated as every man of eminence may hear of himself. Some men

relate what they think as what they know; some men of confused memories and habitual inaccuracy ascribe to one man what belongs to another; and some talk on without thought or care. A few men are sufficient to broach falsehoods, which are afterwards innocently diffused by successive relaters." "

He has been accused of giving too much importance to the attacks of Tom Brown and the criticisms of Dennis, but most improperly so. True it is that Dryden and Pope have outlived their antagonists, but both Brown and Dennis exercised an important influence on the reputations of the writers they attacked. Let us not be too severe :

"Ev'n such small critics some regard may claim,
Preserved in Milton's or in Shakespeare's name."
POPE: Epistle to Arbuthnot.

Brown and Dennis, both able men, will now live chiefly through the great poets they attacked and the proper importance which Johnson gave to their writings from his knowledge of the influence such satire and criticism exercised on the age in which he himself chose to be (and was) a poet. When writing the Lives of Wordsworth and Keats, we must not forget the injurious criticisms of the Edinburgh,' or the bitter notice of the Quarterly. The next generation will no doubt wonder in what way poetic reputations could have been injured by such

6

5 Review of Warton's Essay on Pope.

criticisms, as we ourselves wonder in what way Dryden could have been hurt by Brown's light shafts or Milbourne's heavy artillery, or Pope's reputation (high as it was) injured, even for a season, by the sullen asperities of Dennis.

Though his great undertaking was unforeseen, and not of his seeking, Johnson was not unprepared for it. He had been an author of high reputation for forty years, and Cowley, the earliest poet of whom he undertook to treat, had died within less than half a century of his own birth. One of the dreams of his youth had been a Life of Dryden,' and we casually learn that (with this very view) he sought for information about him from Cibber, whose means of information had indeed been great. His first poem ('London') was admired by Pope, who dragged it out from a mass of anonymous poems by the dunces of the day, and foresaw (if I may use his own expression") the greatness of his young admirer.

Johnson considered the Life of Cowley as the best of the series on account, says Boswell, of the dissertation it contains on the Metaphysical Poets, and the careful discrimination to be found in it of the characteristics of Wit. Yet few will agree with him in his preference, and we may perhaps trace his partiality to another cause. It was the first written of the series, and cost more trouble than any of the others-for he had to turn to books, and read not only Cowley, Donne, and Cleveland, but to elucidate his metaphysical extracts with a commentary on what, when he began, he knew but imperfectly; whereas in his Lives of Dryden and Pope he was writing from memory and from materials immediately within reach. His noble panegyric on Paradise Lost' might have been pronounced at Sir Joshua's table, and his famous parallel between Dryden and Pope was, it is easy to see, and as his MS. shows us, written at a heat.

As a piece of English composition there is no better life of Milton than Johnson's brief and admirable narrative; Todd is more full and accurate, and Brydges more enthusiastic and impartial, but the former is cumbrous and unmethodical, the latter Life of Pope.' He applies it to Dryden.

VOL. I.

b

pleasant but superficial. Johnson (he had no predecessor of name) has not been outstripped.

Passing over the political objections to the life-for mankind (I fear) will long differ and dispute about the political character of Milton-I would venture to affirm that no one has written finer or truer things about Paradise Lost' than Johnson in this Life. His alleged virulence is indeed always more in the manner of his matter than the matter itself. He had no inclination to narrate the events of Milton's career; and tells us in the very outset of the memoir, that he would have contented himself with the addition of a few notes to Fenton's elegant Abridgment, but that a new narrative, for uniformity's sake, was thought necessary. What was forced upon him he at least performed with sincerity; and the hold that his memoir has had upon mankind may be best illustrated by a passage in Lord Byron :

A little heavy, but no less divine:
An independent being in his day-

Learn'd, pious, temperate in love and wine:

But his life falling into Johnson's way,

We're told this great high-priest of all the Nine
Was whipt at college-a harsh sire, odd spouse,
For the first Mrs. Milton left his house."

:

That Milton suffered the indignity of corporal correction at college is now, among those that read, pretty generally exploded; but it will be long before the impression is thoroughly rooted out, advanced as it is by Johnson, and countenanced by Byron in a poem like Don Juan.' That Shakespeare stole deer, and that Milton was whipt at college, will long continue (I fear) among the vulgar errors of our literature.

The Life of Addison was the first of the second series of his prefaces, and contains some of his happiest characteristics. Disliking Addison for his politics, he loved him for his humour, his exquisite English, and the moral tendency of his pages.

There is little to correct in Johnson's Life of Swift, and research since he wrote has rather added to our information, than called in question the statements he put forth.

The cause of Johnson's supposed personal dislike to Swift has not been ascertained. Boswell, admitting the bias, is at a loss to account for it. But the reason was probably simple. The best of men are beset with prejudices, and Johnson had at least his full share. He remembered a kindness, more especially one in early life (witness his partiality for Warburton), and forgave but did not forget a neglect. When young, and known (at least among authors) as the writer of a vigorous satire, he was offered the mastership of a charity school, "provided he could obtain the degree of Master of Arts," without which, by the statutes of the school, he was inadmissible. The salary was sixty pounds a-year, and Lord Gower interested himself by letter to obtain through Swift the required diploma. Swift, it is supposed, withheld his recommendation, for Johnson, to whom the place was In other of the utmost consequence, failed in obtaining it. words, Swift refused or neglected him, when a kind word would have been a real charity to the rarest merit.

With less probability, other reasons are assigned: "he seemed to me," writes Boswell, "to have an unaccountable prejudice against Swift; for I once took the liberty to ask him if Swift had personally offended him, and he told me he had not." He was certainly, as Scott says, no friend to the fame of Swift.7

I am thus particular in referring to Johnson's 'Life of Swift,' clouded as it is with an air of constrained indifference, free as it is from his wonted assumption of superiority. There is throughout an evident struggle against a hatred burning within him; and when his pen is becoming bitter, he seems glad to escape, and to borrow a description from mild Dr. Delany. How otherwise did the filth of Swift's writings pass without Johnson's chastisement - without those reflections which the names of Stella, Varina, and Vanessa could not fail to awaken in a mind so well principled as his?

The Life of Savage was written when Johnson was a young man, and from the interest of its story, and the admirable manner in which that story is told, is deservedly looked upon 7 Misc. Works, ed. 1834, vol. ii. p. 441.

as one of the best biographies in the English language.

It

is, however, unduly proportioned, when contrasted with the series of Lives into which it was somewhat violently introduced, for the merits of Savage as a poet can give him but a very slender claim to so lengthened a biography. But the life was originally written as a tale accompanied by a moral, and with no view whatever to a series of Lives. It would indeed be difficult in that sense to tell the story of Savage in fewer words than Johnson; and this he seems himself to have felt, for the Life as printed among the Poets differs from the first edition only in the alteration of an almost unimportant passage, and in the omission of certain extracts, meant at first for filling. It was a work of necessity and love. "I wrote," he observed in after life," forty-eight of the printed octavo pages of the Life of Savage at a sitting; but then I sat up all night." Had he continued at this speed, he would have written the whole Life at four sittings, for the original edition, to which he referred, is contained in one hundred and eighty pages.

The Life of Pope,' for the facts it contains-facts first found in Johnson-is certainly the most important of the Lives. It is indeed a noble specimen of biography-and I will add (in spite of some few words), of English. That I have partly formed my opinion from Mr. Croker (whose knowledge of Pope is undoubted) will I am sure in no way detract from the value of my judgment in this particular.

When Boswell, in conversation with Burke, characterised the 'Life of Young' as a work possessing a considerable share of merit, and displaying a pretty successful imitation of Johnson's style, Burke vehemently opposed him. "No, no," he exclaimed, "it is not a good imitation of Johnson; it has all his pomp, without his force; it has all the nodosities of the oak, without its strength; it has all the contortions of the sibyl, without the inspiration." As if he had no sense of the sarcastic criticism of Burke, Croft bound up his copy of the Lives (which I have seen) with this lettering, "Johnson's Beauties and Deformities;" his own part of the book exhibiting the deformities of Johnson rather exaggerated than improved. Even in his few good