?7f 
 
 CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 G. B. Sabine 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PR 553.J69 1878 
 
 Johnson's chief lives of the poets, being 
 
 3 1924 013 267 335 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis bool< is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013267335 
 
JOHNSON'S CHIEF 
 LIVES OF THE POETS 
 
 
 Being those of 
 
 MILTON 
 
 ADDISON 
 
 DRYDEN 
 
 POPE 
 
 SWIFT 
 
 GRAY 
 
 MACAULAY'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 
 
 Second Edition 
 WtiA a Preface and Notes 
 
 BY 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 To which are Appended 
 
 MACAULAY'S AND CARLVLE'S ESSAYS ON 
 BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 1889. 
 

 Copyright, 1B78, 
 
 BY 
 
 HBHKy Holt Sl Co- 
 
PUBLISHERS' NOTES. 
 
 The Appendix has been included in consequence of a 
 lately-expressed opinion, that " If a young person were to 
 ask from what portions of English Literature he could gain 
 most benefit in a single sitting, nothing could be more 
 safely recommended than Macaulay's Essay on Boswell's 
 Life of Johnson, and Carlyle's rejoinder to it." 
 
 TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 After the first edition was published, Mr. Arnold wrote 
 some notes for the use of Students, which are given on 
 pages 431-437. He also made some slight changes in the 
 preface, which have been substantially incorporated in this 
 volume. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Johnson's Chief Lives, by Matthew Arnold, , . . . i 
 Life of Johnson, by Lord Macaulay, ..... xiii 
 
 Milton 3 
 
 Dryoen, c 61 
 
 Swift, 151 
 
 Addison, , 179 
 
 Pope, 221 
 
 Gray, , . 321 
 
 Macaulay on Boswell's Life of Johnson, ..... 333 
 Carlyle on Boswell's Life of Johnson, .... 373 
 
 Notes 43^ 
 
 Index, . 439 
 
JOHNSON'S CHIEF LIVES. 
 
 By Matthew Arnold. 
 
 Da mihi, Domine, scire quod sciendum est — ' ' Grant that the knowledge 
 I get may be the knowledge which is worth having !" — the spirit of that 
 prayer ought to rule our education. How little it does rule it, every dis- 
 cerning man will acknowledge. Life is short and our faculties of atten- 
 tion and of recollection are limited ; in education we proceed as if our life 
 were endless, and our powers of attention and recollection inexhaustible. 
 We have not time or strength to deal with half of the matters which are 
 thrown upon our minds, and they prove a useless load to us. When some 
 one talked to Themistocles of an art of memory, he answered, " Teach 
 me rather to forget !" The sarcasm well criticises the fatal want of pro- 
 portion between what we put into our minds and their real needs and 
 powers. 
 
 From the time when fir.st I was led to think about education, this want 
 of proportion is what has most struck me. It is the great obstacle to 
 progress, yet it is by no means remarked and contended against as it 
 should be. It hardly begins to present itself until we pass beyond the 
 strict elements of education — beyond the acquisition, I mean, of reading, 
 of writing, and of calculating, so far as the operations of common life re- 
 quire. But the moment we pass beyond these, it begins to appear. 
 Languages, grammar, literature, history, geography, mathematics, the 
 knowledge of Nature — what of these is to be taught, how much, and how ? 
 There is no clear, well-grounded consent. The same with religion. 
 Religion is surely to be taught, but what of it is to be taught, and how ? 
 A clear, well-grounded consent is again wanting. And taught in such 
 fashion as things are now, how often must a candid and sensible man, if 
 he could be offered an art of memory to secure all that he has learned of 
 them, as to a very great deal of it be inclined to say with Themistocles, 
 " Teach me rather to forget !" 
 
 In England the common notion seems to be that education is advanced 
 in two ways principally : by forever adding fresh matters of instruction, 
 and by preventing uniformity. I should be inclined to prescribe just the 
 opposite course ; to prescribe a severe limitation of the number of matters 
 taught, a severe uniformity in the line of study followed. Wide ranging 
 and the multiplication of matters to be investigated belong to private 
 study, to the development of special aptitudes in the individual learner. 
 
11 MATTHEW ARNOLD ON 
 
 and to the demands which they raise in him. But separate from all this 
 should be kept the broad plain lines of study for almost universal use. 
 I say almost universal, because they must of necessity vary a little with 
 the varying conditions of men. Whatever the pupil finds set out for him 
 upon these lines, he should learn ; therefore it ought not to be too much 
 in quantity. The essential thing is that it should be well chosen. If once 
 we can get it well chosen, the more uniformly it can be kept to, the better. 
 The teacher will be more at home ; and besides, when we have got what 
 is good and suitable, there is small hope of gain, and great certainty of 
 risk, in departing from it. 
 
 No such lines are laid out, and perhaps no one could be trusted to lay 
 them out authoritatively. But to amuse one's self with laying them out 
 in fancy is a good exercise for one's thoughts. One may lay them out 
 for this or that description of pupil, in this or that branch of study. The 
 wider the interest of the branch of study taken, and the more extensive 
 the class of pupils concerned, the better for our purpose. Suppose we 
 take the department of letters. It is interesting to lay out in one's mind 
 the ideal line of study to be followed by all who have to learn Latin and 
 Greek. But it is still more interesting to lay out the ideal line of study to 
 be followed by all who are concerned with that body of literature which 
 exists in English, because this class is so much more numerous among 
 us. The thing would be, one imagines, to begin with a very brief intro- 
 ductory sketch of our subject ; then to fix a certain series of works to 
 serve as what the French, taking an expression from the builder's busi- 
 ness, call points de repere — points which stand as so many natural centres, 
 and by returning to which we can always find our way again, if we are 
 embarrassed ; finally, to mark out a number of illustrative and represen- 
 tative works connecting themselves with each of these points de repire. 
 In the Introductory sketch we are among generalities, in the group of 
 illustrative works we are among details ; generalities and details have, 
 both of them, their perils for the learner. It is evident that, for purposes 
 of educauon, the most important parts by far in our scheme are what we 
 call the points de repere. To get these rightly chosen and thoroughly 
 known is tne great matter. For my part, in thinking of this or that line 
 of study which human minds follow, I feel always prompted to seek, first 
 and foremost, the leading /oz«/j de repire in it. 
 
 In editing, for the use of the young, the group of chapters which are 
 now commonly distmguished as those of the Babylonian Isaiah, I drew 
 attention to their remarkable fitness for serving as a point of this kind to 
 the student of universal history. But a work which by many is regarded . 
 as simply and solely a document of religion, there is difficulty, perhaps, in 
 employing for historical and literary purposes. With works of a secular 
 character one is on safer ground. And for years past, whenever I have 
 had occasion to use Johnson's " Lives of the Poets," the thought has 
 
yoiTN SON'S CHIEF LIVES. ill 
 
 struck me how admirable a point de replre, or fixed centre of the sort de- 
 scribed above, these lives might be made to furnish for the student of 
 English literature. If we could but take, I have said to myself, the most 
 important of the lives in Johnson's volumes, and leave out all the rest, 
 what a text-book we should have ! The volumes at present are a work to 
 stand in a library, " a work which no gentleman's library should be with- 
 out." But we want to get from them a text-book, to be in the hands of 
 every one who desires even so much as a general acquaintance with Eng- 
 lish literature — and so much acquaintance as this who does not desire ? 
 The work as Johnson published it is not fitted to serve as such a text- 
 book ; it is too extensive and contains the lives of many poets quite insig- 
 nificant. Johnson supplied lives of all whom the booksellers proposed to 
 include in their collection of British poets ; he did not choose the poets 
 himself, although he added two or three to those chosen by the booksellers. 
 Whatever Johnson did in the department of literary biography and criti- 
 cism possesses interest and deserves our attention. But in his " Lives 
 of the Poets' ' there are six of pre-eminent interest ; because they are the 
 lives of men who, while the rest in the collection are of in f erior rank, 
 stand out as names of the first class in English literature — Milton, Dry- 
 den, Swift, Addison, Pope, Gray. These six writers differ among them- 
 selves, of course, in power and importance, and every one can see that, 
 if we were following certain modes of literary classification, Milton would 
 have to be placed on a solitary eminence far above any of them. But if, 
 without seeking a close view of individual differences, we form a large 
 and liberal first class among English writers, all these six personages — 
 Milton, Dryden, Swift, Addison, Pope, Gray — must, I think, be placed 
 in it. Their lives cover a space of more than a century and a half, from 
 1608, the year of Milton's birth, down to 1771, the date of the death of 
 Gray. Through this space of more than a century and a half the six lives 
 conduct us. We follow the course of what Warburton well calls ' ' the 
 most agreeable subject in the world, which is literary history, "and follow 
 it in the lives of men of letters of the first class. And the writer of their 
 lives is himself, too, a man of letters of the first class. Malone calls 
 Johnson " the brightest ornament of the eighteenth century." He is 
 justly to be called, at any rate, a man of letters of the first class, and the 
 greatest power in English letters during the eighteenth century. And in 
 his " Lives of the Poets," in this mature and most characteristic work, not 
 finished until 1781, and " which I wrote," as he himself tells iis, " in my 
 usual way, dilatorily and hastily, unwilling to work and working with 
 vigor and haste," we have Johnson mellowed by years, Johnson in his 
 ripeness and plenitude treating the subject which he loved best and knew 
 best. Much of it he could treat with the knowledge and sure tact of a 
 contemporary ; even from Milton and Dryden he was scarcely further 
 separated than our generation is from Burns and Scott. Having all these 
 
iv MATTHEW ARNOLD ON 
 
 recommendations, his " Lives of the Poets" do indeed truly stand for 
 what Boswell calls them, " the work which of all Dr. Johnson's writings 
 will perhaps be read most generally and with most pleasure. ' ' And in 
 the lives of the six chief personages of the work, the lives of Milton 
 Dryden, Swift, Addison, Pope, and Gray, we have its very kernel and 
 quintessence. True, Johnson is not at his best in all of these six lives 
 equally ; one might have wished, in particular, for a better life of Gray 
 from him '^till these six lives contain very much of his best work ; and it 
 is not amiss, perhaps, to have specimens of a great man's less excellent 
 work by the side of his best. By their subjects, at any rate, the six 
 lives are of pre-eminent interest. In these we have Johnson's series of 
 critical biographies relieved of whatever is less significant, retaining 
 nothing which is not highly significant, brought within easy and con- 
 venient compass, and admirably fitted to serve as a point de repere, a. fixed 
 and thoroughly known centre of departure and return, to the student of 
 English literature. 
 
 I know of no such first-raie piece of literature, for supplying in this- 
 way the wants of the literary student, existing at all in any other language : 
 or existing in our own language, for any period except the period which 
 Johnson's six lives cover. A student cannot read them without gaining 
 from them, consciously or unconsciously, an insight into the history oj 
 English literature and life. He would find great benefit, let me add, from 
 reading in connection with each biography something of the author with 
 whom it deals ; the first two books, say, of ' ' Paradise Lost, 'in connec- 
 tion with the life of Milton ; " Absalom and Achitophel, ' ' and the " Dedi- 
 cation of the.(Eneid, " in connection with the life of Dryden ; in connection 
 with Swift's life, the " Battle of the Books ;" with Addison's, the " Co- 
 verley Papers ;" with Pope's, the imitations of the " Satires" and " Epis- 
 tles" of Horace. The " Elegy in a Country Churchyard " everybody 
 knows, and will have it present to his mind when he reads the life of 
 Gray. But of the other works which I have mentioned how little can this 
 be said ; to how many of us are Pope, and Addison, and Dryden, and 
 Swift, and even Milton himself, mere names, about whose date and his- 
 tory and supposed characteristics of style we may have learned by rote 
 something from a hand-book, but of the real men and of the power of their 
 works we know nothing ! From Johnson's biographies the student will 
 get a sense of what the real men were, and with this sense fresh in his 
 mind he will find the occasion propitious for acquiring also, in the way 
 pointed out, a sense of the power of their works. 
 
 This will seem to most people a very unambitious discipline. But the 
 fault of most of the disciplines proposed in education is that they are by 
 far too ambitious. Our improvers of education are almost always for 
 proceeding by way of augmentation and complication ; reduction and 
 simplification, I say, is what is rather required. We give the learner too 
 
yo///vsojv's Chief lives v 
 
 much to do, and we are over-zealous to tell him what he ought to think. 
 Johnson himself has admirably marked the real line of our education 
 through letters. He says in his life of Pope; "Judgment is forced 
 upon us by experience. He that reads many books must compare one! 
 opinion or one style with another ; and, when he compares, must necesj 
 sarily distinguish, reject, and prefer." Nothing could be better. Th^ 
 aim and end of education through letters is to get this experience. Our 
 being told by another what its results will properly be found to be, is not, 
 even if we are told aright, at all the same thing as getting the experience 
 for ourselves. The discipline, therefore, which puts us in the way of 
 getting it cannot be called an inconsiderable or inefficacious one. We 
 should take care not to imperil its acquisition by refusing to trust to it in 
 its simplicity, by being eager to add, set right, and annotate. It is much 
 to secure the reading, by young English people, of the lives of the six 
 chief poets of our nation between the years 1650 and 1750, related by our 
 foremost man of letters of the eighteenth century. It is much to secure 
 their reading, under the stimulus of Johnson's interesting recital and 
 forcible judgments, famous specimens of the authors whose lives ar^ 
 before them. Do not let us insist on also reviewing in detail and sup- 
 plementing Johnson's work for them, on telling them what they ought 
 really and definitely to think about the six authors and about the exact 
 place of each in English literature. Perhaps our pupils are not ripe for 
 it ; perhaps, too, we have not Johnson's interest and Johnson's force ; we 
 are not the power in letters for our century which he was for his. We 
 may be pedantic, obscure, dull, every thing that bores, rather than every 
 thing that stimulates ; and so Johnson and his lives will repel, and 
 will not be received, because we insist on being received along with 
 them. 
 
 And again, as we bar a learner's approach to Homer and Virgil by our 
 chevaux-de-frise of elaborate grammar, so we are apt to stop his way to a 
 piece of English literature by imbedding it in a mass of notes and additional 
 matter. Mr. Croker's edition of Boswell's " Life of Johnson" is a good 
 example of the labor and ingenuity which may be spent upon a master- 
 piece, with the result, after all, really of rather encumbering than illus- 
 trating it. All knowledge may be in itself good, but this kind of editing 
 seems to proceed upon the notion that we have only one book to read in 
 the course of our life, or else that we have eternity to read in. What can 
 it matter to our generation whether it was Molly Aston or Miss Boothby 
 whose preference for Lord Lyttelton made Johnson jealous, and produced 
 in his " Life of Lyttelton" a certain tone of disparagement ? With the 
 young reader, at all events, our great endeavor should be to bring him 
 face to face with masterpieces, and to hold him there, not distracting or 
 rebutting him with needless excursions or trifling details. 
 
VI MATTffEW ARNOLD ON 
 
 I should like to think that a number of young people might be brought to 
 know an important period of our literary and intellectual history, through 
 means of the lives of six of its leading and representative authors, told 
 by a great man. I should like to think that they would go on, under the 
 stimulus of the lives, to acquaint themselves with some leading and repre- 
 sentative work of each author. In the six lives they would at least have 
 secured, I think, a most valuable /«»< de repire in the history of our Eng- 
 lish life and literature, a point from which afterward to find their way ; 
 whether they might desire to ascend upward to our anterior literature, or 
 to come downward to the literature of yesterday and of the present. 
 
 The six lives cover a period of literary and intellectual movement in 
 which we are all profoundly interested. It is the passage of our nation tu 
 prose and reason ; the passage to a type of thought and expression, mod- 
 ern, European, and which on the whole is ours at the present day, from a 
 type antiquated, peculiar, and which is ours no longer. The period be- 
 gins with a prose like this of Milton : ' ' They who to states and governors 
 of the commonwealth direct their speech, high court of Parliament ! or, 
 wanting such access in a private condition, write that which they foresee 
 may advance the public good ; I suppose them, if at the beginning of 
 no mean endeavor, not a little altered and moved inwardly in their minds. " 
 It ends with a prose like this of Smollett : " My spirit began to accommo- 
 date itself to my beggarly fate, and I became so mean as to go down to- 
 ward Wapping, with an intention to inquire for an old school-fellow, 
 who, I understood, had got the command of a small coasting-vessel 
 then in the river, and implore his assistance." These are extreme in- 
 stances ; but they give us no unfaithful notion of the change in our prose 
 between the reigns of Charles I. and of George III. Johnson has recorded 
 his own impression of the extent of the change and of its salutariness. 
 Boswell gave him a book to read, written in 1702 by the English chaplain 
 of a regiment stationed in Scotland. " It is sad«tuff, sir," said Johnson, 
 after reading it ; " miserably written, as books in general then were. 
 There is now an elegance of style universally diffused. No man now 
 writes so ill as Martin's ' Account of the Hebrides ' is written. A man 
 could not write so ill if he should try. Set a. merchant's clerk now to 
 write, and he'll do better." 
 
 It seems as if a simple and natural prose were a thing which we might 
 expect to come easy to communities of men, and to come early to them ; 
 but we know from experience that it is not so. Poetry and the poetic 
 form of expression naturally precede prose. We see this in ancient 
 Greece. We see prose forming itself there gradually and with labor ; we 
 see it passing through more than one stage before it attains to thorough 
 propriety and lucidity, long after forms of consummate accuracy have al- 
 ready been reached and used in poetry. It is a people's growth in 
 practical life and its native turn for developing this life and for making 
 
yOffNSON'S CHIEF LIVES. Vll 
 
 progress in it which awaken the desire for a good prose — a prose plain, 
 direct, intelligible, serviceable. A dead language, the Latin, for a long 
 time furnished the nations of Europe with an instrument of the kind supe- 
 rior to any which they had yet discovered in their own tongue. But 
 nations such as England and France, called to a great historic life, and 
 with powerful interests and gifts either social or practical, were sure to 
 feel the need of having a sound prose of their own, and to bring such a. 
 prose forth. They brought it forth in the seventeenth century ; France 
 first, afterward England. 
 
 The Restoration marks the real moment of birth of our modern Eng- 
 lish prose. Men of lucid and direct mental habit there were, such as Chil- 
 lingworth, in whom before the Restoration the desire and the commence- 
 ments of a. modern prose show themselves. There were men like Bar- 
 row, weighty and powerful, whose mental habit the old prose suited, who 
 continued its forms and locutions after the Restoration. But the hour was 
 come for the new prose, and it grew and prevailed. In Johnson's time 
 its victory had long been assured, and the old style seemed barbarous. 
 Johnson himself wrote a prose decidedly modern. The reproach conveyed 
 in the phrase ' ' Johnsonian English ' ' must not mislead us. It is aimed 
 at his words, not at his structure. In Johnson's prose the words are 
 often pompous and long, but the structure is always plain and modern. 
 The prose writers of the eighteenth century have indeed their mannerisms 
 and phrases which are no longer ours. Johnson says of Milton's blame 
 of the universities for permitting young men designed for orders in the 
 Church to act in plays : ' ' This is sufficiently peevish in a man, who, when 
 he mentions his exile from college, relates, with great luxuriance, the 
 compensation which the pleasures of the theatre afford him. Plays were 
 therefore only criminal when they were acted by academics. ' ' We should 
 nowadays not say peevish here, nor luxuriance nor academics. Yet the 
 style is ours by its organism, if not by its phrasing. It is by its organism 
 — an organism opposed to length and involvement, and enabling us to be 
 clear, plain, and short — that English style after the Restoration breaks 
 with the style of the times preceding it, finds the true law of prose, and 
 becomes modern ; becomes, in spite of superficial differences, the style of 
 our own day. 
 
 Burnet has pointed out how we are under obligations in this matter to 
 Charles II., whom Johnson described as " the last King of England who 
 was a man of parts. ' ' A king of England by no means fulfils his whole 
 duty by being a man of parts, or by loving and encouraging art, science, 
 and literature. Yet the artist and the student of the natural sciences will 
 always feel a kindness toward the two Charleses for their interest in art and 
 science ; and modern letters, too, have their debt to Charles II., although 
 it may be quite true that that prince, as Burnet says, " had little or no 
 literature," " The king had little or no literature, but," continues Bur- 
 
Vni MATTHEW ARNOLD ON 
 
 net, " true and good sense, and had got a right notion of style ; for he 
 was in France at the time when they were much set on reforming their 
 language. It soon appeared that he had a true taste. So this helped to 
 raise the value of these men" (Tillotson and others), " when the king ap- 
 proved of the style their discourses generally ran in, which was clear, 
 plain, and short.'" 
 
 It is the victory of this prose style, "clear, plain, and short,'' over 
 what Burnet calls " the old style, long and heavy," which is the distin- 
 guished achievement, in the history of English letters, of the century fol- 
 lowing the Restoration. From the first it proceeded rapidly and was never 
 checked. Burnet says of the Chancellor Finch, Earl of Nottingham : 
 " He was long much admired for his eloquence, but it was labored and 
 aflected, and he saw it much despised before he died." A like revolution 
 of taste brought about a general condemnation of our old prose style, 
 imperfectly disengaged from the style of poetry. By Johnson's time the 
 new style, the style of prose, was altogether paramount in its own proper 
 domain, and in its pride of victorious strength had invaded also the do- 
 main of poetry. 
 
 That invasion is now visited by us with a condemnation not less strong 
 and general than the condemnation which the eighteenth century passed 
 upon the unwieldy prose of its predecessors. But let us be careful to do 
 justice while we condemn. A thing good in its own place may be bad 
 out of it. Prose reqr'res a different style from poetry. Poetry, no 
 doubt, is more excellent in itself than prose. In poetry man finds the 
 highest and most beautiful expression of that which is in him. We had 
 far better poetry than the poetry of the eighteenth century before that 
 century arrived, we have had better since it departed. Like the Greeks, 
 and unlike the French, we can point to an age of poetry anterior to our 
 age of prose, eclipsing our age of prose in glory, and fixing the future charac- 
 ter and conditions of our literature. We do well to place our pride in the 
 Elizabethan age and Shakespeare, as the Greeks place theirs in Homer. 
 We did well to return in the present century to the poetry of that older age 
 for illumination and inspiration, and to put aside in a great measure the 
 poetry and poets intervening between Milton and Wordsworth. Milton, 
 in whom our great poetic age expired, was the last of the immortals. Of 
 the five poets whose lives follow his in our present volume, three Dry- 
 den, Addison, and Swift — are eminent prose-writers as well as poets ; two 
 of the three — Swift and Addison — far more distinguished as prose- 
 writers than as poets. The glory of English literature is in poetry, 
 and in poetry the strength of the eighteenth century does not lie. 
 
 Nevertheless, the eighteenth century accomplished for us an immense 
 literary progress, and its very shortcomings in poetry were an instrument 
 to that progress, and served it. The example of Germany may show us 
 what a nation loses from having no prose style, The practical genius of 
 
yOffNSON'S CHIEF LIVES. ix 
 
 our people could not but urge irresistibly to the production of a real prose 
 style, because for the purposes of modern life the old English prose, the 
 prose of Milton and Taylor, is cumbersome, unavailable, impossible. A 
 style of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance, was wanted. These are 
 the qualities of a serviceable prose style. Poetry has a different logic, as 
 Coleridge said, from prose ; poetical style follows another law of evolution 
 than the style of prose. But there is no doubt that a style of regularity, uni- 
 formity, precision, balance, will acquire a yet stronger hold upon the mind 
 of a nation, if it is adopted in poetry as well as in prose, and so comes to 
 govern both. This is what happened in France. To the practical, 
 modern, and social genius of the French, a true prose was indispensable. 
 They produced one of conspicuous excellence, supremely powerful and 
 influential in the last century, the first to come, and standing at first 
 alone, a modern prose. French prose is marked in the highest degree 
 by the qualities of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. With 
 little opposition from any deep-seated and imperious poetic instincts, the 
 French made their poetry conform to the law which was moulding their 
 prose. French poetry became marked with the qualities of regularity, 
 uniformity, precision, balance. This may have been bad for French 
 poetry, but it was good for French prose. It heightened the perfection 
 with which those qualities, the true qualities of prose, were impressed 
 upon it. When England, at the Restoration, desired a modern prose, and 
 began to create it, our writers turned naturally to French literature, which 
 had just accomplished the very process which engaged them. The king's 
 acuteness and taste, as we have seen, helped. Indeed, to the admission 
 of French influence of all kinds, Charles II. 's character and that of his 
 court were but too favorable. But the influence of the French writers 
 was, at that moment, on the whole, fortunate, and seconded what was a 
 vital and necessary effort in our literature. Our literature required a 
 prose which conformed to the true law of prose ; and, that it might acquire 
 this the more surely, it compelled poetry, as in France, to conform itself 
 to the law of prose likewise. The classic verse of French poetry was the 
 Alexandrine, a measure favorable to the qualities of regfularity, uniformity, 
 precision, balance. Gradually a measure favorable to those very same- 
 qualities — the ten-syllable couplet — established itself as the classic verse 
 of England, until in the eighteenth century it had become the' ruling form 
 of our poetry. Poetry, or rather the use of verse, entered in a remarkable 
 degree, duririg that century, into the whole of the daily life of the civilized 
 classes ; and the poetry of the century was a perpetual school of the qual- 
 ities requisite for a good prose, the qualities of regularity, uniformity, 
 precision, balance. This may have been of no great service to English 
 poetry, although to say that it has been of no service at all, to say that the 
 eighteenth century has in no respect changed the conditions, for gnglis^ti 
 
X MATTHEW ARNOLD ON 
 
 poetical style, or that it has changed them for the worse, would be 
 untrue. But it was undeniably of signal service to that which was the 
 great want and work of the hour, English prose. 
 
 Do not let us, therefore, hastily despise Johnson and his century for 
 their defective poetry and criticism of poetry. True, Johnson is capable 
 of saying, " Surely no man could have fancied that he read ' Lycidas ' 
 with pleasure had he not known the author !" True, he is capable of 
 maintaining that " the description of the temple in Congreve's ' Mourning 
 Bride ' was the finest poetical passage he had ever read— he recollected 
 none in Shakespeare equal to it. " But we are to conceive of Johnson and 
 of his century as having a special task committed to them, the establish- 
 ment of English prose ; and as capable of being warped and narrowed in 
 their judgfments of poetry by this exclusive task. Such is the common 
 course and law of progress ; one thing is done at a time, and the other 
 things are sacrificed to it. We must be thankful for the thing done, if it is 
 valuable, and we must put up with the temporary sacrifice of other 
 things to this one. The other things will have their turn sooner or later. 
 Above all, a nation with profound poetical instincts, like the English na- 
 tion, may be trusted to work itself right again in poetry after periods of 
 mistaken poetical practice. Even in the midst of an age of such practice, 
 and with his style frequently showing the bad influence of it. Gray was 
 saved, we may say, and remains a poet whose work has high and pure 
 worth, simply by his knowing the Greeks thoroughly, more thoroughly 
 than any English poet had known them since Milton. Milton was a sur- 
 vivor from the great age of poetry ; Dryden, Addison, Pope, and Swift 
 were mighty workers for the age of prose. Gray, a poet in the midst of the 
 age of prose, a poet, moreover, of by no means the highest force, and of 
 scanty productiveness, nevertheless claims a place among the six chief per- 
 sonages of Johnson's lives, because it was impossible for an English poet, 
 even in that age, who knew the great Greek masters intimately, not to re- 
 spond to their good influence, and to be rescued from the false poetical 
 practice of his contemporaries. Of such avail to a nation are deep poeti- 
 cal instincts even in an age of prose. How much more may they be 
 trusted to assert themselves after the age of prose has ended, and to rem- 
 edy any poetical mischief done by it ! And meanwhile the work of the 
 hour, the necessary and appointed work, has been done, and we have 
 got our prose. 
 
 Let us always bear in mind, therefore, that the century so well repre- 
 sented by Dryden, Addison, Pope, and Swift, and of which the literary 
 history is so powerfully written by Johnson in his lives, is a century of prose 
 — a century of which the great work in literature was the formation of Eng- 
 lish prose. Johnson was himself a laborer in this great and needful work ■ 
 and was ruled by its influences. His blame of genuine poets like Milton 
 and Gray, his over-praise of artificial poets like Pope, are to be taken as 
 the utterances of a ijian who worked for an age of prose, who was ruled by 
 
JOHNSON'S CHIEF LIVES. XI 
 
 its influences, and could not but be ruled by them. Of poetry he speaks 
 as a man whose sense for that with which he is dealing is in some degree 
 imperfect. 
 
 Yet even on poetry Johnson's utterances are valuable, because they 
 are the utterances of a great and original man. That, indeed, he was ; 
 and to be conducted by such a man through an important century cannot 
 but do us good, even though our guide may in some places be less compe- 
 tent than in others. Johnson was the man of an age of prose. Further- 
 more, Johnson was a strong force of conservatism and concentration, in 
 an epoch which by its natural tendencies seemed to be moving towards 
 expansion and freedom. But he was a great man, and great men are al- 
 ways instructive. The more we study him, the higher will be our esteem 
 for the power of his mind, the width of his interests, the largeness of his 
 knowledge, the freshness, fearlessness, and strength of his judgments. 
 The higher, too, will be our esteem for his character. His well-known 
 lines on Levett's death, beautiful and touching lines, are still more beauti- 
 ful and touching because they recall a whole history of Johnson's good- 
 ness, tenderness, and charity. Human dignity, on the other hand, he 
 maintained, we all know how well, through the whole long and arduous 
 struggle of his life, from his undergraduate days at Oxford, down to the Jam . 
 moriturus of his closing hour. His faults and strangenesses are on the sur- 
 face, and catch every eye. But on the whole we have in him a fine and ad- 
 mirable type, worthy to be kept in view for ever, of " the ancient and in- 
 bred integrity, piety, good-nature, and good-humor of the English people." 
 
 It was right that a Life of Johnson himself should stand as an intro- 
 duction to the present volume, and I long ago conceived the wish that it 
 should be the Life contributed by Lord Macaulay to the " Encyclopsedia 
 Britannica." That Life is a work which shows Macaulay at his very best ; 
 a work written when his style was matured and when his resources were 
 in all their fulness. The subject, too, was one which he knew thoroughly, 
 and for which he felt cordial sympathy ; indeed by his mental habit 
 Macaulay himself belonged, in many respects, to the eighteenth century 
 rather than to our own. But the permission to use in this manner a 
 choice work of Lord Macaulay's was no light favor to ask. However, in 
 my zeal for the present volume, I boldly asked it, and by the proprietors 
 of the " Encyclopaedia Britannica," the Messrs. Black, it has been kindly 
 and generously accorded. I cannot sufficiently express my sense of 
 obligation to them for their consent, and to Mr. Trevelyan for his 
 acquiescence in it. They have enabled me to fill a long-cherished desire, 
 to tell the story of a whole important age of English literature in one com- 
 pendious volume — itself, at the same time, a piece of English literature 
 of the very first class. Such a work the reader has in his hands in the 
 present volume ; its editor may well be fearful of injuring it by a single 
 superfluous line, a single unacceptable word, 
 
SAMUEL JOHNSON. 
 
 BY LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 Samuel Johnson,* one of the most eminent English wri- 
 ters of the eighteenth century, was the son of Michael John- 
 son, who was, at the beginning of that century, a magistrate of 
 Lichfield, and a bookseller of great note in the midland coun- 
 ties. Michael's abilities and attainments seem to have been 
 considerable. He was so well acquainted with the contents of 
 the volumes which he exposed to sale, that the country rectors 
 of Staffordshire and Worcestershire thought him an oracle on 
 points of learning. Between him and the clergy, indeed, there 
 was a strong religious and political sympathy. He was a zeal- 
 ous churchman, and, though he had qualified himself for muni- 
 cipal office by taking the oaths to the sovereigns in possession, 
 was to the last a Jacobite in heart. At his house, a house 
 which is still pointed out to every traveller who visits Lich- 
 field, Samuel was born on the 1 8th of September, 1709. In the 
 child the physical, intellectual, and moral peculiarities which 
 afterwards distinguished the man were plainly discernible ; 
 great muscular strength accompanied by much awkwardness 
 and many infirmities ; great quickness of parts, with a morbid 
 propensity to sloth and procrastination ; a kind and generous 
 heart, with a gloomy and irritable temper. He had inherited 
 from his ancestors a scrofulous taint, which it was beyond the 
 power of medicine to remove. His parents were weak enough 
 to believe that the royal touch was a specific for this malady. 
 In his third year he was taken up to London, inspected by the 
 court surgeon, prayed over by the court chaplains, and stroked 
 and presented with a piece of gold by Queen Anne. One of 
 his earliest recollections was that of a stately lady in a diamond 
 stomacher and a long black hood. Her hand was applied in 
 vain. The boy's features, which were originally noble and not 
 irregular, were distorted by his malady. His cheeks were 
 deeply scarred. He lost for a time the sight of one eye, and 
 he saw but very imperfectly with the other. But the force of 
 his mind overcame every impediment. Indolent as he was, he 
 acquired knowledge with such ease and rapidity, that at every 
 school to which he was sent he was soon the best scholar. 
 From sixteen to eighteen he resided at home, and was left to 
 
 * This essay was contributed to the Encycloptedia Britannica, 
 
XIV LORD MACAULAY ON 
 
 his own devices. He learned much at this time, though his 
 studies were without guidance and without plan. He ran- 
 sacked his father's shelves, dipped into a multitude of books, 
 read what was interesting, and passed over what was dull. An 
 ordinary lad would have acquired little or no useful knowledge 
 in such a way ; but much that was dull to ordinary lads was 
 interesting to Samuel. He read little Greek ; for his pro- 
 ficiency in that language was not such that he could take much 
 pleasure in the masters of Attic poetry and eloquence. But he 
 had left school a good Latinist, and he soon acquired, in the 
 large and miscellaneous library of which he now had the com- 
 mand, an extensive knowledge of Latin literatu^v;. That 
 Augustan delicacy of taste, which is the boast of the great pub- 
 lic schools of England, he never possessed. But he was early 
 familiar with some classical writers, who were quite unknown 
 to the best scholars in the sixth form at Eton. He was pecu- 
 liarly attracted by the works of the great restorers of learning. 
 Once, while searching for some apples, he found a huge folio vol- 
 ume of Petrarch's works. The name excited his curiosity, and 
 he eagerly devoured hundreds of pages. Indeed, the diction and 
 versification of his own Latin compositions show that he had 
 paid at least as much attention to modern copies from the 
 antique as to the original models. 
 
 While he was thus irregularly educating himself, his family 
 was sinking into hopeless poverty. Old Michael Johnson was 
 much better qualified to pore upon books, and to talk about 
 them, than to trade in them. His business declined : his debts 
 increased : it was with difficulty that the daily expenses of his 
 household were defrayed. It was out of his power to support 
 his son at either university ; but a wealthy neighbor offered 
 assistance ; and, in reliance on promises which proved to be of 
 very little value, Samuel was entered at Pembroke College, 
 Oxford. When the young scholar presented himself to the 
 rulers of that society, they were amazed not more by his un- 
 gainly figure and eccentric manners, than by the quantity of 
 extensive and curious information which he had picked up dur- 
 ing many months of desultory, but not unprofitable study. On 
 the first day of his residence he surprised his teachers by quot- 
 ing " Macrobius ;" and one of the most learned among them 
 declared that he had never known a freshman of equal attain- 
 ments. 
 
 At Oxford, Johnson resided during about three years. He 
 was poor, even to raggedness ; and his appearance excited a 
 mirth and pity which were equally intolerable to his haughty 
 spirit. He was driven from the quadrangle of Christ Church 
 
SAMUEL yOffMSOJ\r. XV 
 
 by the sneering looks which the members of that aristocratical 
 society cast at the holes in his shoes. Some charitable person 
 placed a new pair at his door ; but he spurned them away in a 
 fury. Distress made him, not servile, but reckless and ungov- 
 ernable. No opulent gentleman commoner, panting for one- 
 and-twenty, could have treated the academical authorities with 
 more gross disrespect. The needy scholar was generally to be 
 seen under the gate of Pembroke, a gate now adorned with his 
 effigy, haranguing a circle of lads, over whom, in spite of his 
 tattered gown and dirty linen, his wit and audacity gave him an 
 undisputed ascendency. In every mutiny against the disci- 
 pline of the college he was the ringleader. Much was par- 
 doned, however, to a youth so highly distinguished by abilities 
 and acquirements. He had early made himself known by 
 turning Pope's " Messiah" into Latin verse. The style and 
 rhythm, indeed, were not exactly Virgilian ; but the translation 
 found many admirers, and was read with pleasure by Pope him- 
 self. 
 
 The time drew near at which Johnson would, in the ordi- 
 nary course of things, have become a Bachelor of Arts ; but he 
 was at the end of his resources. Those promises of support 
 on which he had relied had not been kept. His family could 
 do nothing for him. His debts to Oxford tradesmen were 
 small indeed, yet larger than he could pay. In the autumn of 
 1 73 1, he was under the necessity of quitting the university 
 without a degree. In the following winter his father died. 
 The old man left but a pittance ; and of that pittance almost 
 the whole was appropriated to the support of his widow. The 
 property to which Samuel succeeded amounted to no more 
 than twenty pounds. 
 
 His life, during the thirty years which followed, was one 
 hard struggle with poverty. The misery of that struggle 
 needed no aggravation, but was aggravated by the sufferings of 
 an unsound body and an unsound mind. Before the young 
 man left the university, his hereditary malady had broken forth 
 in a singularly cruel form. He had become an incurable hypo- 
 chondriac. He said long after ;;hat he had been mad all his 
 life, or at least not perfectly sane ; and, in truth, eccentricities 
 less strange than his have often been thought grounds sufficient 
 for absolving felons and for setting aside wills. His grimaces, 
 his gestures, his mutterings, sometimes diverted and sometimes 
 terrified people who did not know him. At a dinner-table he 
 would, in a fit of absence, stoop down and twitch off a lady's 
 shoe. He would amaze a drawing-room by suddenly ejaculat- 
 ing a clause of the Lord's Prayer. He would conceive an un- 
 
Xvi LORD MACAVLAY ON- 
 
 intelligible aversion to a particular alley, and perform a great 
 circuit rather than see the hateful place. He would set his 
 heart on touching every post in the streets through which he 
 walked. If by any chance he missed a post, he would go back 
 a hundred yards and repair the omission. Under the influence 
 of his disease, his senses became morbidly torpid, and his im- 
 agination morbidly active. At one time he would stand poring 
 on the town clock without being able to tell the hour. At an- 
 other he would distinctly hear his mother, who was many miles 
 off, calling him by his name. But this was not the worst. A 
 deep melancholy took possession of him, and gave a dark tinge 
 to all his views of human nature and of human destiny. Such 
 wretchedness as he endured has driven many men to shoot 
 themselves or drown themselves. But he was under no temp- 
 tation to commit suicide. He was sick of life, but he was 
 afraid of death ; and he shuddered at every sight or sound 
 which reminded him of the inevitable hour. In religion he 
 found but little comfort during his long and frequent fits of 
 dejection ; for his religion partook of his own character. The 
 light from heaven shone on him indeed, but not in a direct 
 line, or with its own pure splendor. The rays had to struggle 
 through a disturbing medium ; they reached him refracted, 
 dulled and discolored by the thick gloom which had settled on 
 his soul ; and, though they might be sufficiently clear to guide 
 him, were too dim to cheer him. 
 
 With such infirmities of body and of mind, this celebrated man 
 was left, at two-and-twenty, to fight his way through the world. 
 He remained during about five years in the midland counties. 
 At Lichfield, his birthplace and his early home, he had in- 
 herited some friends and acquired others. He was kindly 
 noticed by Henry Hervey, a gay officer of noble family, who 
 happened to be quartered there. Gilbert Walmesley, registrar 
 of the ecclesiastical court of the diocese, a man of distin- 
 guished parts, learning, and knowledge of the world, did him- 
 self honor by patronizing the young adventurer, whose repul- 
 sive person, unpolished manners, and squalid garb, moved 
 many of the petty aristocracy of the neighborhood to laughter 
 or to disgust. At Lichfield, however, Johnson could find no 
 way of earning a livelihood. He became usher of a grammar 
 school in Leicestershire ; he resided as a humble companion in 
 the house of a country gentleman ; but a life of dependence was 
 insupportable to his haughty spirit. He repaired to Birming- 
 ham, and there earned a few guineas by literary drudgery. In 
 that town he printed a translation, little noticed at the time 
 and long forgotten, of a Latin book about Abyssinia. He then 
 
SAMUEL yoMNSON. XVU 
 
 put forth proposals for publishing by subscription the poems 
 of Politian, with notes containing a history of modern Latin 
 verse ; but subscriptions did not come in, and the volume 
 never appeared. 
 
 While leading this vagrant and miserable life, Johnson fell 
 in love. The object of his passion was Mrs, Elizabeth Porter, 
 a widow who had children as old as himself. To ordinary 
 spectators, the lady appeared to be a short, fat, coarse woman, 
 painted half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy colors, and fond of 
 exhibiting provincial airs and graces which were not exactly 
 those of the Queensberrys and Lepels. To Johnson, however, 
 whose passions were strong, whose eyesight was too weak to 
 distinguish ceruse from natural bloom, and who had seldom or 
 never been in the same room with a woman of real fashion, his 
 Titty, as he called her, was the most beautiful, graceful, and 
 accomplished of her sex. That his admiration was unfeigned 
 cannot be doubted ; for she was as poor as himself. She 
 accepted, with a readiness which did her little honor, the 
 addresses of a suitor who might have been her son. The mar- 
 riage, however, in spite of occasional wranglings, proved hap- 
 pier than might have been expected. The lover continued to 
 be under the illusions of the wedding-day till the lady died in 
 her sixty-fourth year. On her monument he placed an inscrip- 
 tion extolling the charms of her person and of her manners ; 
 and when, long after her decease, he had occasion to mention 
 her, he exclaimed, with a tenderness half ludicrous, half 
 pathetic, " Pretty creature !" 
 
 His marriage made it necessary for him to exert himself 
 more strenuously than he had hitherto done. He took a house 
 in the neighborhood of his native town, and advertised for 
 pupils. But eighteen months passed away, and only three 
 pupils came to his academy. Indeed, his appearance was so 
 strange, and his temper so violent, that his scliool-room must 
 have resembled an ogre's den. Nor was the tawdry painted 
 grandmother whom he called his Titty well qualified to make 
 provision for the comfort of young gentlemen. David Gar- 
 rick, who was one of the pupils, used, many years later, to 
 throw the best company of London into convulsions of laughter 
 by mimicking the endearments of this extraordinary pair. 
 
 At length Johnson, in the twenty-eighth year of his age, de- 
 termined to seek his fortune in the capital as a literary adven- 
 turer. He set out with a few guineas, three acts of the tragedy 
 of ' ' Irene' ' in manuscript, and two or three letters of introduc- 
 tion from his friend Walmesley. 
 
 Never since literature became a calling in England had it 
 
xviii Lord macaulay oM 
 
 been a less gainful calling than at the time when Johnson took 
 up his residence in London. In the preceding generation a 
 writer of eminent merit was sure to be munificently rewarded 
 by the government. The least that he could expect was a pen- 
 sion or a sinecure place ; and if he showed any aptitude for 
 politics, he might hope to be a member of parHament, a lord of 
 the treasury, an ambassador, a secretary of state. It would be 
 easy, on the other hand, to name several writers of the nine- 
 teenth century, of whom the least successful has received forty 
 thousand pounds from the booksellers. But Johnson entered 
 on his vocation in the most dreary part of the dreary interval 
 which separated two ages of prosperity. Literature had ceased 
 to flourish under the patronage of the great, and had not begun 
 to flourish under the patronage of the public. One man of let- 
 ters, indeed. Pope, had acquired by his pen what was then con- 
 sidered as a handsome fortune, and lived on a footing of equal- 
 ity with nobles and ministers of state. But this was a solitary 
 exception. Even an author whose reputation was established, 
 and whose works were popular, such an author as Thomson, 
 whose " Seasons" were in every library, such an author as 
 Fielding, whose " Pasquin" had had a greater run than any 
 drama since " The Beggar's Opera," was sometimes glad to 
 obtain, by pawning his best coat, the means of dining on tripe 
 at a cookshop underground, where he could wipe his hands, 
 after his greasy meal, on the back of a Newfoundland dog. It 
 is easy, therefore, to imagine what humiliations and privations 
 must have awaited the novice who had still to earn a name. 
 One of the publishers to whom Johnson applied for employ- 
 ment measured with a scornful eye that athletic though un- 
 couth frame, and exclaimed, "You had better get a porter's 
 knot, and carry trunks. ' ' Nor was the advice bad, for a porter 
 was likely to be as plentifully fed and as comfortably lodged 
 as a poet. 
 
 Some time appears to have elapsed before Johnson was able 
 to form any literary connection from which he could expect 
 more than bread for the day which was passing over him. He 
 never forgot the generosity with which Hervey, who was now 
 residing in London, relieved his wants during this time of trial. 
 ' ' Harry Hervey, ' ' said the old philosopher many years later, 
 ' ' was a vicious man ; but he was very kind to me. If you call 
 a dog Hervey, I shall love him." At Hervey's table Johnson 
 sometimes enjoyed feasts which were made more agreeable by 
 contrast. But in general he dined, and thought that he dined 
 well, on sixpenny worth of meat and a pennyworth of bread at 
 an alehouse near Drury Lane. 
 
SAMUEL JOHNSON. XlX 
 
 The effect of the privations and sufferings which he en- 
 dured at this time was discernible to the last in his temper and 
 his deportment. His manners had never been courtly. They 
 now became almost savage. Being frequently under the neces- 
 sity of wearing shabby coats and dirty shirts, he became a con- 
 firmed sloven. Being often very hungry when he sat down to 
 his meals, he contracted a habit of eating with ravenous greedi- 
 ness. Even to the end of his life, and even at the tables of 
 the great, the sight of food affected him as it affects wild beasts 
 and birds of prey. His taste in cookery, formed in subterra- 
 nean ordinaries and Alamode beefshops, was far from delicate. 
 Whenever he was so fortunate as to have near him a hare that 
 had been kept too long, or a meat pie made with rancid butter, 
 he gorged himself with such violence that his veins swelled 
 and the moisture broke out on his forehead. The affronts 
 which his poverty emboldened stupid and low-minded men to 
 offer to him would have broken a mean spirit into sycophancy, 
 but made him rude even to ferocity. Unhappily the insolence 
 which, while it was defensive, was pardonable, and in some 
 sense respectable, accompanied him into societies where he was 
 treated with courtesy and kindness. He was repeatedly pro- 
 voked into striking those who had taken liberties with him. 
 All the sufferers, however, were wise enough to abstain from 
 talking about their beatings, except Osborne, the most rapa- 
 cious and brutal of booksellers, who proclaimed everywhere 
 that he had been knocked down by the huge fellow whom he 
 had hired to puff the Harleian Library. 
 
 About a year after Johnson had begun to reside in London, 
 he was fortunate enough to obtain regular employment from 
 Cave, an enterprising and intelligent bookseller, who was pro- 
 prietor and editor of the " Gentleman's Magazine." That 
 journal, just entering on the ninth year of its long existence, 
 was the only periodical work in the kingdom which then had 
 what would now be called a large circulation. It was, indeed, 
 the chief source of parliamentary intelligence. It was not then 
 safe, even during a recess, to publish an account of the pro- 
 ceedings of either House without some disguise. Cave, how- 
 ever, ventured to entertain his readers with what he called Re- 
 ports of the Debates of the Senate of Liliput. France was 
 Blefuscu ; London was Mildendo ; pounds were sprugs ; the 
 Duke of Newcastle was the Nardac secretary of state ; Lord 
 Hardwicke was the Hurgo Hickrad ; and William Pulteney was 
 Wingul Pulnub. To write the speeches was, during several 
 years, the business of Johnson. He was generally furnished 
 with notes, meagre indeed and inaccurate, of what had been 
 
XX LdUD MACaVlAV ON^ 
 
 said ; but sometimes he had to find arguments and eloquence 
 both for the ministry and for the opposition. He was himself 
 a Tory, not from rational conviction — for his serious opmion 
 was that one form of government was just as good or as bad as 
 another — ^but from mere passion, such as inflamed the Capulets 
 against the Montagues, or the Blues of the Roman circus 
 against the Greens. In his infancy he had heard so much talk 
 about the villanies of the Whigs and the dangers of the 
 Church, that he had become a furious partisan when he could 
 scarcely speak. Before he was three he had insisted on being 
 taken to hear Sacheverell preach at Lichfield Cathedral, and 
 had listened to the sermon with as much respect, and proliably 
 with as much intelligence, as any Staffordshire squire in the 
 congregation. The work which had been begun in the nursery 
 had been completed by the university. Oxford, when Johnson 
 resided there, was the most Jacobitical place in England ; and 
 Pembroke was one of the most Jacobitical colleges in Oxford. 
 The prejudices which he brought up to London were scarcely 
 less absurd than those of his own Tom Tempest. Charles II. 
 and James II. were two of the best kings that ever reigned. 
 Laud, a poor creature who never did, said, or wrote any thing 
 indicating more than the ordinary capacity of an old woman, 
 was a prodigy of parts and learning over whose tomb Art and 
 Genius still continued to weep. Hampden deserved no more 
 honorable name than that of " the zealot of rebellion." Even 
 the ship money, condemned not less decidedly by Falkland and 
 Clarendon than by the bitterest Roundheads, Johnson would 
 not pronounce to have been an unconstitutional impost. 
 Under a government the mildest that had ever been known in 
 the world, under a government which allowed to the people an 
 unprecedented liberty of speech and action, he fancied that he 
 was a slave ; he assailed the ministry with obloquy which 
 refuted itself, and regretted the lost freedom and happiness of 
 those golden days in which a writer who had taken but one 
 tenth part of the license allowed to him would have been pillo- 
 ried, mangled with the shears, whipped at the cart's tail, and 
 flung into a noisome dungeon to die. He hated dissenters 
 and stock-jobbers, the excise and the army, septennial parlia- 
 ments, and continental connections. He long had an aversion 
 to the Scotch, an aversion of which he could not remember the 
 commencement, but which, he owned, had probably originated 
 in his abhorrence of the conduct of the nation during the Great 
 Rebellion. It is easy to guess in what manner debates on 
 great party questions were likely to be reported by a man whose 
 judgment was so much disordered by party spirit. A show of 
 
SAMt/ML yoffJ^SOJ^. XXi 
 
 fairness was indeed necessary to the prosperity of the Maga- 
 zine. But Johnson long afterwards owned that, though he had 
 saved appearances, he had taken care that the Whig dogs 
 should not have the best of it ; and, in fact, every passage 
 which has lived, every passage which bears the marks of his 
 higher faculties, is put into the mouth of some member of the 
 opposition. 
 
 A few weeks after Johnson had entered on these obscure 
 labors, he published a work which at once placed him high 
 among the writers of his age. It is probable that what he had 
 suffered during his first year in London had often reminded 
 him of some parts of that noble poem in which Juvenal had 
 described the misery and degradation of a needy man of let- 
 ters, lodged among the pigeons' nests in the tottering garrets 
 which overhung the streets of Rome. Pope's admirable imita- 
 tions of Horace's Satires and Epistles had recently appeared, 
 were in every hand, and were by many readers thought supe- 
 rior to the originals. What Pope had done for Horace, John- 
 son aspired to do for Juvenal. The enterprise was bold and 
 yet judicious. For between Johnson and Juvenal there was 
 much in common, much more certainly than between Pope and 
 Horace. 
 
 Johnson's " London" appeared without his name in May, 
 1738. He received only ten guineas for this stately and vigor- 
 ous poem ; but the sale was rapid and the success complete. 
 A second edition was required within a week. Those small 
 critics who are always desirous to lower established reputation 
 ran about proclaiming that the anonymous satirist was superior 
 to Pope in Pope's own peculiar department of literature. It 
 ought to be remembered, to the honor of Pope, that he joined 
 heartily in the applause with which the appearance of a rival 
 genius was welcomed. He made inquiries about the author of 
 ' ' London. ' ' Such a man, he said, could not long be concealed. 
 The name was soon discovered ; and Pope, with great kind- 
 ness, exerted himself to obtain an academical degree and the 
 mastership of a grammar school for the poor young poet. The 
 attempt failed, and Johnson remained a bookseller's hack. 
 
 It does not appear that these two men, the most eminent 
 writer of the generation which was going out, and the most em- 
 inent writer of the generation which was coming in, ever saw 
 each other. They lived in very different circles, one surrounded 
 by dukes and earls, the other by starving pamphleteers and in- 
 dex-makers. Among Johnson's associates at this time may be 
 mentioned Boyse, who, when his shirts were pledged, scrawled^ 
 Latin verses sitting up in bed with his arms through two hoie^ 
 
Xxii LORD MACaVLAY ON 
 
 in his blanket, who composed very respectable sacred poetry 
 when he was sober, and who was at last run over by a hackney 
 coach when he was drunk ; Hoole, surnamed the metaphysical 
 tailor, who, instead of attending to his measures, used to trace 
 geometrical diagrams on the board where he sat cross-legged ; 
 and the penitent impostor, George Psalmanazar, who, after 
 poring all day, in a humble lodging, on the folios of Jewish 
 rabbis and Christian fathers, indulged himself at night with 
 literary and theological conversation at an alehouse in the city. 
 But the most remarkable of the persons with whom at this time 
 Johnson consorted was Richard Savage, an earl's son, a shoe- 
 maker's apprentice, who had seen life in all its forms, who had 
 feasted among blue ribbons in Saint James's Square, and 
 had lain with fifty pounds weight of irons on his legs, in the 
 condemned ward of Newgate. This man had, after many 
 vicissitudes of fortune, sunk at last into abject and hopeless 
 poverty. His pen had failed him. His patrons had been 
 taken away by death, or estranged by the riotous profusion 
 with which he squandered their bounty, and the ungrateful in- 
 solence with which he rejected their advice. He now lived by 
 begging. He dined on venison and champagne whenever he 
 had been so fortunate as to borrow a guinea. If his questing 
 had been unsuccessful, he appeased the rage of hunger with 
 some scraps of broken meat, and lay down to rest under the 
 Piazza of Covent Garden in warm weather, and, in cold 
 weather, as near as he could get to the furnace of a glass-house,' 
 Yet, in his misery, he was still an agreeable companion. He 
 had an inexhaustible store of anecdotes about that gay and 
 brilliant world from which he was now an outcast. He had 
 observed the great men of both parties in hours of careless 
 relaxation, had seen the leaders of opposition without the mask 
 of patriotism, and had heard the Prime Minister roar with 
 laughter and tell stories not over decent. During some 
 months Savage lived in the closest familiarity with Johnson ;;, 
 and then the friends parted, not without tears. Johnson 
 remained in London to drudge for Cave. Savage went to the 
 West of England, lived there as he had lived everywhere, and, 
 in 1743, died, penniless and heart-broken, in Bristol jail. 
 
 Soon after his death, while the public curiosity was strongly 
 excited about his extraordinary character and his not less 
 extraordinary adventures, a life of him appeared widely differ- 
 ent from the catchpenny lives of eminent men which were then 
 a staple article of manufacture in Grub Street. The style was 
 indeed deficient in ease and variety ; and the writer was evi- 
 dently too partial to the Latin element of our language. But 
 
SAMUEL yOHATSON. XXlll 
 
 the little work, with all its faults, was a masterpiece. No finer 
 specimen of literary biography existed in any language, living 
 or dead ; and a discerning critic might have confidently pre- 
 dicted that the author was destined to be the founder of a new 
 school of English eloquence. 
 
 The Life of Savage was anonymous ; but it was well 
 known in literary circles that Johnson was the writer. During 
 the three years which followed, he produced no important 
 work ; but he was not, and indeed could not be, idle. The 
 fame of his abilities and learning continued to grow. Warbur- 
 ton pronounced him a man of parts and genius ; and the praise 
 of Warburton was then no light thing. Such was Johnson's 
 reputation that, in 1747, several eminent booksellers combined 
 to employ him in the arduous work of preparing a ' ' Dictionary 
 of the English Language," in two folio volumes. The sum 
 which they agreed to pay him was only fifteen hundred 
 guineas ; and out of this sum he had to pay several poor 
 men of letters who assisted him in the humbler parts of his 
 task. 
 
 The Prospectus of the Dictionary he addressed to the 
 Earl of Chesterfield. Chesterfield had long been celebrated for 
 the politeness of his manners, the brilliancy of his wit, and the 
 delicacy of his taste. He was acknowledged to be the finest 
 speaker in the House of Lords. He had recently governed 
 Ireland, at a momentous conjuncture, with eminent firmness, 
 wisdom, and humanity ; and he had since become Secretary of 
 State. He received. Johnson's homage with the most winning 
 affability, and requited it with a few guineas, bestowed doubt- 
 less in a very graceful manner, but was by no means desirous 
 to see all his carpets blackened with the London mud, and his 
 soups and wines thrown to right and left over the gowns of 
 fine ladies and the waistcoats of fine gentlemen, by an absent, 
 awkward scholar, who gave strange starts and uttered strange 
 growls, who dressed like a scarecrow, and ate like a cormorant. 
 During some time, Johnson continued to call on his patron, 
 but, after being repeatedly told by the porter that his lordship 
 was not at home, took the hint, and ceased to present himself 
 at the inhospitable door. 
 
 Johnson had flattered himself that he should have com- 
 pleted his Dictionary by the end of 1750, but it was not 
 till 1755 that he at length gave his huge volumes to the world. 
 During the seven years which he passed in the drudgery of 
 penning definitions and marking quotations for transcription, 
 he sought for relaxation in literary labor of a more agreeable 
 kind. In 1749 he published the " Vanity of Human Wishes," 
 
Xxiv LORD MACAULAY ON 
 
 an excellent imitation of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal. It 
 is, in truth, not easy to say whether the palm belongs to the 
 ancient or to the modern poet. The couplets m which the tall 
 of Wolsey is described, though lofty and sonorous, are feeble 
 when compared with the wonderful lines Which brmg before us 
 all Rome in tumult on the day of the fall of Sejanus, the lau- 
 rels on the doorposts, the white bull stalkmg towards the Capi- 
 tol, the statues rolling down from their pedestals, the flatterers 
 of the disgraced minister running to see him dragged with a 
 hook through the streets, and to have a kick at his carcase be- 
 fore it is hurled into the Tiber. It must be owned, too, that 
 in the concluding passage, the Christian moralist has not made 
 the most of his advantages, and has fallen decidedly short of 
 the sublimity of his Pagan model. On the other hand, Juve- 
 nal's Hannibal must yield to Johnson's Charles ; and John- 
 son's vigorous and pathetic enumeration of the miseries of a 
 literary life must be allowed to be superior to Juvenal's lamen- 
 tation over the fate of Demosthenes and Cicero. 
 
 For the copyright of the "Vanity of Human Wishes" 
 Johnson received only fifteen guineas. 
 
 A few days after the publication of this poem, his tragedy, 
 begun many years before, was brought on the stage. His 
 pupil, David Garrick, had, in 1741, made his appearance on a 
 humble stage in Goodman's Fields, had at once risen to the 
 first place among actors, and was now, after several years 
 of almost uninterrupted success, manager of Drury Lane 
 Theatre. The relation between him and his old preceptor 
 was of a very singular kind. They repelled each other 
 strongly, and yet attracted each other strongly. Nature had 
 made them of very different clay, and circumstances had 
 fully brought out the natural peculiarities of both. Sudden 
 prosperity had turned Garrick' s head. Continued adversity 
 had soured Johnson's temper. Johnson saw with more envy 
 than became so great a man the villa, the plate, the china, the 
 Brussels carpet, which the little mimic had got by repeating, 
 with grimaces and gesticulations, what wiser men had written ; 
 and the exquisitely sensitive vanity of Garrick was galled by 
 the thought that, while all the rest of the world was applauding 
 him, he could obtain from one morose cynic, whose opinion it 
 was impossible to despise, scarcely any compliment not acidu- 
 lated with scorn. Yet the two Lichfield men had so many 
 early recollections in common, and sympathized with each 
 other on so many points on which they sympathized with 
 nobody else in the vast population of the capital, that, though 
 the master was often provoked by the monkey-like imperii- 
 
SAMUEL JOHNSON. XXV 
 
 nence of the pupil, and the pupil by the bearish rudeness of the 
 master, they remained friends till they were parted by death. 
 Garrick now brought " Irene" out, with alterations sufficient 
 to displease the author, yet not sufficient to make the piece 
 pleasing to the audience. The public, however, listened, with 
 little emotion, but with much civility, to five acts of monoto- 
 nous declamation. After nine representations the play was 
 withdrawn. It is, indeed, altogether unsuited to the stage, 
 and, even when perused in the closet, will be found hardly 
 worthy of the author. He had not the slightest notion of what 
 blank verse should be. A change in the last syllable of every 
 other line would make the versification of the " Vanity of 
 Human Wishes" closely resemble the versification of " Irene." 
 The poet, however, cleared, by his benefit nights, and by the 
 sale of the copyright of his tragedy, about three hundred 
 pounds, then a great sum in his estimation. 
 
 About a year after the representation of " Irene," he began 
 to publish a series of short essays on morals, manners, and lit- 
 erature. This species of composition had been brought into 
 fashion by the success of the " Tatler," and by the still more 
 brilliant success of the ' ' Spectator. ' ' A crowd of small wri- 
 ters had vainly attempted to rival Addison. " The Lay Mon- 
 astery," the "Censor," the "Freethinker," the "Plain 
 Dealer," the " Champion," and other works of the same kind, 
 had had their short day. None of them had obtained a per- 
 manent place in our literature ; and they are now to be found 
 only in the libraries of the curious. At length, Johnson under- 
 took the adventure in which so many aspirants had failed. In 
 the thirty-sixth year after the appearance of the last number of 
 the " Spectator" appeared the first number of the " Rambler." 
 From March 1750 to March 1752 this paper continued to come 
 out every Tuesday and Saturday. 
 
 From the first the " Rambler" was enthusiastically admired 
 by a few eminent men. Richardson, when only five numbers had 
 appeared, pronounced it equal, if not superior to the " Specta- 
 tor. ' ' Young and Hartley expressed their approbation not less 
 warmly. Bubb Dodington, among whose many faults indiffer- 
 ence to the claims of genius and learning cannot be reckoned, 
 solicited the acquaintance of the writer. In consequence prob- 
 ably of the good offices of Dodington, who was then the confi- 
 dential adviser of Prince Frederic, two of his Royal Highness's 
 gentlemen carried a gracious message to the printing-office, and 
 ordered seven copies for Leicester House. But these overtures 
 seem to have been very coldly received. Johnson had had 
 enough of the patronage of the great to last him all his life, and 
 
XXVI LORD MACAULAY ON 
 
 was not disposed to haunt any other door as he had haunted 
 the door of Chesterfield. 
 
 By the public the ' ' Rambler' ' was at first very coldly received. 
 Though the price of a number was only twopence, the sale 
 did not amount to five hundred. The profits were therefore very 
 small. But as soon as the flying leaves were collected and 
 reprinted, they became popular. The author lived to see thir- 
 teen thousand copies spread over England alone. Separate 
 editions were published for the Scotch and Irish markets. A 
 large party pronounced the style perfect, so absolutely perfect 
 that in some essays it would be impossible for the writer him- 
 self to alter a single word for the better. Another party, not 
 less numerous, vehemently accused him of having corrupted 
 the purity of the English tongue. The best critics admitted 
 that his diction was too monotonous, too obviously artificial, 
 and now and then turgid even to absurdity. But they did jus- 
 tice to the acuteness of his observations on morals and man- 
 ners, to the constant precision and frequent brilliancy of his 
 language, to the weighty and magnificent eloquence of many 
 serious passages, and to the solemn yet pleasing humor of some 
 of the lighter papers. On the question of precedence between 
 Addison and Johnson, a question which, seventy years ago, was 
 much disputed, posterity has pronounced a decision from which 
 there is no appeal Sir Roger, his chaplain and his butler. Will 
 Wimble and Will Honeycomb, the Vision of Mirza, the Jour- 
 nal oi' the Retired Citizen, the Everlasting Club, the Dunmow 
 Flitch, the Loves of Hilpah and Shalum, the Visit to the Ex- 
 change, and the Visit to the Abbey, are known to everybody. 
 But many men and women, even of highly cultivated minds, 
 are unacquainted with Squire Bluster and Mrs. Busy, Quisqui- 
 lius and Venustulus, the Allegory of Wit and Learning, the 
 Chronicle of the Revolutions of a Garret, and the sad fate of 
 Aningait and Ajut. 
 
 The last " Rambler" was written in a sad and gloomy hour. 
 Mrs. Johnson had been given over by the physicians. Three 
 days later she died. She left her husband almost broken- 
 hearted. Many people had been surprised to see a man of his 
 genius and learning stooping to every drudgery, and denying 
 himself almost every comfort, for the purpose of supplying a 
 silly, affected old woman with superfluities, which she accepted 
 with but little gratitude. But all his affection had been con- 
 centrated on her. He had neither brother nor sister, neither 
 son nor daughter. To him she was beautiful as the Gunnings 
 and witty as Lady Mary. Her opinion of his writings was 
 more important to him than the voice of the pit of Drury Lane 
 
SAMUEL JOHNSON. XXvil 
 
 Theatre, or the judgment of the ' ' Monthly Review. ' ' The chief 
 support which had sustained him through the most arduous 
 labor of his life was the hope that she would enjoy the fame 
 and the profit which he anticipated from his Dictionary. 
 She was gone ; and in that vast labyrinth of streets, peopled by 
 eight hundred thousand human beings, he was alone. Yet it 
 was necessary for him to set himself, as he expressed it, dog- 
 gedly to work. After three more laborious years, the Dic- 
 tionary was at length complete. 
 
 It had been generally supposed that this great work would 
 be dedicated to the eloquent and accomplished nobleman to 
 whom the Prospectus had been addressed. He well knew 
 the value of such a compliment ; and therefore, when the day 
 of publication drew near, he exerted himself to soothe, by a 
 show of zealous and at the same time of delicate and judicious 
 kindness, the pride which he had so cruelly wounded. Since 
 the " Ramblers" had ceased to appear, the town had been enter- 
 tained by a journal called the " World," to which many men of 
 high rank and fashion contributed. In two successive num- 
 bers of the ' ' World, ' ' the Dictionary was, to use the modern 
 phrase, puffed with wonderful skill. The writings of Johnson 
 were warmly praised. It was proposed that he should be in- 
 vested with the authority of a dictator, nay, of a pope, over 
 our language, and that his decisions about the meaning and the 
 spelling of words should be received as final. His two folios, 
 it was said, would of course be bought by everybody who 
 could afford to buy them. It was soon known that these 
 papers were written by Chesterfield. But the just resentment 
 of Johnson was not to be so appeased. In a letter written with 
 singular energy and dignity of thought and language, he 
 repelled the tardy advances of his patron. The Dictionary 
 came forth without a dedication. In the preface the author 
 truly declared that he owed nothing to the great, and described 
 the difficulties with which he had been left to struggle so forci- 
 bly and pathetically that the ablest and most malevolent of all 
 the enemies of his fame, Home Tooke, never could read that 
 passage without tears. 
 
 The public, on this occasion, did Johnson full justice, and 
 something more than justice. The best lexicographer may 
 well be content if his productions are received by the world 
 with cold esteem. But Johnson's Dictionary was hailed with 
 an enthusiasm such as no similar work has ever excited. It was, 
 indeed, the first dictionary which could be read with pleasure. 
 The definitions show so much acuteness of thought and com- 
 mand of language, and the passages quoted from poets, divines, 
 
XXVlll LORD MACAULAY ON 
 
 and philosophers, are so skilfully selected, that a leisure hour 
 may always be very agreeably spent in turning over the pages. 
 I'he faults of the book resolve themselves, for the most part^ 
 into one great fault. Johnson was a wretched etymologist. 
 He knew little or nothing of any Teutonic language except Eng- 
 hsh, which, indeed, as he wrote it, was scarcely a Teutonic 
 language ; and thus he was absolutely at the mercy of Junius 
 and Skinner. 
 
 The Dictionary, though it raised Johnson's fame, added 
 nothing to his pecuniary means. The fifteen hundred guineas 
 which the booksellers had agreed to pay him had been ad- 
 vanced and spent before the last sheets issued from the press. 
 It is painful to relate that, twice in the course of the year 
 which followed the publication of this great work, he was 
 arrested and carried to sponging-houses, and tjiat he was twice 
 indebted for his liberty to his excellent friend Richardson. It 
 was still necessary for the man who had been formally saluted 
 by the highest authority as Dictator of the English language to 
 supply his wants by constant toil. He abridged his Diction- 
 ary. He proposed to bring out an edition of Shakespeare by 
 subscription ; and many subscribers sent in their names and 
 laid down their money ; but he soon found the task so little to 
 his taste that he turned to more attractive employments. He 
 contributed many papers to a new monthly journal, which was 
 called the " Literary Magazine." Few of these papers have 
 much interest ; but among them was the very best thing that he 
 ever wrote, a masterpiece both of reasoning and of satirical 
 pleasantry, the review of Jenyns's " Inquiry into the Nature 
 and Origin of Evil. ' ' 
 
 In the spring of 1758, Johnson put forth the first of a series 
 of essays, entitled the ' ' Idler. ' ' During two years these essays 
 continued to appear w"°kly. They were eagerly read, widely 
 circulated, and, indeea, impudently pirated while they were 
 still in the original form, and had a large sale when collected 
 into volumes. The " Idler" may be described as a second 
 part of the ' ' Rambler, ' ' somewhat livelier and somewhat weaker 
 than the first part. 
 
 While Johnson was busied with his ' ' Idlers, ' ' his mother, who 
 had accomplished her ninetieth year, died at Lichfield. It was 
 long since he had seen her ; but he had not failed to contribute 
 largely, out of his small means, to her comfort. In order to 
 defray the charges of her funeral, and to pay some debts which 
 she had left, he wrote a little book in a single week and sent 
 off the sheets to the press without reading them over. A hun- 
 dred pounds were paid him for the copyright ; and the pur- 
 
SAMUEL JOHNSON. XXIX 
 
 chasers had great cause to be pleased with their bargain ; for 
 the book was ' ' Rasselas. ' ' 
 
 The success of " Rasselas" was great, though such ladies 
 as Miss Lydia Languish must have been grievously disap- 
 pointed when they found that the new volume from the circu- 
 lating library was little more than a dissertation on the author's 
 favorite theme, the Vanity of Human Wishes ; that the Prince 
 of Abyssinia was without a mistress, and the Princess without 
 a lover ; and that the story set the hero and the heroine down 
 exactly where it had taken them up. The style was the subject 
 of much eager controversy. The " Monthly Review" and the 
 "Critical Review" took different sides. Many readers pro- 
 nounced the writer a pompous pedant, who would never use a 
 word of two syllables where it was possible to use a word of six, 
 and who could not make a waiting-woman relate her adventures 
 without balancing every noun with another noun, and every 
 epithet with another epithet. Another party, not less zealous, 
 cited with delight numerous passages in which weighty meaning 
 was expressed with accuracy and illustrated with splendor. 
 And both the censure and the praise were merited. 
 
 About the plan of " Rasselas" little was said by the critics ; 
 and yet the faults of the plan might seem to invite severe crit- 
 icism. Johnson has frequently blamed Shakespeare for neg- 
 lecting the proprieties of time and place, and for ascribing to 
 one age or nation the manners and opinions of another. Yet 
 Shakespeare has not sinned in this way more grievously than 
 Johnson. Rasselas and Imlac, Nekayah and Pekuah, are evi- 
 dently meant to be Abyssinians of the eighteenth century ; for 
 the Europe which Imlac describes is the Europe of the eight- 
 eenth century ; and the inmates of the Happy Valley talk 
 familiarly of that law of gravitation which Newton discovered, 
 and which was not fully received even at Cambridge till the 
 eighteenth century. What a real company of Abyssinians 
 would have been may be learned from Bruce' s Travels. But 
 Johnson, not content with turning filthy savages, ignorant of 
 their letters, and gorged with raw steaks cut from living cows, 
 into philosophers as eloquent and enlightened as himself or his 
 friend Burke, and into ladies as highly accomplished as Mrs. 
 Lennox or Mrs. Sheridan, transferred the whole domestic sys- 
 tem of England to Egypt. Into a land of harems, a land of 
 polygamy, a land where women are married without ever being 
 seen, he introduced the flirtations and jealousies of our ball- 
 rooms. In a land where there is boundless liberty of divorce, 
 wedlock is described as the indissoluble compact. ' ' A youth 
 and maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice. 
 
XXX LORD MACAULAY ON 
 
 exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of 
 each other. Such," says Rasselas, "is the common process 
 of marriage." Such it may have been, and may still be, m 
 London, but assuredly not at Cairo. A writer who was guilty 
 of such improprieties had little right to blame the poet who 
 made Hector quote Aristotle, and represented Julio Romano 
 as flourishing in the days of the oracle of Delphi. 
 
 By such exertions as have been described, Johnson sup- 
 ported himself till the year 1762. In that year a great change 
 in his circumstances took place. He had from a child been an 
 enemy of the reigning dynasty. His Jacobite prejudices had 
 been exhibited with little disguise both in his works and in his 
 conversation. Even in his massy and elaborate Diction- 
 ary, he had, with a strange want of taste and judgment, in- 
 serted bitter and contumelious reflections on the Whig party. 
 The excise, which was a favorite resource of Whig financiers, 
 he had designated as a hateful tax. He had railed against the 
 commissioners of excise in language so coarse that they had 
 seriously thought of prosecuting him. He had with difficulty 
 been prevented from holding up the Lord Privy Seal by name 
 as an example of the meaning of the word " renegade." A 
 pension he had defined as pay given to a state hireling to be- 
 tray his country ; a pensioner as a slave of state hired by a 
 stipend to obey a master. It seemed unlikely that the author 
 of these definitions would himself be pensioned. But that was 
 a time of wonders. George the Third had ascended the 
 throne ; and had, in the course of a few months, disgusted 
 many of the old friends and conciliated many of the old ene- 
 mies of his house. The city was becoming mutinous. Oxford 
 was becoming loyal. Cavendishes and Bentincks were murmur- 
 ing. Somersets and Wyndhams were hastening to kiss hands. 
 The head of the treasury was now Lord Bute, who was a Tory, 
 and could have no objection to Johnson's Toryism. Bute 
 wished to be thought a patron of men of letters ; and Johnson 
 was one of the most eminent and one of the most needy men of 
 letters in Europe. A pension of three hundred a year was 
 graciously offered, and with very little hesitation accepted. 
 
 This event produced a change in Johnson's whole way of 
 life. For the first time since his boyhood he no longer felt the 
 daily goad urging him to the daily toil. He was at liberty, 
 after thirty years of anxiety and drudgery, to indulge his con- 
 stitutional indolence, to lie in bed till two in the afternoon, and 
 to sit up talking till four in the morning, without fearing either 
 the printer's devil or the sheriff' s. officer. 
 
 One laborious task indeed he had bound himself to per- 
 
SAMUEL JOHNSON. XXXI 
 
 form. He had received large subscriptions for his promised 
 edition of Shakespeare ; he had lived on those subscriptions 
 during some years ; and he could not without disgrace omit to 
 perform his part of the contract. His friends repeatedly ex- 
 horted him to make an effort ; and he repeatedly resolved to do 
 so. But, notwithstanding their exhortations and his resolu- 
 tions, month followed month, year followed year, and nothing 
 was done. He prayed fervently against his idleness ; he deter- 
 mined, as often as he received the sacrament, that he would no 
 longer doze away and trifle away his time ; but the spell under 
 which he lay resisted prayer and sacrament. His private notes 
 at this time are made up of self-reproaches. " My indolence, " 
 he wrote on Easter-eve in 1764, " has sunk into grosser slug- 
 gishness. A kind of strange oblivion has overspread me, so 
 that I know not what has become of the last year. ' ' Easter 
 1765 came, and found him still in the same state. " My 
 cime," he. wrote, " has been unprofitably spent, and seems as a 
 dream that has left nothing behind. My memory grows con- 
 fused, and I know not how the days pass over me." Happily 
 for his honor, the charm which held him captive was at length 
 broken by no gentle or friendly hand. He had been weak 
 enough to pay serious attention to a story about a ghost which 
 haunted a house in Cock Lane, and had actually gone himself, 
 with some of his friends, at one in the morning, to St. John's 
 Church, Clerkenwell, in the hope of receiving a communication 
 from the perturbed spirit. But the spirit, though adjured with 
 all solemnity, remained obstinately silent ; and it soon ap- 
 peared that a naughty girl of eleven had been amusing herself 
 by making fools of so many philosophers. Churchill, who, 
 confident in his powers, drunk with popularity, and burning 
 with party spirit, was looking for some man of established fame 
 and Tory politics to insult, celebrated the Cock Lane Ghost in 
 three cantos, nicknamed Johnson Pomposo, asked where the 
 book was which had been so long promised and so liberally 
 paid for, and directly accused the great moralist of cheating. 
 This terrible word proved effectual ; and in October, 1765, ap- 
 peared, after a delay of nine years, the new edition of Shake- 
 speare. 
 
 This publication saved Johnson's character for honesty, but 
 added nothing to the fame of his abilities and learning. The 
 preface, though it contains some good passages, is not in his 
 best manner. The most valuable notes are those in which he 
 had an opportunity of showing how attentively he had during 
 many years observed human life and human nature. The best 
 specimen is the note on the character of Polonius. Nothing so 
 
Xxxii LOkD MACAULAY ON 
 
 good is to be found even in Wilhelm Meister's admirable ex* 
 amination of Hamlet. But here praise must end. It would 
 be difficult to name a more slovenly, a more worthless edition 
 of any great classic. The reader may turn over play after play 
 without finding one happy conjectural emendation, or one inge- 
 nious and satisfactory explanation of a passage which had 
 baffled preceding commentators. Johnson had, in his Pro- 
 spectus, told the world that he was peculiarly fitted for the 
 task whch he had undertaken, because he had, as a lexicogra- 
 pher, been under the necessity of taking a wider view of the 
 English language than any of his predecessors. That his 
 knowledge of our literature was extensive is indisputable. But, 
 unfortunately, he had altogether neglected that very part of our 
 literature with which it is especially desirable that an editor of 
 Shakespeare should be conversant. It is dangerous to assert a 
 negative. Yet little will be risked by the assertion, that in the 
 two folio volumes of the English Dictionary there' is not a 
 single passage quoted from any dramatist of the Elizabethan 
 age except Shakespeare and Ben. Even from Ben the quota-, 
 tions are few. Johnson might easily, in a few months, have 
 made himself well acquainted with every old play that was ex- 
 tant. But it never seems to have occurred to him that this 
 was a necessary preparation for the work which he had under- 
 taken. He would doubtless have admitted that it would be 
 the height of absurdity in a man who was not familiar with the 
 works of ^schylus and Euripides to publish an edition of 
 Sophocles. Yet he ventured to publish an edition of Shake- 
 speare, without having ever in his life, as far as can be discov- 
 ered, read a single scene of Massinger, Ford, Decker, Webster, 
 Marlow, Beaumont, or Fletcher. His detractors were noisy 
 and scurrilous. Those who most loved and honored him had 
 little to say in praise of the manner in which he had discharged 
 the duty of a commentator. He had, however, acquitted him- 
 self of a debt which had long lain heavy on his conscience, and 
 he sank back into the repose from which the sting of satire had 
 roused him. He long continued to live upon the fame which 
 he had already won. He was honored by the University of 
 Oxford with a Doctor's degree, by the Royal Academy with a 
 professorship, and by the king with an interview, in which his 
 Majesty most graciously expressed a hope that su excellent a 
 writer would not cease to write. In the interval, however, 
 between 1765 and 1775 Johnson published only two or three 
 political tracts, the longest of which he could have produced in 
 forty-eight hours, if he had worked as he worked on the ' ' Life 
 of Savage" and on " Rasselas." 
 
SAMVkL yoHNSOM. xxxiii 
 
 But though his pen was now idle, his tongue was active. 
 The influence exercised by his conversation, directly upon those 
 with whom he lived, and directly on the whole literary world, 
 was altogether without a parallel. His colloquial talents were 
 indeed of the highest order. He had strong sense, quick dis- 
 cernment, wit, humor, immense knowledge of literature and 
 of life, and an infinite store of curious anecdotes. As respect- 
 ed style, he spoke far better than he wrote. Every sentence 
 which dropped from his lips was as correct in structure as the 
 most nicely balanced period of the ' ' Rambler. ' ' But in his talk 
 there were no pompous triads, and little more than a fair pro- 
 portion of words in osify and ation. All was simplicity, ease, 
 and vigor. He uttered his short, weighty, and pointed sen- 
 tences with a power of voice and a justness and energy of em- 
 phasis of which the effect was rather increased than diminish- 
 ed by the rollings of his huge form, and by the asthmatic gasp- 
 ings and puffings in which the peals of his eloquence generally 
 ended. Nor did the laziness which made him unwilling to sit 
 down to his desk prevent him from giving instruction or enter- 
 tainment orally. To discuss questions of taste, of learning, of 
 casuistry, in language so exact and so forcible that it might 
 have been printed without the alteration of a word, was to him 
 no exertion, but a pleasure. He loved, as he said, to fold his 
 legs and have his talk out. He was ready to bestow the over- 
 flowings of his full mind on anybody who would start a subject, 
 on a fellow-passenger in a stage coach, or on the person who 
 sat at the same table with him in an eating-house. But his 
 conversation was nowhere so brilliant and striking as when he 
 was surrounded by a few friends, whose abilities and knowl- 
 edge enabled them, as he once expressed it, to send him back 
 every ball that he threw. Some of these, in 1764, formed 
 themselves into a club, which gradually became a formidable 
 power in the commonwealth of letters. The verdicts pro- 
 nounced by this conclave on new books were speedily known 
 over all London, and were sufficient to sell off a whole edition in 
 a day, or to condemn the sheets to the service of the trunk- 
 maker and the pastry-cook. Nor shall we think this strange 
 when we consider what great and various talents and acquire- 
 ments met in the little fraternity. Goldsmith was the repre- 
 sentative of poetry and light literature, Reynolds of the arts, 
 Burke of political eloquence and political philosophy. There, 
 too, were Gibbon, the greatest historian, and Jones, the great- 
 est linguist, of the age. Garrick brought to the meetings his in- 
 exhaustible pleasantry, his incomparable mimicry, and his con- 
 summate kno^v ledge of stage effect. Among the most constant 
 
X/tXlV LORD MACAULAY ON 
 
 attendants were two high-born and high-bred gentlemen, close- 
 ly bound together by friendship, but of widely different char- 
 acters and habits ; Bennet Langton, distinguished by his skill 
 in Greek literature, by the orthodoxy of his opinions, and by 
 the sanctity of his life ; and Topham Beauclerk, renowned for 
 his amours, his knowledge of the gay world, his fastidious 
 taste, and his sarcastic wit. To predominate over such a so- 
 ciety was not easy. Yet even over such a society Johnson pre- 
 dominated. Burke might indeed have disputed the supreniacy 
 to which others were under the necessity of submitting. 
 But Burke, though not generally a very patient listener, was 
 content to take the second part when Johnson was present ; 
 and the club itself, consisting of so many eminent men, is to 
 this day popularly designated as Johnson's club. 
 
 Among the members of this celebrated body was one to 
 whom it has owed the greater part of its celebrity, yet who was 
 regarded with little respect by his brethren, and had not with- 
 out difficulty obtained a seat among them. This was James 
 Eoswell, a young Scotch lawyer, heir to an honorable name 
 and a fair estate. That he was a coxcomb and a bore, weak,' 
 vain, pushing, curious, garrulous, was obvious to all who 
 were acquainted with him. That he could not reason, that he 
 had no wit, no humor, no eloquence, is apparent from his writ- 
 ings. And yet his writings are read beyond the Mississippi, 
 and under the Southern Cross, and are likely to be read as 
 long as the English exist, either as a living or as a dead lan- 
 guage. Nature had made him a slave and an idolater. His 
 mind resembled those creepers which the botanists call para- 
 sites, and which can subsist only by clinging round the stems 
 and imbibing the juices of stronger plants. He must have 
 fastened himself on somebody. He might have fastened him- 
 self on Wilkes, and have become the fiercest patriot in the Bill 
 of Rights Society. He might have fastened himself on White- 
 field, and have become the loudest field preacher among the 
 Calvinistic Methodists. In a happy hour he fastened himself 
 on Johnson. The pair might seem ill matched ; for Johnson 
 had early been prejudiced against Boswell's country. To a 
 man of Johnson's strong understanding and irritable temper 
 the silly egotism and adulation of Boswell must have been as 
 teasing as the constant buzz of a fly. Johnson hated to be 
 questioned ; and Boswell was eternally catechising him on all 
 kinds of subjects, and sometimes propounded such questions 
 as, ' ' What would you do, sir, if you were locked up in a tower 
 with a baby ?" Johnson was a water-drinker and Boswell was 
 a winebibber, and indeed little better than a habitual sot. It 
 
SAMUEL yOHNSON. XXXV 
 
 %as impossible that there should be perfect harmony between 
 two such companions. Indeed, the great man was sometimes 
 provoked into fits of passion, in which he said things which the 
 small man, during a few hours, seriously resented. Every 
 quarrel, however, was soon made up. During twenty years 
 the disciple continued to worship the master : the master con- 
 tinued to scold the disciple, to sneer at him, and to love him. 
 The two friends ordinarily resided at a great distance from 
 each other. Boswell practised in the Parliament House of 
 Edinburgh, and could pay only occasional visits to London. 
 During those visits his chief business was to watch Johnson, 
 to discover all Johnson's habits, to turn the conversation to 
 subjects about which Johnson was likely to say something re- 
 markable, and to fill quarto note-books with minutes of what 
 Johnson had said. In this way were gathered the materials out 
 of which was afterwards constructed the most interesting bio- 
 graphical work in the world. 
 
 Soon after the club began to exist, Johnson formed a con- 
 nection less important indeed to his fame, but much more im- 
 portant to his happiness, than his connection with Boswell. 
 Henry Thrale, one of the most opulent brewers in the king- 
 dom, a man of sound and cultivated understanding, rigid prin- 
 ciples, and liberal spirit, was married to one of those clever, 
 kind-hearted, engaging, vain, pert, young women, who are per- 
 petually doing or saying what is not exactly right, but who, 
 do or say what they may, are always agreeable. In 1765 the 
 Thrales became acquainted with Johnson, and the acquaintance 
 ripened fast into friendship. They were astonished and de- 
 lighted by the brilliancy of his conversation. They were flat- 
 tered by finding that a man so widely celebrated preferred their 
 house to any other in London. Even the peculiarities which 
 seemed to unfit him for civilized society, his gesticulations, his 
 rollings, his puffings, his mutterings, the strange way in which 
 he put on his clothes, the ravenous eagerness with which he 
 devoured his dinner, his fits of melancholy, his fits of anger, 
 his frequent rudeness, his occasional ferocity, increased the in- 
 terest which his new associates took in him. For these things 
 Were the cruel marks left behind by a life which had bfeen one 
 long conflict with disease and with adversity. In a vulgar 
 hack writer such oddities would have excited only disgust. 
 But in a man of genius, learning, and virtue their effect was to 
 add pity to admiration and esteem. Johnson soon had an 
 apartment at the br»wery in Southwark, and a still more pleas- 
 ant apartment at the villa of his friends on Streatham Common. 
 A large part of every year he passed in those abodes, abodes 
 
XXXVl LORD MACaVLAY ON 
 
 which must have seemed magnificent and luxurious indeed, 
 when compared with the dens in which he had generally been 
 lodged. But his chief pleasures were derived from what the as- 
 tronomer of his Abyssinian tale called " the endearing ele- 
 gance of female friendship. ' ' Mrs. Thrale rallied him, soothed 
 him, coaxed him, and, if she sometimes provoked him by her 
 flippancy, made ample amends by listening to his reproofs with 
 angelic sweetness of temper. When he was diseased in body 
 and in mind, she was the most tender of nurses. No comfort 
 that wealth could purchase, no contrivance that womanly in- 
 genuity, set to work by womanly compassion, could devise was 
 wanting to his sick-room. He requited her kindness by an 
 affection pure as the affection of a father, yet delicately tinged 
 with a gallantry which, though awkward, must have been more 
 flattering than the attentions of a crowd of the fools who 
 gloried in the names, now obsolete, of Buck and' Maccaroni. 
 It should seem that a full half of Johnson's life, during about 
 sixteen years, was passed under the roof of the Thrales. He 
 accompanied the family sometimes to Bath and sometimes to 
 Brighton, once to Wales and once to Paris. But he had at the 
 same time a house in one of the narrow and gloomy courts on 
 the north of Fleet Street. In the garrets was his library, a 
 large and miscellaneous collection of books, falling to pieces 
 and begrimed with dust. On a lower floor he sometimes, but 
 very rarely, regaled a friend with a plain dinner — a veal pie, or 
 a leg of lamb and spinage, and a rice pudding. Nor was the 
 dwelling uninhabited during his long absences. It was the 
 home of the most extraordinary assemblage of inmates that 
 ever was brought together. At the head of the establishment 
 Johnson had placed an old lady named Williams, whose chief 
 recommendations were her blindness and her poverty. But, in 
 spite of her murmurs and reproaches, he gave an asylum to an- 
 other lady who was as poor as herself, Mrs. Desmoulins, whose 
 family he had known many years before in Staffordshire. 
 Room was found for the daughter of Mrs. Desmoulins, and for 
 another destitute damsel, who was generally addressed as Miss 
 Carmichael, but whom her generous host called Polly. An old 
 quack doctor named Levett, who bled and dosed coal-heavers 
 and hackney coachmen, and received for fees crusts of bread, 
 bits of bacon, glasses of gin, and sometimes a little copper, 
 completed this strange menagerie. All these poor creatures 
 were at constant war with each other, and with Johnson's ne- 
 gro servant Frank. Sometimes, indeed, they transferred their 
 hostilities from the servant to the master, complained that a 
 better table was not kept for them, and railed or maundered 
 
Samuel yoHMsoN. xxxvii 
 
 till their benefaclor was glad to make his escape to Streatham 
 or to the Mitre Tavern. And yet he, who was generally the 
 haughtiest and most irritable of mankind, who was but too 
 prompt to resent any thing which looked like a slight on the 
 part of a purse-proud bookseller, or of a noble and powerful 
 patron, bore patiently from mendicants, who, but for his 
 bounty, must have gone to the workhouse, insults more pro- 
 voking than those for which he had knocked down Osborne 
 and bidden defiance to Chesterfield. Year after year Mrs. 
 Williams and Mrs. Desmoulins, Polly and Levett, continued to 
 torment him and to live upon him. 
 
 The course of life which has been described was interrupt- 
 ed in Johnson's sixty-fourth year by an important event. He 
 had early read an account of the Hebrides, and had been much 
 interested by learning that there was so near him a land peo- 
 pled by a race which was still as rude and simple as in the 
 middle ages. A wish to become intimately acquainted with a 
 state of society so utterly unlike all that he had ever seen fre- 
 quently crossed his mind. But it is not probable that his curi- 
 osity would have overcome his habitual sluggishness, and his 
 love of the smoke, the mud, and the cries of London, had not 
 Boswell importuned him to attempt the adventure, and offered 
 to be his squire. At length, in August 1773, Johnson crossed 
 the Highland line, and plunged courageously into what was 
 then considered by most Englishmen as a dreary and perilous 
 wilderness. After wandering about two months through the 
 Celtic region, sometimes in rude boats which did not protect 
 him from the rain, and sometimes on small shaggy ponies 
 which could hardly bear his weight, he returned to his old 
 haunts with a mind full of new images and new theories. Dur- 
 ing the following year he employed himself in recording his ad- 
 ventures. About the beginning of 1775 his " Journey to the 
 Hebrides" was published, and was, during some weeks, the 
 chief subject of conversation in all circles in which any atten- 
 tion was paid to literature. The book is still read with pleas- 
 ure. The narrative is entertaining ; the speculations, whether 
 sound or unsound, are always ingenious ; and the style, though 
 too stiff and pompous, is somewhat easier and more graceful 
 than that of his early writings. His prejudice against the 
 Scotch had at length become little more than matter of jest ; 
 and whatever remained of the old feeling had been effectually 
 removed by the kind and respectful hospitality with which he 
 had been received in every part of Scotland. It was, of 
 course, not to be expected that an Oxonian Tory should praise 
 the Presbyterian polity and ritual, or that an eye accustomed to 
 
XXXVm LORD MACAULAY ON 
 
 the hedgerows and parks of England should not be struck by 
 the bareness of Berwickshire and East Lothian. But even m 
 censure Johnson's tone is not unfriendly. The most enlight- 
 ened Scotchmen, with Lord Mansfield at their head, were well 
 pleased. But some foolish and ignorant Scotchmen were 
 moved to anger by a little unpalatable truth which was mmgled 
 with much eulogy, and assailed him whom they chose to 
 consider as the enemy of their country with libels much 
 more dishonorable to their country than any thing that he had 
 ever said or written. They published paragraphs in the news- 
 papers, articles in the magazines, sixpenny pamphlets, five- 
 shilling books. One scribbler abused Johnson for being blear- 
 eyed, another for being a pensioner ; a third informed the 
 world that one of the Doctor's uncles had been convicted of 
 felony in Scotland, and had found that there was in that coun- 
 try one tree capable of supporting the weight of an English- 
 man. Macpherson, whose Fingal had been proved in the 
 Journey to be an impudent forgery, threatened to take ven- 
 geance with a cane. The only effect of this threat was that 
 Johnson reiterated the charge of forgery in the most contemp-i» 
 tuous terms, and walked about, during some time, with a cud- 
 gel, which, if the impostor had not been too wise to encounter 
 it, would assuredly have descended upon him, to borrow the 
 sublime language of his own epic poem, ' ' like a hammer on 
 the red son of the furnace. ' ' 
 
 Of other assailants Johnson took no notice whatever. He 
 had early resolved never to be drawn into controversy ; and he 
 adhered to his resolution with a steadfastness which is the 
 more extraordinary, because he was, both intellectually and 
 morally, of the stuff of which controversialists are made. In 
 conversation he was a singularly eager, acute, and pertinacious 
 disputant. When at a loss for good reasons he had recourse 
 to sophistry ; and when heated by altercation he made unspar- 
 ing use of sarcasm and invective. But when he took his pen in 
 hand his whole character seemed to be changed. A hundred 
 bad writers misrepresented him and reviled him ; but not one of 
 the hundred could boast of having been thought by him worthy 
 of a refutation, or even of a retort. The Kenricks, Campbells, 
 MacNicols, and Hendersons, did their best to annoy him, in the 
 hope that he would give them importance by answering them. 
 But the reader will in vain search his works for any allusion 
 to Kenrick or Campbell, to MacNicol or Henderson. One 
 Scotchman, bent on vindicating the fame of Scotch learning, 
 defied him to the combat in a detestable Latin hexameter. 
 " Maxime, si tu vis, cupio contendere tecum." 
 
SAMUEL JOHNSON. XXXIX 
 
 But Johnson took no notice of the challenge. He had learned, 
 both from his own observation and from literary history, in 
 which he was deeply read, that the place of books in the 
 public estimation is fixed, not by what is written about them, 
 but by what is written in them ; and that an author whose 
 works are likely to live is very unwise if he stoops to wrangle 
 with detractors whose works are certain to die. He always 
 maintained that fame was a shuttlecock, which could be kept up 
 only by being beaten back as well as beaten forward, and 
 which would soon fall if there were only one battledore. No 
 saying was oftener in his mouth than that fine apothegm of 
 Bentley, that no man was ever written down but by himself. 
 
 Unhappily, a few months after the appearance of the ' ' Jour- 
 ney to the Hebrides, ' ' Johnson did what none of his envious 
 assailants could have done, and to a certain extent succeeded in 
 writing himself down. The disputes between England and her 
 American colonies had reached a point at which no amicable 
 adjustment was possible. Civil war was evidently impending ; 
 and the ministers seem to have thought that the eloquence of 
 Johnson might with advantage be employed to inflame the na- 
 tion against the opposition here, and against the rebels beyond 
 the Atlantic. He had already written two or three tracts in 
 defence of the foreign and domestic policy of the government ; 
 and those tracts, though hardly worthy of him, were much su- 
 perior to the crowd of pamphlets which lay on the counters of 
 Almon and Stockdale. But his " Taxation No Tyranny" was 
 a pitiable failure. The very title was a silly phrase, which can 
 have been recommended to his choice by nothing but a jingling 
 alliteration which he ought to have despised. The arguments 
 were such as boys use in debating societies. The pleasantry 
 was as awkward as the gambols of a hippopotamus. Even 
 Boswell was forced to own that, in this unfortunate piece, he 
 could detect no trace of his master's powers. The general 
 opinion was that the strong faculties which had produced the 
 Dictionary and the " Rambler" were beginning to feel the effect 
 of time and of disease, and that the old man would best con- 
 sult his credit by writing no more. 
 
 But this was a great mistake. Johnson had failed, not be- 
 cause his mind was less vigorous than when he wrote ' ' Rasselas' ' 
 in the e\'enings of a week, but because he had foolishly chosen, 
 or suffered others to choose for him, a subject such as he would 
 at no time have been competent to treat. He was in no sense 
 a statesman. He nev€r willingly read or thought or talked 
 about affairs of state. He loved biography, literary history, 
 the history of manners ; but political history was positively dis- 
 
Xl LORD MACAULAV ON 
 
 tasleful to him. The question, at issue between the colonies 
 and the mother country was a question about which he had really 
 nothing to say. He failed, therefore, as the greatest men 
 must fail when they attempt to do that for which they are un- 
 fit ; as Burke would have failed if Burke had tried to write 
 comedies like those of Sheridan ; as Reynolds would have 
 failed if Reynolds had tried to paint landscapes like those of 
 Wilson. Happily, Johnson soon had an opportunity of proving 
 most signally that his failure was not to be ascribed to intellec- 
 tual decay. 
 
 On Easter-eve 1777, some persons, deputed by a meeting 
 which consisted of forty of the first booksellers in London, 
 called upon him. Though he had some scruples about doing 
 business at that season, he received his visitors with much civil- 
 ity. They came to inform him that a new edition of the Eng- 
 lish poets, from Cowley downwards, was in contemplation, 
 and to ask him to furnish short biographical prefaces. He 
 readily undertook the task, a task for which he was pre-emi- 
 nently qualified. His knowledge of the literary history of Eng- 
 land since the Restoration was unrivalled. That knowledge 
 he had derived partly from books, and partly from sources 
 which had long been closed ; from old Grub Street traditions ; 
 from the talk of forgotten poetasters and pamphleteers who 
 had long been lying in parish vaults ; from the recollections of 
 such men as Gilbert Walmesley, who had conversed with the 
 wits of Button ; Gibber, who had mutilated the plays of two 
 generations of dramatists ; Orrery, who had been admitted to 
 the society of Swift ; and Savage, who had rendered services 
 of no very honorable kind to Pope. The biographer there- 
 fore sat down to his task with a mind full of matter. He had at 
 first intended to give only a paragraph to every minor poet, and 
 only four or five pages to the greatest name. But the flood of 
 anecdote and criticism overflowed the narrow channel. The 
 work, which was originally meant to consist only of a few sheets, 
 swelled into ten volumes, small volumes, it is true, and not 
 closely printed. The first four appeared in 1779, the remaining 
 six in 1781. 
 
 The ' ' Lives of the Poets' " are, on the whole, the best of John- 
 son's works. The narratives areas entertaining as any novel. 
 The remarks on life and on human nature are eminently 
 shrewd and profound. The criticisms are often excellent, and, 
 even when grossly and provokingly unjust, well deserve to be 
 studied. For, however erroneous they may be, they are never 
 silly. They are the judgments of a mind trammelled by preju- 
 dice and deficient in sensibility, but vigorous and acute. They 
 
SAMUEL JOHNSON. xH 
 
 therefore generally contain a portion of valuable truth which 
 tleserves to be separated from the alloy ; and, at the very 
 worst, they mean something, a praise to which much of what 
 is called criticism in our time has no pretensions. 
 
 Savage's Life, Johnson reprinted nearly as it had ap- 
 peared in 1744. Whoever, after reading that life, will turn to 
 the other lives, will be struck by the difference of style. Since 
 Johnson had been at ease in his circumstances he had written 
 little and had talked much. When, therefore, he, after the 
 lapse of years, resumed his pen, the mannerism which he had 
 contracted while he was in the constant habit of elaborate com- 
 position was less perceptible than formerly ; and his diction fre- 
 quently had a colloquial ease which it had formerly wanted. 
 The improvement may be discerned by a skilful critic in the 
 ' ' Journey to the Hebrides, ' ' and in the ' ' Lives of the Poets' ' 
 is so obvious that it cannot escape the notice of the most care- 
 less reader. 
 
 Among the Lives the best are perhaps those of Cowley, 
 Dryden, and Pope. The very worst is, beyond all doubt, that 
 of Gray. 
 
 This great work at once became popular. There was, in- 
 deed, much just and much unjust censure ; but even those who 
 were loudest in blame were attracted by the book in spite of 
 themselves. Maloile computed the gains of the publishers at 
 five or six thousand pounds. But the writer was very poorly 
 remunerated. Intending at first to write very short prefaces, 
 he had stipulated for only two hundred guineas. The book- 
 sellers, when they saw how far his performance had surpassed 
 his promise, added only another hundred. Indeed Johnson, 
 though he did not despise or affect to despise money, and 
 though his strong sense and long experience ought to have 
 qualified him to protect his own interests, seems to have been 
 singularly unskilful and unlucky in his literary bargains. He 
 was generally reputed the first English writer of his time. Yet 
 several writers of his time sold their copyrights for sums such 
 as he never ventured to ask. To give a single instance, Rob- 
 ertson received four thousand five hundred pounds for the " His- 
 tory of Charles V.," and it is no disrespect to the memory of 
 Robertson to say that the ' ' History of Charles V. " is both a less 
 valuable and a less amusing book than the ' ' Lives of the 
 Poets." 
 
 Johnson was now in his seventy-second year. The infirm- 
 ities of age were coming fast upon him. That inevitable event, 
 of which he never thought without horror, was brought near to 
 him ; and his whole life was darkened by the shadow of death. 
 
Xlii LORD MACAULAY ON 
 
 He had often to. pay the cruel price of longevity. Every year 
 he lost what could never be replaced. The strange depend- 
 ents to whom he had given shelter, and to whom, in spite of 
 their faults, he was strongly attached by habit, dropped off 
 one by one ; and, in the silence of his home, he regretted even 
 the noise of their scolding matches. The kind and generous 
 Thrale was no more ; and it would have been well if his wife 
 had been laid beside him. But she survived to be the laugh- 
 ing-stock of those who had envied her, and to draw from the 
 eyes of the old man who had loved her beyond any thing in the 
 world, tears far more bitter than he would have shed over her 
 grave. With some estimable and many agreeable qualities, 
 she was not made to be independent. The control of a mind 
 more steadfast than her own was necessary to her respectabil- 
 ity. While she was restrained by her husband, a man of sense 
 and firmness indulgent to her taste in trifles, but always the un- 
 disputed master of his house, her worst offences had been im- 
 pertinent jokes, white lies, and short fits of pettishness ending 
 in sunny good-humor. But he was gone ; and she was left an 
 opulent widow of forty, with strong sensibility, volatile fancy, 
 and slender judgment. She soon fell in love with a music-mas- 
 ter from Brescia, in whom nobody but herself could discover any 
 thing to admire. Her pride, and perhaps some better feelings, 
 struggled hard against this degrading passion. But the strug- 
 gle irritated her nerves, soured her temper, and at length "en- 
 dangered her health. Conscious that her choice was one 
 which Johnson could not approve, she became desirous to 
 escape from his inspection. Her manner towards him changed. 
 She was sometimes cold and sometimes petulant. She did not 
 conceal her joy when he left Streatham : she never pressed 
 him to return ; and if he came unbidden she received him in a 
 manner which convinced him that he was no longer a welcome 
 guest. He took the very intelligible hints which she gave. 
 He read, for the last time, a chapter of the Greek Testament 
 in the library which had been formed by himself. In a solemn 
 and tender prayer he commended the house and its inmates to 
 the Divine protection, and, with emotions which choked his 
 voice and convulsed his powerful frame, left forever that be- 
 loved home for the gloomy and desolate house behind Fleet 
 Street, where the few and evil days which still remained to him 
 were to run out. Here, in June 1783, he had a paralytic 
 stroke, from which, however, he recovered, and which does not 
 appear to have at all impaired his intellectual faculties. But 
 other maladies came thick upon him. His asthma tormented 
 jtiim day and night, Dropsical symptoms made their appear- 
 
SAMUEL JOHNSON. xliii 
 
 ance. While sinking under a complication of diseases, he 
 heard that the woman whose friendship had been the chief hap- 
 piness of sixteen years of his life, had married an Italian fid- 
 dler ; that all London was crying shame upon her ; and that 
 the newspapers and magazines were filled with allusions to 
 the Ephesian matron and the two pictures in Hamlet. He 
 vehemently said that he would try to forget her existence. 
 He never uttered her name. Every memorial of her which 
 met his eye he flung into the fire. She meanwhile fled from 
 the laughter and hisses of her countrymen and countrywomen 
 to a land where she was unknown, hastened across Mont 
 Cenis, and learned, while passing a merry Christmas of con- 
 certs and lemonade parties at Milan, that the great man with 
 whose name hers is inseparably associated had ceased to exist. 
 He had, in spite of much mental and much bodily affliction, 
 clung vehemently to life. The feeling described in that fine but 
 gloomy paper which closes the series of his " Idlers" seemed to 
 grow stronger in him as his last hour drew near. He fancied that 
 he should be able to draw his breath more easily in a southern 
 climate, and would probably have set out for Rome and Na- 
 ples but for his fear of the expense of the journey. That ex- 
 pense, indeed, he had the means of defraying ; for he had laid 
 up about two thousand pounds, the fruit of labors which had 
 made the fortune of several publishers. But he was unwilling 
 to break in upon this hoard, and he seems to have wished even 
 to keep its existence a secret. Some of his friends hoped that 
 the government might be induced to increase his pension to six 
 hundred pounds a year, but this hope was disappointed, and 
 he resolved to stand one English winter more. That winter, 
 was his last. His legs grew weaker ; his breath grew shorter ; 
 the fatal water gathered fast, in spite of incisions which he, 
 courageous against pain, but timid against death, urged his 
 surgeons to make deeper and deeper. Though the tender care 
 which had mitigated his sufferings during months of sick- 
 ness at Streatham was withdrawn, he was not left desolate. 
 The ablest physicians and surgeons attended him, and refused 
 to accept fees from him. Burke parted from him with deep 
 emotion. Windham sat much in the sick-room, arranged the 
 pillows, and sent his own servant to watch at night by the 
 bed. Frances Burney, whom the old man had cherished with 
 fatherly kindness, stood weeping at the door ; while Langton, 
 whose piety eminently qualified him to be an adviser and com- 
 forter at such a time, received the last pressure of his friend's 
 hand within. When at length the moment, dreaded through 
 so many years, came close, the dark cloud passed away from 
 
Xliv LORD MACAULA V ON SAMUEL JOHNSON. 
 
 Johnson's mind. His temper became unusually patient and 
 gentle ; he ceased to think with terror of death and of that 
 which lies beyond death ; and he spoke much of the mercy of 
 God and of the propitiation of Christ. Jn this serene frame 
 of mind he died on the 13 th of December, 1784. He was laid, 
 a week later, in Westminster Abbey, among the eminent men 
 of whom he had been the historian— Cowley and Denham, 
 Dryden and Congreve, Gay, Prior, and Addison. 
 
 Since his death the popularity of his works — the ' ' Lives of 
 the Poets," and, perhaps, the " Vanity of Human Wishes" ex- 
 cepted — has greatly diminished. His Dictionary has been altered 
 by editors till it can scarcely be called his. An allusion to his 
 " Rambler" or his " Idler" is not readily apprehended in literary 
 circles. The fame even of ' ' Rasselas' ' has grown somewhat dim. 
 But though the celebrity of the writings may have declined, 
 the celebrity of the writer, strange to say, is as great as ever. 
 Boswell's book has done for him more than the best of his own 
 books could do. The memory of other authors is kept ahve 
 by their works. But the memory of Johnson keeps many of his 
 works alive. The old philosopher is still among us in the brown 
 coat with the metal buttons and the shirt which ought to be at 
 wash, blinking, puffing, rolling his head, drumming with his 
 fingers, tearing his meat like a tiger, and swallowing his tea in 
 oceans. No human being who has been more than seventy 
 years in the grave is so well known to us. And it is but just 
 to say that our intimate acquaintance with what he would him- 
 self hav-e called the anfractuosities of his intellect and of his 
 temper, serves only to strengthen our conviction that he was 
 both a great and a good man, 
 
THE CHIEF 
 
 LIVES OF THE POETS. 
 
 BY 
 
 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON. 
 
DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON MILTON. 
 
 The life of Milton has been already written in so many 
 forms, and with such minute inquiry, that I might perhaps 
 more properly have contented myself with the addition of a 
 few notes on Mr. Fenton's elegant Abridgment, but that a new 
 narrative was thought necessary to the uniformity of this 
 edition. 
 
 John Milton was by birth a gentleman, descended from 
 the proprietors of Milton, near Thame, in Oxfordshire, one of 
 whom forfeited his estate in the times of York and Lancaster. 
 Which side he took I know not ; his descendant inherited 
 no veneration for the White Rose. 
 
 His grandfather, John, was keeper of the forest of Shot- 
 over, a zealous papist, who disinherited his son because he had 
 forsaken the religion of his ancestors. 
 
 His father, John, who was the son disinherited, had recourse 
 for his support to the profession of a scrivener. He was a man 
 eminent for his skill in music, many of his compositions being 
 still to be found ; and his reputation in his profession was 
 such that he grew rich, and retired to an estate. He had 
 probably more than common literature, as his son addresses 
 him in one of his most elaborate Latin poems. He married a 
 gentlewoman of the name of Caston, a Welsh family, by whom 
 he had two sons — John, the poet, and Christopher, who studied 
 the law, and adhered, as the law taught him, to the king's 
 party, for which he was a while persecuted ; but having, by his 
 brother's interest, obtained permission to live in quiet, he sup- 
 ported himself so honorably by chamber practice, that, soon 
 after the accession of King James, he was knighted, and made 
 a judge ; but, his constitution being too weak for business, he 
 retired before any disreputable compliances became necessary. 
 
 He had likewise a daughter, Anne, whom he married with 
 considerable fortune to Edward Philips, who came from 
 Shrewsbury, and rose in the Crown Office to be secondary : by 
 him she had two sons, John and Edward, who were educated 
 by the poet, and from whom is derived the only authentic 
 account of his domestic manners. 
 
 John, the poet, was bom in his father's house, at the 
 Spread Eagle, in Bread Street, December 9, 1608, between six 
 and seven in the morning. His father appears to have been very , 
 
ISMUEL yOHNSON ON 
 
 t,f-.,.v,ixo about his education ; for he was instructed at first by 
 jp..vate tuition, under the care of Thomas Young, who wai 
 afterwards chaplain to the EngUsh merchants at Hamburg, 
 and of whom we have reason to think well, since his scholai 
 considered him as worthy of an epistolary elegy. 
 
 He was then sent to St. Paul's School, under the care of 
 _r. Gill ; and removed, in the beginning of his sixteenth year, 
 to Christ's College, in Cambridge, where he entered a sizar, 
 February 12, 1624. 
 
 He was at this time eminently skilled in the Latin tongue : 
 and he himself, by annexing the dates to his first compositions, 
 a boast of which the learned Politian had given him an exam- 
 ple, seems to commend the earliness of his own proficiency to 
 the notice of posterity. But the products of his vernal fertility 
 have been surpassed by many, and particularly by his contem- 
 porary Cowley. Of. the powers of the mind it is difficult to 
 form an estimate : many have excelled Milton in their first 
 essays, who never rose to works like " Paradise Lost." 
 
 At fifteen, a date which he uses till he is sixteen, he trans- 
 lated or versified two Psalms, 114 and 136, which he thought 
 worthy of the public eye; but they raise.no great expecta- 
 tions : they would in any numerous school have obtained 
 praise, but not excited wonder. 
 
 Many of his elegies appear to have been written in his 
 eighteenth year, by which it appears that he had then read the 
 Roman authors with very nice discernment. I once heard 
 Mr. Hampton, the translator of Polybius, remark, what I 
 think is true, that Milton was the first Englishman who, after 
 the revival of letters, wrote Latin verses with classic elegance. 
 If any exceptions can be made, they are very few : Haddon and 
 Ascham, the pride of Elizabeth's reign, however they have suc- 
 ceeded in prose, no sooner attempt verse than they provoke 
 derision. If we produced any thing worthy of notice before 
 the elegies of Milton, it was perhaps " Alabaster's Roxana." 
 
 Of the exercises which the rules of the University required, 
 some were published by him in his maturer years. They had 
 been undoubtefidly applauded, for they were such as few can 
 perform ; yetLthere is reason to suspect that he was regarded 
 in his college with no great fondness. That he obtained no 
 fellowship is certain ; but the unkindness with which he was 
 treated was not merely negative. I am ashamed to relate, 
 what I fear is true, that Milton was one of the last students in 
 either University that suffered the public indignity of corporal ' 
 correction. 
 
 It was, in the violence of controversial hostility, objected 
 
MILTON. 5 
 
 to him, that he was expelled : this he steadily denies, and it 
 was apparently not true ; but it seems plain, from his own 
 verses to Diodati, that he had incurred rustication, a tem- 
 porary dismission into the country, with perhaps the loss of a 
 term : 
 
 " Me tenet urbs refluS quam Thamesis alluit unda, 
 Meque nee invitum patria dulcis habet. 
 Jam nee arundiferum mihi cura revisere Caraum, 
 
 Nee dudum vetiti me laris angit amor. — 
 Nee duri libet usque minas perferre magistri, 
 
 Caeteraque ingenio non subeunda meo. 
 Si sit hoc exilium patrios adiisse penates, 
 
 Et vacuum curis otia grata sequi, 
 Non ego vel profugi nomen sortemve recuso, 
 Laetus et exilii conditione fruor." 
 
 I cannot find any meaning but this, which even kindness and 
 reverence can give the term vetiti laris, " a habitation from 
 which he is excluded ;" or how exile can be otherwise inter- 
 preted. He declares yet more that he is weary of enduring 
 l/ie threats of a rigorous master, and something else, which a 
 temper like his cannot undergo. What was more than threat 
 was probably punishment. This poem, which mentions his 
 exile, proves likewise that it was not perpetual ; for it con- 
 cludes with a resolution of returning some time to Cambridge. 
 And it may be conjectured, from the willingness with which he 
 has perpetuated the memory of his exile, that its cause was 
 such as gave him no shame. 
 
 He took both the usual dggrees ; that of bachelor in 1628, 
 and that of master in 1632 /Mt he left the University with no 
 kindness for its institutionj'-Brtt&nated either by the injudicious 
 severity of his governors, or his own captious perverseness. 
 The cause cannot now be known, but the effect appears in his 
 writings. His scheme of education, inscribed to Hartlib, 
 supersedes all academical instruction, being intended to com- 
 prise the whole time which men usually spend in literature, 
 from their entrance upon grammar, //// they proceed, as it is 
 called, masters of arts. And in his discourse on the likeliest 
 ■way to remove hirelings otU of the church, he ingeniously pro- 
 poses that " the profits of the lands forfeited by the act for 
 superstitious uses should be applied to such academies all over 
 the land, where languages and arts may be taught together ; so 
 that youth may be at once brought up to a competency of 
 learning and an honest trade, by which means such of them as 
 had the gift, being enabled to support themselves (without 
 tithes) by the latter, may, by the help of the former, become 
 worthy preachers." 
 
6 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 One of his objections to academical education, as it was 
 then conducted, is, that men designed for orders in the church 
 were permitted to act plays, " writhing and unboning their 
 clergy limbs to all the antic and dishonest gestures of Trin- 
 culos, buffoons, and bawds, prostituting the shame of that min- 
 istry which they had, or were near having, to the eyes of the 
 courtiers and court ladies, their grooms and mademoiselles. 
 
 This is sufficiently peevish in a man who, when he men- 
 tions his exile from the college, relates, with great luxuriance, 
 the compensation which the pleasures of the theatre afford 
 him. Plays were therefore only criminal when they were acted 
 by academics. 
 
 He went to the University with a design of entering into 
 the church, but in time altered his mind ; for he declared that 
 whoever became a clergyman must ' ' subscribe slave, and take 
 an oath withal, which, unless he took with a conscience that 
 could not retch, he must straight perjure himself. He thought 
 it better to prefer a blameless silence before the office of speak- 
 ing, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing. ' ' 
 
 These expressions are, I find, applied to the subscription of 
 the Articles ; but it seems more probable that they relate to 
 canonical obedience. I know not any of the Articles which 
 seem to thwart his opinions : but the thoughts of obedience; 
 whether canonical or civil, raised his indignation. 
 
 His unwillingness to engage in the ministry, perhaps not yet 
 advanced to a settled resolution of declining it, appears in a 
 letter to one of his friends, who had reproved his suspended 
 and dilatory life, which he seems to have imputed to an insati- 
 able curiosity, and fantastic luxury of various knowledge. To 
 this he writes a cool and plausible answer, in which he endeav- 
 ors to persuade him that the delay proceeds not from the 
 delights of desultory study, but from the desire of obtainin| 
 more fitness for his task ; and that he goes on, not taking 
 thought of being late, so it gives advantage to be more fit. 
 
 When he left the University, he returned to his father, then 
 residing at Horton, in Buckinghamshire, with whom he lived : 
 five years, in which time he is said to have read all the Greek 
 and Latin writers. With what limitations this uniyersality-is 
 to be understood, who shall inform us ? 
 
 It might be supposed that he who read so much should 
 have done nothing else ; but Milton found time to write the 
 " Mask of Comus," which was presented at Ludlow then the 
 residence of the Lord President of Wales, in 1634'; and had 
 the honor of being acted by the Earl of Bridgewa'ter's sons 
 and daughter. The fiction is derived from Homer's Circe ■ 
 
MILTON. J 
 
 but we never can refuse to any modern the liberty of borrow- 
 ing from Homer : 
 
 " a quo ceu fonte perenni 
 
 Vatum Pieriis ora rigantur aquis." 
 
 His next production was ' ' Lycidas, ' ' an elegy, written in 
 1637, on the death of Mr. King, the son of Sir John King, sec- 
 retary for Ireland in the time of Elizabeth, James, and Charles. 
 King was much a favorite at Cambridge, and many of the 
 wits joined to do honor to his memory. Milton's acquaint- 
 ance with the Italian writers may be discovered by a mixture of 
 longer and shorter verses, according to the rules of Tuscan 
 poetry, and his malignity to the church by some lines which 
 are interpreted as threatening its extermination. 
 
 He is supposed about this time to have written; his 
 " Arcades ;" for, while he lived at Horton, he used sometimes 
 to steal from his studies a few days, which he spent at Hare- 
 field, the house of the Countess Dowager of Derby, where the 
 " Arcades" made part of a dramatic entertainment. 
 
 He began now to grow weary of the country, and had some 
 purpose of taking chambers in the Inns of Court, when the 
 death of his mother set him at liberty to travel, for which he 
 obtained his father's consent, and Sir Henry Wojiton's direc- 
 tions ; with the celebrated precept of prudence, / pemieri 
 streiti, ed il visa sciolto, ' ' Thoughts close, and looks loose. ' ' 
 
 In 1638 he left England, and went first to Paris ; where, by 
 the favor of Lord Scudamore, he had the opportunity of visit- 
 ing Grotius, then residing at the French court as ambassador 
 from Christina of Sweden. From Paris he hasted into Italy, 
 of which he had with particular diligence studied the language 
 and literature ; and though he seems to have intended a very 
 quick perambulation of the country, stayed two months at 
 Florence ; where he found his way into the academies, and 
 produced his compositions with such applause as appears to 
 have exalted him in his own opinion, and confirmed him in the 
 hope that, "by labor and intense study, which," says he, 
 " I take to be my portion in this life, joined with a strong pro- 
 pensity of nature, ' ' he might ' ' leave something so written to 
 aftertimes as they should not willingly let it die. ' ' 
 
 It appears in all his writings that he had the usual concomi- 
 tant of great abilities, a lofty and steady confidence in himself, ' 
 perhaps not without some contempt of others ; for scarcely 
 any man ever wrote so much, and praised so few. Of his 
 praise he was very frugal, as he set its value high, and consid- 
 ered his mention of a name as a security against the waste of 
 time, and a certain preservative from oblivion 
 
S DR. SAMUEL yotttfsON ON 
 
 At Florence he could not, indeed, complain that his merit 
 wanted distinction. Carlo Dati presented him with an enco- 
 miastic inscription, in the tumid lapidary style ; and Francini 
 wrote him an ode, of which the first stanza is only empty 
 noise ; the rest are perhaps too diffuse on common topics : but 
 the last is natural and beautiful. 
 
 From Florence he went to Sienna, and from Sienna to 
 Rome, where he was again received with kindness by the 
 learned and the great. Holstenius, the keeper of the Vatican 
 Library, who had resided three years at Oxford, introduced 
 him to Cardinal Barberini ; and he, at a musical entertainment, 
 waited for him at the door, and led him by the hand into the 
 assembly. Here Selvaggi praised him in a distich, and Salsilli 
 in a tetrastic ; neither of them of much value. The Italians 
 were gainers by this literary commerce ; for the encomiums 
 with which Milton repaid Salsilli, though not secure against a 
 stern grammarian, turn the balance indisputably in Milton's 
 favor. 
 
 Of these Italian testimonies, poor as they are, he was proud 
 enough to publish them before his poems ; though he says he, 
 cannot be suspected but to have known that they were said 
 non tarn de se, quam supra se. 
 
 At Rome, as at Florence, he stayed only two months — a - 
 time indeed sufficient, if he desired only to ramble with an 
 explainer of its antiquities, or to view palaces and count pic- 
 tures ; but certainly too short for the contemplation of learn- 
 ing, policy, or manners. 
 
 From Rome he passed on to Naples, in company of a her- 
 mit, a companion from whom little could be expected ; yet to 
 him Milton owed his introduction to Manso, Marquis of Villa, 
 who had been before the patron of Tasso. Manso was enough 
 delighted with his accomplishments to honor him with a sorry 
 distich, in which he commends him for every thing but his 
 religion ; and Milton, in return, addressed him in a Latin 
 poem, which must have raised a high opinion of English ele- 
 gance and literature. 
 
 His purpose was now to have visited Sicily and Greece ; 
 but, hearing of the differences between the king and parlia- 
 ment, he thought it proper to hasten home, rather than pass his 
 life in foreign amusements while his countrymen were contend- 
 ing for their rights. He therefore came back to Rome, though 
 the merchants informed him of plots laid against him by the 
 Jesuits, for the liberty of his conversations on religion. He 
 had sense enough to judge that there was no danger, and 
 therefore kept on his way, and acted as before, neither obtrud- 
 
MILTON. 
 
 ing nor shunning controversy. He had perhaps given some 
 offence by visiting Galileo, then a prisoner in the Inquisition 
 for philosophical heresy ; and at Naples he was told by Manso 
 that, by his declarations on religious questions, he had exclud- 
 ed himself from some distinctions which he should otherwise 
 have paid him. But such conduct, though it did not please, 
 was yet sufficiently safe ; and Milton stayed two months more 
 at Rome, and went on to Florence without molestation. 
 
 From Florence he visjed Lucca. He afterwards went to 
 Venice ; and, having sent away a collection of music and other 
 books, travelled to Geneva, which he probably considered as 
 the metropolis of orthodoxy. 
 
 Here he reposed as in a congenial element, and became 
 acquainted with John Diodati and Frederick Spanheim, two 
 learned professors of divinity. From Geneva he passed 
 through France ; and came home, after an absence of a year 
 and three months. 
 
 At his return he heard of the death Of his friend Charles 
 Diodati ; a man whom it is reasonable to suppose of great 
 merit, since he was thought by Milton worthy of a poem, en- 
 titled " Epitaphium Damonis," written with the common but 
 childish imitation of pastoral life. 
 
 He now hired a lodging at the house of one Russel, a tailor in 
 St. Bride's Churchyard, and undertook the education of John 
 and Edward Philips, his sister's sons. Finding his rooms too 
 little, he took a house and garden in Aldersgate Street, which 
 was not then so much out of the world as it is now ; and chose 
 his dwelling at the upper end of a passage, that he might avoid 
 the noise of the street. Here he received more boys, to be 
 boarded and .instructed. 
 
 Let not our veneration for Milton forbid us to look with 
 some degree of merriment on great promises and small per- 
 formance, on the man who hastens home, because his country- 
 men are contending for their liberty, and, when he reaches the 
 scene of action, vapors away his patriotism in a private board- 
 ing-school. This is the period of his life from which all his 
 biographers seem inclined to shrink. They are unwilling that 
 Milton should be degraded to a schoolmaster ; but, since it 
 cannot be denied that he taught boys, one finds out that he 
 taught for nothing, and another that his motive was only zeal 
 for the propagation of learning and virtue ; and all tell what 
 they do not know to be true, only to excuse an act which no 
 wise man will consider as in itself disgraceful. His father was 
 alive ; his allowance was not ample ; and he supplied its defi- 
 ciencies by an honest and useful employment. 
 
%0 DR. SAMimt yOHNSOM'ON 
 
 It is told, that in the art of education he performed won- 
 ders ; and a formidable list is given of the authors, Greek and 
 Latin, that were read in Aldersgate Street by youths between ten 
 and fifteen or sixteen years of age. Those who tell or receive 
 these stories should consider that nobody can be taught faster 
 than he can learn. The speed of the horseman must be lim- 
 ited by the power of the horse. Every man that has ever un- 
 dertaken to instruct others can tell what slow advances he has 
 been able to make, and how much patience it requires to recall 
 vagrant inattention, to stimulate sluggish indifference, and to 
 rectify absurd misapprehension. 
 
 The purpose of Milton, as it seems, was to teach something 
 more solid than the common literature of schools, by reading 
 those authors that treat of physical subjects : such as the 
 Georgics, and astronomical treatises of the ancients. This 
 was a scheme of improvement which seems to have busied 
 many literary projectors of that age. Cowley, who had more 
 means than Milton of knowing what was wanting to the embel- 
 lishments of life, formed the same plan of education in his im- 
 aginary college. 
 
 But the truth is, that the knowledge of external nature, and 
 the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes, are not 
 the great or the frequent business of the human mind. 
 Whether we provide for action or conversation, whether we 
 wish to be useful or pleasing, the first requisite is the religious 
 and moral knowledge of right and wrong ; the next is an 
 acquaintance with the history of mankind, and with those' 
 examples which may be said to embody truth, and prove by 
 events the reasonableness of opinions. Prudence and justice 
 are virtues and excellences of all times and of all places ; we 
 are perpetually mo?alists, but we are geometricians only by 
 chance. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary ; 
 "our speculations upon matter are voluntary, and at leisure. 
 Physiological learning is of such rare emergence, that one may 
 know another half his life without being able to estimate his 
 skill in hydrostatics or astronomy ; but his moral and pruden- 
 tial character immediately appears. 
 
 Those authors, therefore, are to be read at schools that 
 supply most axioms of prudence, most principles of moral 
 truth, and most materials for conversation ; and those pur- 
 poses are best served by poets, orators, and historians. 
 
 Let me not be censured for this digression as pedantic or 
 paradoxical ; for, if I have Milton against me, I have Socratef 
 on my side. It was his labor to turn philosophy from the' 
 study of nature to speculations upon life ; but the innovators 
 
MILTON. ri 
 
 whom I oppose are turning ofE attention from life to nature. 
 They seem to think that we are placed here to watch the 
 growth of plants, or the motions of the stars : Socrates was 
 rather of opinion that what we had to learn was, how to do 
 good and avoid evil. 
 
 ' ' 'Ottl Toi ev fieyagowi kokovt' aya&ovTe TervKrai. ' ' 
 
 Of institutions we may judge by their effects. From this 
 wonder-working academy I do not know that there ever pro- 
 ceeded any man very eminent for knowledge : its only genuine 
 product, I believe, is a small history of poetry, written in Latin 
 by his nephew Philips, of which perhaps none of my readers 
 has ever heard. 
 
 That in his school, as in every thing else which he under- 
 took, he labored with great diligence, there is no reason for 
 doubting. One part of his method deserves general imitation. 
 He was careful to instruct his scholars in religion. Every 
 Sunday was spent upon theology ; of which he dictated a short 
 system, gathered from the writers that were then fashionable in 
 the Dutch universities. 
 
 He set his pupils an example of hard study and spare diet : 
 only now and then he allowed himself to pass a day of festivity 
 and indulgence with some gay gentlemen of Gray's Inn. 
 
 He now began to engage in the controversies of the times, 
 and lent his breath to blow the flames of contention. In 1641 
 he published a treatise of Reformation, in two books, against 
 the established church ; being willing to help the Puritans, who 
 were, he says, " inferior to the prelates in learning." 
 
 Hall, Bishop of Norwich, had published an Humble Re- 
 monstrance, in defence of episcopacy ; to ^ which, in 1641, five 
 ministers, of whose names the first letters made the celebrated 
 word Smectymnuus, gave their Answer. Of this Answer a Con- 
 futation was attempted by the learned Usher ; and to the Con- 
 futation Milton published a reply, entitled, " Of Prelaticab 
 Episcopacy, and whether it may be deduced from the Apostol- 
 ical Times, by virtue of those Testimonies which are alleged to 
 that purpose in some late Treatises, one whereof goes under 
 the Name of James, Lord Bishop of Armagh." 
 
 I have transcribed this title to show, by his contemptuous 
 mention of Usher, that he had now adopted the puritanical 
 savageness of manners. His next work was, ' ' The Reason of 
 Church Government urged against Prelacy, by Mr. John Milton, 
 1642." In this book he discovers, not with ostentatious exul- 
 tation, but with calm confidence, his high opinion of his own 
 powers ; and promises to undertake something, he yet knows 
 
12 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 not what, that may be of use and honor to his country. 
 " This," says he, " is not to be obtained but by devout prayer 
 to that eternal Spirit that can enrich with all utterance and 
 knowledge, and sends out his seraphim with the hallowed fire 
 of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases. 
 To this must be added, industrious and select reading, steady 
 observation, and insight into all seemly and generous arts and 
 affairs ; till which in some measure be compassed, I refuse not 
 to sustain this expectation." From a promise like this, at 
 once fervid, pious, and rational, might be expected the ' ' Para- 
 dise Lost." 
 
 He published the same year two more pamphlets, upon the 
 same question. To one of his antagonists, who affirms that he 
 was " vomited out of the University," he answers in general' 
 terms. " The fellows of the college wherein I spent some 
 years, at my parting, after I had taken two degrees, as the 
 manner is, signified many times how much better it would con- 
 tent them that I should stay. As for the common approbation 
 or dislike of that place as now it is, that I should esteem or 
 disesteem myself the more for that, too simple is the answerer, 
 if he think to obtain with me. Of small practice were the 
 physician who could not judge, by what she and her sister have 
 of long time vomited, that the worser stuff she strongly keeps 
 in her stomach, but the better she is ever kecking at, and is 
 queasy ; she vomits now out of sickness ; but before it will be 
 well with her she must vomit by strong physic. The Univer- 
 sity, in the time of her bet'ter health, and my younger judg- 
 ment, I never greatly admired, but now much less. ' ' 
 
 This is surely the language of a man who thinks that he has 
 been injured. He proceeds to describe the course of his con- 
 duct and the train of his thoughts, and, because he has been 
 suspected of incontinence, gives an account of his own purity : 
 " That if I be justly charged," says he, " with this crime, it, 
 may come upon me with tenfold shame." 
 
 The style of his piece is rough, and such perhaps was that 
 of his antagonist. This roughness he justifies by great exam- 
 ples in a long digression. Sometimes he tries to be humorousg 
 " Lest I should take him for some chaplain in hand, some 
 squire of the body to his prelate, one who serves not at the 
 altar only, but at the court-cupboard, he will bestow on us a 
 pretty model of himself ; and sets me out half a dozen phthisical 
 mottoes, wherever he had them, hopping short in the measure of 
 convulsion fits ; in which labor the agony of his wit having 
 escaped narrowly, instead of well-sized periods, he greets us 
 with a quantity of thumb-ring poesies. And thtts ends this 
 
MILTON. 
 
 13 
 
 section, or rather dissection, of himself. ' ' Such is the contro- 
 versial merriment of Milton ; his gloomy seriousness is yet 
 more offensive. Such is his malignity, that hell grows darker 
 at his frown. 
 
 His father, after Reading was taken by Essex, came to 
 reside in his house ; and his school increased. At Whitsun- 
 tide, in his thirty-fifth year, he married Mary, the daughter of 
 Mr. Powel, a justice of the peace in Oxfordshire. He brought 
 her to town with him, and expected all the advantages of a 
 conjugal life. The lady, however, seems not much to have 
 delighted in the pleasures of spare diet and hard study ; for, as 
 Philips relates, " having for a month led a philosophic life, 
 after having been used at home to a great house, and much 
 company and joviality, her friends, possibly by her own desire, 
 made earnest suit to have her company the remaining part of 
 the summer ; which was granted, upon a promise of her return 
 at Michaelmas." 
 
 Milton was too busy to much miss his wife ; he pursued his 
 studies ; and now and then visited the Lady Margaret Leigh, 
 whom he has mentioned in one of his sonnets. At last Mich- 
 aelmas arrived ; but the lady had no inclination to return to 
 the sullen gloom of her husband's habitation, and therefore 
 very willingly forgot her promise. He sent her a letter, but 
 had no answer ; he sent more, with the same success. It could 
 be alleged that letters miscarry ; he therefore despatched a mes- 
 senger, being by this time too angry to go himself. His mes- 
 senger was sent back with some contempt. The family of the 
 lady were cavaliers. 
 
 In a man whose opinion of his own merit was like Mil- 
 ton's, less provocation than this might have raised violent 
 i«sentment. IMilton soon determined to repudiate her for dis- 
 obedience ; and, being one of those who could easily find argu- 
 ments to justify incUnation, published (in 1644) " The Doc- 
 trine and Discipline of Divorce ;" which was followed by 
 " The Judgment of Martin Bucer concerning Divorce ;" and 
 the next year, his Tetrachordon, " Expositions upon the four 
 chief Places of Scripture which treat of Marriage." 
 
 This innovation was opposed, as might be expected, by the 
 clergy, who, then holding their famous assembly at Westmin- 
 ster, procured that the author should be called before the 
 Lords ; "but that House," says Wood, " whether approving 
 the doctrine, or not favoring his accusers, did soon dismiss 
 him." 
 
 There seems not to have been much written against him, 
 nor any thing by any writer of eminence, The antagonist 
 
14 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 that appeared is styled by him, A serving-man turned sohcttor. 
 Howel, in his Letters, mentions the new doctrine with con. 
 tempt ; and it was, I suppose, thought more worthy of de- 
 rision than of confutation. He complains of this neglect in 
 two sonnets, of which the first is contemptible, and the second 
 not excellent. 
 
 From this time it is observed that he became an enemy 
 to the Presbyterians, whom he had favored before. He that 
 changes his party by his humor is not more virtuous than he 
 that changes it by his interest ; he loves himself rather than 
 truth. 
 
 ■ His wife and her relations now found that Milton was not an 
 unresisting sufferer of injuries ; and perceiving that he had 
 begun to put his doctrine in practice, by courting a young 
 woman of great accomplishments, the daughter of one Doctor 
 Davis, who was, however, not ready to comply, they resolved to 
 endeavor a reunion. He went sometimes to the house of 
 one Blackborough, his relation, in the lane of St. Martin's- 
 le-Grand, and at one of his usual visits was surprised to see his 
 wife come from another room, and implore forgiveness on her 
 knees. He resisted her entreaties for a while ; " but partly," 
 says Philips, " his own generous nature, more inclinable to 
 reconciliation than to perseverance in anger or revenge, and 
 partly the strong intercession of friends on both sides, soon 
 brought him to an act of oblivion and a firm league of peace." 
 It were injurious to omit that Milton afterwards received her 
 father and her brothers in his own house, when they were dis- 
 tressed, with other royalists. 
 
 He published about the same time his " Areopagitica, a 
 Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Print- 
 ing." The danger of such unbounded liberty, and the danger 
 of bounding it, have produced a problem in the science of gov- 
 ernment which human understanding seems hitherto unable to 
 solve. If nothing may be published but what civil authority 
 shall have previously approved, power must always be the 
 standard of truth ; if every dreamer of innovations may propa- 
 gate his projects, there can be no settlement ; if every mur- 
 murer at government may diffuse discontent, there can be no 
 peace ; and if every sceptic in theology may teach his follies, 
 there can be no religion. The remedy against these evils is to 
 punish the authors ; for it is yet allowed that every society may 
 punish, though not prevent, the publication of opinions which 
 that society shall think pernicious ; but this punishment, 
 though it may crush the author, promotes the book ; and it 
 seems not more reasonable to leave the right of printing unre- 
 
MIL TON. 
 
 15 
 
 Strained because writers may be afterwards censured, than it 
 would be to sleep with doors unbolted because by our laws we 
 can hang a thief. 
 
 But whatever were his engagements, civil or domestic, 
 poetry was never long out of his thoughts. 
 
 About this time (1645) a collection of his Latin and Eng- 
 lish poems appeared, in which the Allegro and Penseroso, 
 with some others, were first published. 
 
 He had taken a larger house in Barbican for the reception 
 of scholars ; but the numerous relations of his wife, to whom 
 he generously granted refuge for a while, occupied his rooms. 
 In time, however, they went away ; " and the house again," 
 says Philips, "now looked like a house of the muses only, 
 though the accession of scholars was not great. Possibly his 
 having proceeded so far in the education of youth may have 
 been the occasion of his adversaries calling him pedagogue and 
 schoolmaster ; whereas it is well known he never set up for a 
 public school, to teach all the young fry of a parish ; but only 
 was willing to impart his learning and knowledge to his rela- 
 tions, and the sons of gentlemen who were his intimate friends, 
 and that neither his writings nor his way of teaching ever 
 savored in the least of pedantry." 
 
 Thus laboriously does his nephew extenuate what cannot be 
 denied, and what might be confessed without disgrace. Mil- 
 ton was not a man who could become mean by a mean employ- 
 ment. This, however, his warmest friends seem not to have 
 found ; they therefore shift and palliate. He did not sell 
 literature to all comers at an open shop ; he was a chamber- 
 milliner, and measured his commodities only to his friends. 
 
 Philips, evidently impatient of viewing him in this state of 
 degradation, tells us that it was not long continued ; and, to 
 raise his character again, has a mind to invest him with mili- 
 tary splendor : ' ' He is much mistaken, " ' he say?, ' ' if there was 
 not about this time a design of making him an adjutant-general 
 in Sir William Waller's army. But the new-modelling of the 
 army proved an obstruction to the design. ' ' An event cannot 
 be set at a much greater distance than by having been only de- 
 signed about some time, if a man be not much mistaken. Milton 
 shall be a pedagogue no longer ; for, if Philips be not much 
 mistaken, somebody at some time designed him for a sol- 
 dier. 
 
 About the time that the army was new-modelled (1645), he 
 removed to a smaller house in Holborn, which opened back- 
 ward into Lincoln's Inn Fields. He is not known to have pub- 
 lished any thing afterwards till the king's death, when, find- 
 
1 6 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 ing his murderers condemned by the Presbyterians, he wrote a 
 treatise to justify it, and to compose the minds of the people. 
 
 He made some " Remarks on the Articles of Peace between 
 Ormond and the Irish Rebels. ' ' While he contented himself to 
 write he perhaps did only what his conscience dictated ; and 
 if he did not very vigilantly watch the influence of his own 
 passions, and the gradual prevalence of opinions, first willingly 
 admitted, and then habitually indulged ; if objections by being 
 overlooked were forgotten, and desire superinduced convic- 
 tion ; he yet shared only the common weakness of mankind, 
 and might be no less sincere than his opponents. But as fac- 
 tion seldom lea/es a man honest, however it might find him, 
 Milton is suspected of having interpolated the book called 
 " Icon Basilike," which the Council of State, to whom he was 
 now made Latin secretary, employed him to censure, by insert- 
 ing a prayer taken from Sidney's " Arcadia," and imputing it 
 to the king ; whom he charges, in his " Iconoclastes, " with the 
 use of this prayer, as with a heavy crime, in the indecent lan- 
 guage with which prosperity had emboldened the advocates 
 for rebellion to insult all that is venerable or great : ' ' Who 
 would have imagined so little fear in him of the true all-seeing 
 Deity, as, immediately before his death, to pop into the hands 
 of the grave bishop that attended him, as a special relic of his 
 saintly exercises, a prayer stolen word for word from the 
 mouth of a heathen woman praying to a heathen god ?' ' 
 
 The papers which the king gave to Dr. Juxon on the scaf- 
 fold the regicides took away, so that they were at least the pub- 
 lishers of this prayer ; and Dr. Birch, who had examined the 
 question with great care, was inclined to think them the 
 forgers. The use of it by adaptation was innocent ; and they 
 who could so noisily censure i-t, with a little extension of their 
 malice, could contrive what they wanted to accuse. 
 
 King Charles the Second, being now sheltered in Holland, 
 employed Salmasius, professor of polite learning at Leyden, to 
 write a defence of his father and of monarchy, and, to excite 
 his industry, gave him, as was reported, a hundred Jacobuses. 
 Salmasius was a man of skill in languages, knowledge of 
 antiquity, and sagacity of emendatory criticism, almost exceed- 
 ing all hope of human attainment ; and having, by excessive 
 praises, been confirmed in great confidence of himself, though 
 he probably had not much considered the principles of society 
 or the rights of government, undertook the employment with- 
 out distrust of his own qualifications ; and, as his expedition in 
 writing was wonderful, in 1649 published " Defensio Regis." 
 
 To this Milton was required to write a sufficient answer, 
 
MILTON. 
 
 17 
 
 which he performed (165 1) in such a manner that Hobbes 
 declared himself unable to decide whose language was best or 
 whose arguments were worst. In my opinion, Milton's peri- 
 ods are smoother, neater, and more pointed ; but he delights 
 himself with teasing his adversary as much as with confuting 
 him. He makes a foolish allusion of Salmasius, whose doc- 
 trine he considers as servile and unmanly, to the stream of 
 Salmacis, which, whoever entered, left half his virility behind 
 him. Salmasius was a Frenchman, and was unhappily married 
 to a scold. Tu es Gallus, says Milton, et, itt aiunt, nimium 
 gallinaceus. But his supreme pleasure is to tax his adversary, 
 so renowned for criticisms, with vicious Latin. He opens his 
 book with telling that he has used /f rj^«a, which, according to 
 Milton, signifies only a mask, in a sense not known to the Ro-. 
 mans, by applying it as we apply person. But as Nemesis is 
 always on the watch, it is memorable that he has enforced the 
 charge of a solecism by an expression in itself grossly solecisti- 
 cal, when for one of those supposed blunders he says, as Ker, 
 and I think some- one before him, has remarked, pre^ino te 
 grammatistis tuts vapulandum. From vapulo, which has a pas- 
 sive sense, vapulandus can never be derived. No man forgets 
 his original trade ; the rights of nations and of kings sink into 
 questions of grammar if grammarians discuss them. 
 
 Milton, when he undertook this answer, was weak of body 
 and dim of sight ; but his will was forward, and what was 
 wanting of health was supplied by zeal. He was rewarded 
 with a thousand pounds, and his book was much read ; for 
 paradox, recommended by spirit and elegance, easily gains 
 attention ; and he, who told every man that he was equal to 
 his king, could hardly want an audience. 
 
 That the performance of Salmasius was not dispersed with 
 equal rapidity, or read with equal eagerness, is very credible. 
 He taught only the stale doctrine of authority and the un- 
 pleasing duty of submission, and he had been so long not only 
 the monarch but the tyrant of literature, that almost all man- 
 kind were delighted to find him defied and insulted by a new 
 name not yet considered as any one's rival. If Christina, as is 
 said, commended the ' ' Defence of the People, ' ' her purpose 
 must be to torment Salmasius, who was then at her court ; for 
 neither her civil station nor her natural' character could dis- 
 pose her to favor the doctrine, who was by birth a queen, and 
 by temper despotic. 
 
 That Salmasius was, from the appearance of Milton's book, 
 treated with neglect, there is not much proof ; but to a man so 
 long accustomed to admiration, a little praise of his antagonist 
 
l8 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 would be sufficiently offensive, and might incline him to leave 
 Sweden, from which, however, he was dismissed, not with any 
 mark of contempt, but with a train of attendants scarcely less 
 than regal. 
 
 He prepared a reply, which, left as it was imperfect, was 
 published by his son in the year of the Restoration. In the 
 beginning, being probably most in pain for his Latinity, he 
 endeavors to defend his use of the word persona ; but, if I 
 remember right, he misses a better authority than any that he 
 has found, that of Juvenal in his Fourth Satire : 
 
 " Quid agas, cum dira et foedior omni 
 
 Crimine persona est ?' ' 
 
 As Salmasius reproached Milton with losing his eyes in the 
 quarrel, Milton delighted himself with the belief that he had 
 shortened Salmasius's life, and both perhaps with more malignity 
 than reason. Salmasius died at the Spa, September 3, 1653 ; 
 and, as controvertists are commonly said to be killed Ijy their 
 last dispute, Milton was flattered with the credit of destroying 
 him. 
 
 Cromwell had now dismissed the parliament by the author- 
 ity of which he had destroyed monarchy, and commenced mon- 
 arch himself, under the title of Protector, but with kingly and 
 more than kingly power. That his authority was lawful, never 
 was pretended ; he himself founded his right only in necessity ; 
 but Milton, having now tasted the honey of public employ- 
 ment, would not return to hunger and philosophy ; but, con- 
 tinuing to exercise his office under a manifest usurpation, be- 
 trayed to his power that liberty which he had defended. 
 Nothing can be more just than that rebellion should end in 
 slavery ; that he who had justified the murder of his king, for 
 some acts which seemed to him unlawful, should now sell his 
 services and his flatteries to a tyrant, of whom- it was evident 
 that he could do nothing lawful. 
 
 He had now been blind for some years ; but his vigor of 
 intellect was such that he was not disabled to discharge his 
 office of Latin secretary, or continue his controversies. His 
 mind was too eager to be diverted, and too strong to be sub- 
 dued. 
 
 About this time his first wife died in childbed, having left 
 him three daughters. As he probably did not much love her, 
 he did not long continue the appearance of lamenting her ; but 
 after a short time married Catharine, the daughter of one Cap- 
 tain Woodcock, of Hackney ; a woman doubtless educated in 
 opinions like his owjj, She died, within a year, of childbirth, 
 
MILTOM. 
 
 19 
 
 or some distemper that followed it, and her husband honored 
 her memory with a poor sonnet. 
 
 The first reply to Milton's " Defensio PopuK" was pub- 
 lished in 1 65 1, called " Apologia pro Rege et Populo AngH- 
 cano, contra Johannis Polypragmatici (alias Miltoni) defen- 
 sionem destructivam Regis et Populi." Of this the author 
 was not known ; but Milton, and his nephew Philips, under 
 whose name he published an answer so much corrected by him 
 that it might be called his own, imputed it to Bramhal ; and, 
 knowing him no friend to regicides, thought themselves at lib- 
 erty to treat him as if they had known what they only sus- 
 pected. 
 
 Next year appeared ' ' Regii Sanguinis clamor ad Coelum. ' ' 
 Of this the author was Peter du Moulin, who was afterwards 
 prebendary of Canterbury ; but Morus, or More, a French 
 minister, having the care of its publication, was treated as the 
 writer by Milton in his ' ' Defensio Secunda, ' ' and over- 
 whelmed by such violence of invective that he began to shrink 
 under the tempest, and gave his persecutors the means of 
 knowing the true author. Du Moulin was now in great danger ; 
 but Milton's pride operated against his malignity ; and both he 
 and his friends were more willing that Du Moulin should 
 escape than that he should be convicted of mistake. 
 
 In this second defence he shows that his eloquence is not 
 merely satirical ; the rudeness of his invective is equalled by 
 the grossness of his flattery. ' ' Deserimur, Cromuelle, tu solus 
 superes, ad te summa nostrarum rerum rediit, in te solo consistit, 
 insuperabili tuse virtuti cedimus cuncti, nemine vel obloquente, 
 nisi quia quales insequalis ipse honores sibi quagrit, aut digniori 
 concessos invidet, aut non intelligit nihil esse in societate hom- 
 inum magis vel Deo gratum, vel rationi consentaneum, esse in 
 civitate nihil squius, nihil utilius, quam potiri rerum dignissi- 
 mum. Eum te agnoscunt omnes, Cromuelle, ea tu civis max- 
 imus et gloriosissimus,' dux publici consilii, exercitum fortissi- 
 morum imperator, pater patrije gessisti. Sic tu spontanea bo- 
 norum omnium et animitus missa voce salutaris. ' ' 
 
 Caesar when he assumed the perpetual dictatorship had not 
 more servile or more elegant flattery. A translation may show 
 its servility ; but its elegance is less attainable. Having 
 exposed the unskilfulness or selfishness of the former govern- 
 ment, " We were left," says Milton, " to ourselves : the whole 
 national interest fell into your hands, and subsists only in your 
 
 ' It may be doubted whether glonosissimus be here used with Milton's 
 boasted purity. Res gloriosa is an illustrious thing ; but vir gloriosus is 
 commonly a braggart, as in miles gloriosus. 
 
20 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 abilities. To your virtue, overpowering ai\d resistless, every 
 man gives way, except some who, without equal qualifications, 
 aspire to equal honors, who envy the distinctions of merit 
 greater than their own, or who have yet to learn that in the 
 coalition of human society nothing is more pleasing to God, or 
 more agreeable to reason, than that the highest mind should 
 have the sovereign power. Such, sir, are you by general con- 
 fession ; such are the things achieved by you, the greatest and 
 most glorious of our countrymen, the director of our public 
 councils, the leader of unconquered armies, the father of your 
 country ; for by that title does every good man hail you with 
 sincere and voluntary praise. ' ' 
 
 Next year, having defended all that wanted defence, he 
 found leisure to defend himself. He undertook his own vindi- 
 cation against More, whom he declares in his title to be justly 
 called the author of the ' ' Regii Sanguinis Clamor. ' ' In this 
 there is no want of vehemence or eloquence, nor does he forget 
 his wonted wit. ' ' Morus es ? an Momus ? an uterque idem 
 est ?' ' He then remembers that Morus is Latin for a mulberry- 
 tree, and hints at the known transformation : 
 
 Poma al a ferebat 
 
 Quae post nigra tulit Morus. 
 
 With this piece ended his controversies ; and he from this 
 time gave himself up to his private studies and his civil em- 
 ployment. 
 
 As secretary to the Protector he is supposed to have written 
 the " Declaration of the Reasons for a War with Spain." His 
 agency was considered as of great importance ; for, when a 
 treaty with Sweden was artfully suspended, the delay was pub- 
 licly imputed to Mr. Milton's indisposition ; and the Swedish 
 agent was provoked to express his wonder that only one man 
 in England could write Latin, and that man blind. 
 
 Being now forty-seven years old, and seeing himself disen- 
 cumbered from external interruptions, he seems to have recol- 
 lected his former purposes, and to have resumed three great 
 works which he had planned for his future employment : an 
 epic poem, the history of his country, and a dictionary of the 
 Latin tongue. 
 
 To collect a dictionary seems a work of all others least 
 practicable in a state of blindness, because it depends upon 
 perpetual and minute inspection and collation. Nor would 
 Milton probably have begun itj'after he had lost his eyes ; but, 
 having had it always before him, he continued it, says Philips, 
 "almost to his dying day; but the papers were so discom- 
 
MILTON. 
 
 21 
 
 posed and deficient that they could not be fitted for the press." 
 The compilers of the Latin dictionary, printed at Cambridge, 
 had the use of those collections in three folios ; but what was 
 their fate afterwards is not known. 
 
 To compile a history from various authors, when they can 
 only be consulted by other eyes, is not easy, nor possible, but 
 with more skilful and attentive help than can be commonly 
 obtained ; and it was probably the difiiculty of consulting and 
 comparing that stopped Milton's narrative at the Conquest — a 
 period at which affairs were not yet very intricate nor authors 
 very numerous. 
 
 For the subject of his epic poem, after much deliberation, 
 long choosing, and beginning late, he fixed upon " Paradise 
 Lost;" a design so comprehensive that it could be justified 
 only by success. He had once designed to celebrate King 
 Arthur, as he hints in his verses to Mansus ; but " Arthur was 
 reserved," says Fenton, " to another destiny." 
 
 It appears by some sketches of poetical projects left in 
 manuscript, and to be seen in a library at Cambridge, that he 
 had digested his thoughts on this subject into one of those wild 
 dramas which were anciently called Mysteries ; and Philips 
 had seen what he terms part of a tragedy beginning with the 
 first ten lines of Satan's address to the sun. These mysteries 
 consist of allegorical persons ; such as Justice, Mercy, Faith. 
 Of the tragedy or mystery of " 
 plans : 
 
 The Persons. 
 
 Michael. 
 
 Chorus of Angels. 
 
 Heavenly Love. 
 
 Lucifer. 
 
 Adam, \ -.-l ^x. c 
 
 £ \ wiih the serpent. 
 
 Conscience. 
 
 Death. 
 
 Labor. 
 
 Sickness, 1 
 
 Discontent, 
 
 Ignorance, 
 
 with others, 
 
 Faith. 
 
 Hope. 
 
 Charity. 
 
 Mutes. 
 
 Paradise Lost' ' there are two 
 
 The Persons. 
 
 Moses. 
 
 Divine Justice, Wisdom. 
 
 Heavenly Love. 
 
 The Evening Star, Hesperus. 
 
 Chorus of Angels. 
 
 Lucifer. 
 
 Adam. 
 
 Eve. 
 
 Conscience. 
 
 Labor, 
 
 Sickness, 
 
 Discontent, . 
 
 Ignorance, 
 
 Fear, 
 
 Death, 
 
 Faith. Hope 
 
 Mutes. 
 
 Charity. 
 
 Paradise Lost. 
 The Persons. 
 Moses TCpoXoyi^Ei.^ recounting how he assumed his true 
 body ; that it corrupts not, because it is with God in the 
 
22 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 mount ; declares the like with Enoch and Elijah : besides the 
 purity of the place, that certain pure winds, dews, and cloudb 
 preserve it from corruption ; whence exhorts to the sight of 
 God ; tells they cannot see Adam in the state of innocence, by 
 reason of their sin. 
 
 Justice, ) 
 
 Mercy, > debating what should become of man, if he fall. 
 
 Wisdom, ) 
 
 Chorus of Angels singing a hymn of the Creation. 
 
 ACT II. 
 
 Heavenly Love. 
 
 Evening Star. 
 
 Chorus sing the marriage song, and describe Paradise. 
 
 ACT III. 
 
 Lucifer contriving Adam's ruin. 
 
 Chorus fears for Adam, and relates Lucifer's rebellion and fall 
 
 ACT IV. 
 
 Ev'::; fallen. 
 
 Conscience cites them to God's examination. 
 Chorus bewails, and tells the good Adam has lost. 
 
 ACT v. 
 
 Adam and Eve driven out of Paradise. 
 
 — — — presented by an angel with 
 Labor, Grief, Hatred, Envy, War, Famine, Pesti- \ 
 
 lence, Sickness, Discontent, Ignorance, Fear, \ Mutes. 
 
 Death, ) 
 
 To whom he gives their names. Likewise Winter, Heat, 
 
 Tempest, etc. 
 Faith, 1 
 
 Hope, \ conifort him and instruct him. 
 Charity, ) 
 
 Chorus briefly concludes. 
 
 Such was his first design, which could have produced only 
 an allegory, or mystery. The following sketch seems to have 
 attained more maturity : 
 
 Adam unparadised. 
 
 The angel Gabriel, either descending or entering ; showing, 
 since this globe was created, his frequency as much on earth as 
 in heaven : describes Paradise. Next, the Chorus, showing 
 
Milton: 
 
 n 
 
 the reason of his coming to keep his watch in Paradise, after 
 Lucifer's rebellion, by command from God ; and withal 
 expressing his desire to see and know more concerning this 
 excellent new creature, man. The angel Gabriel, as by his 
 name signifying a prince of power, tracing Paradise with a 
 more free office, passes by the station of the Chorus, and, 
 desired by them, relates what he knew of man : as the creation 
 of Eve, with their love and marriage. After this Lucifer ap- 
 pears ; after his overthrow, bemoans himself, seeks revenge on 
 man. The Chorus prepare resistance on his first approach. 
 At last, after discourse of enmity on either side, he departs : 
 whereat the Chorus sings of the battle and victory in heaven 
 against him and his accomplices : as before, after the first act, 
 was sung a hymn of the creation. Here again may appear 
 Lucifer relating and exulting in what he had done to the 
 destruction of man. Man next, and Eve, having by this time 
 been seduced by the Serpent, appears confusedly covered with 
 leaves. Conscience in a shape accuses him ; Justice cites him 
 to a place whither Jehovah called for him. In the mean while 
 the Chorus entertains. the stage, and is informed by some angel 
 the manner of the fall. Here the Chorus bewails Adam's fall. 
 Adam then and Eve return ; accuse one another ; but espe- 
 cially Adam lays the blame to his wife ; is stubborn in his 
 offence. Justice appears, reasons with him, convinces him. 
 The Chorus admonisheth Adam, and bids him beware Lucifer's 
 example of impenitence. The angel is sent to banish them out 
 of Paradise ; but before causes to pass before his eyes, in 
 shapes, a mask of all the evils of this life and world. He is 
 humbled, relents, despairs ; at last appears Mercy, comforts 
 him, promises the Messiah ; then calls in Faith, Hope, and 
 Charity ; instructs him ; he repents, gives God the glory, sub- 
 mits to his penalty. The Chorus briefly concludes. Compare 
 this with the former draught. 
 
 These are very imperfect rudiments of " Paradise Lost ;" 
 but it is pleasant to see great works in their seminal state, 
 pregnant with latent possibilities of excellence ; nor could there 
 be any more delightful entertainment than to trace their grad- 
 ual growth and expansion, and to observe how they are some- 
 times suddenly improved by accidental hints, and sometimes 
 slowly improved by steady meditation. 
 
 Invention is almost the only literary labor which blindness 
 cannot obstruct, and therefore he naturally solaced his sohtude 
 by the indulgence of his fancy and the melody of his numbers. 
 He had done what he knew to be necessarily previous to poeti- 
 cal excellence ; he had made himse'f acquainted with seemly 
 
24 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 arts and affairs ; his comprehension was extended by various 
 knowledge, and his memory stored with intellectual treasures. 
 He was skilful in many languages, and had by reading and 
 composition attained the full mastery of his own. He would 
 have wanted little help from books, had he retained the power 
 of perusing them. 
 
 But while his greater designs were advancing, having now, 
 like many other authors, caught the love of publication, he 
 amused himself as he could, with little productions. He sent 
 to the press (1658) a manuscript of Raleigh, called " The Cab- 
 inet Council ;" and next year gratified his malevolence to the 
 clergy by a " Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Cases, 
 and the Means of removing Hirelings out of the Church. ' ' 
 
 Oliver was now dead, Richard was constrained to resign ; 
 the system of extemporary government, which had been held 
 together only by force, naturally fell into fragments when that 
 force was taken away ; and Milton saw himself and his cause in 
 equal danger. But he had still hope of doing something. He 
 wrote letters, which Toland has published, to such men as he 
 thought friends to the new commonwealth ; and even in the 
 year of the Restoration he bated no jot of heart or hope, but 
 was fantastical enough to think that the nation, agitated as it 
 was, might be settled by a pamphlet, called ' ' A ready and 
 easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth," which was, 
 however, enough considered to be both seriously and ludicrous- 
 ly answered. 
 
 The obstinate enthusiasm of the commonwealthmen was 
 very remarkable. When the king was apparently returning, 
 Harrington, with a few associates as fanatical as himself, used 
 to meet, with all the gravity of political importance, to settle 
 an equal government by rotation ; and Milton, kicking when 
 he could strike no longer, was foolish enough to publish, a few 
 weeks before the Restoration, Notes upon a sermon preached 
 by one Griffiths, entitled, "The Fear of God and the King." 
 To these notes an answer was written by L' Estrange, in a 
 pamphlet petulantly called ' ' No Blind Guides. ' ' 
 
 But whatever Milton could write, or men of greater activity 
 could do, the king was now about to be restored, with the irre- 
 sistible approbation of the people. He was therefore no longer 
 secretary, and was consequently obliged to quit the house, 
 which he held by his office ; and, proportioning his sense of 
 danger to his opinion of the importance of his writings, thought 
 it convenient to seek some shelter, and hid himself for a time 
 in Bartholomew Close, by West Smithfield. 
 
 I cannot but remark a kind of respect, perhaps unconscious- 
 
MILTON. 25 
 
 ly,. paid to this great man by his biographers : every house in 
 which he resided is historically mentioned, as if it were an in- 
 jury to neglect naming any place that he honored by his pres- 
 ence. 
 
 The king, with lenity of which the world has had perhaps 
 no other example, declined to be the judge or avenger of his 
 own or his father's wrongs, and promised to admit into the 
 Act of Oblivion all, except those whom the parliament should 
 except ; and the parliament doomed none to capital punish- 
 mentbut the wretches who had immediately co-operated in the 
 murder of the king. Milton was certainly not one of them ; he 
 had only justified what they had done. 
 
 This justification was indeed sufficiently offensive ; and 
 (June 16) an order was issued to seize Milton's "Defence," 
 and Goodwin's " Obstructors of Justice," another book of the 
 same tendency, and burn them by the common hangman. The 
 attorney-general was ordered to prosecute the authors ; but 
 Milton was not seized, nor perhaps very diligently pursued. 
 
 Not long after (August 19) the flutter of innumerable 
 bosoms were stilled by an act which the king, that his mercy 
 might want no recommendation of elegance, rather called an Act 
 of Oblivion than of Grace. Goodwin was named, with nine- 
 teen more, as incapacitated for any public trust ; but of Milton 
 there was no exception. 
 
 Of this tenderness shown to Milton, the curiosity of man- 
 kind has not forborne to inquire the reason. Burnet thinks he 
 was forgotten ; but this is another instance which may confirm 
 Dalrymple's observation, who says, that " whenever Burnet's 
 narrations are examined, he appears to be mistaken." 
 
 Forgotten he was not, for his prosecution was ordered ; it 
 must be therefore by design that he was included in the general 
 oblivion. He is said to have had friends in the House, such as 
 Marvel, Morrice, and Sir Thomas Clarges ; and undoubtedly 
 a man like him must have had influence. A very particular 
 story of his escape is told by Richardson in his Memoirs, 
 which he received from Pope, as delivered by Betterton, who 
 might have heard it from Davenant. In the war between the 
 king and parliament, Davenant was made prisoner, and con- 
 demned to die ; but was spared at the request of Milton. 
 When the turn of success brought Milton into the like danger, 
 Davenant repaid the benefit by appearing in his favor. Here 
 is a reciprocation of generosity and gratitude so pleasing that 
 the tale makes its own way to credit. But if help were 
 wanted, I know not where to find it. The danger of Davenant 
 is certain from his own relation ; but of his escape there is no 
 
26 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 account. Betterton's narration can be traced no higher, it is 
 not known that he had it from Davenant. We are told that 
 the benefit exchanged was Hfe for. life ; but it seems not certain 
 that Milton's life ever was in danger. Goodwin, who had 
 committed the same kind of crime, escaped with incapacitation ; 
 and, as exclusion from public trust is a punishment which the 
 power of government can commonly inflict without the help of 
 a particular law, it required no great interest to exempt Milton 
 from a censure little more than verbal. Something may be 
 reasonably ascribed to veneration and compassion — to venera- 
 tion of his abilities and compassion for his distresses — ^which 
 made it fit to forgive his malice for his learning. He was now 
 poor and blind ; and who would pursue with violence an illus- 
 trious enemy depressed by fortune and disarmed by nature ? 
 
 The publication of the Act of Oblivion put him in the same 
 condition with his fellow-subjects. He was, however, upon 
 some pretence now not known, in the custody of the sergeant 
 in December ; and when he was released, upon his refusal of 
 the fees demanded, he and the sergeant were called before the 
 House. He was now safe within the shade of oblivion, and 
 knew himself to be as much out of the power of a griping officer 
 as any other man. How the question was determined is not 
 known. Milton would hardly have contended, but that he knew 
 himself to have right on his side. 
 
 He tJien removed to Jewin Street, near Aldersgate Street, 
 and, being blind and by no means wealthy, wanted a domestic 
 companion and attendant ; and therefore, by the recommenda- 
 tion of Dr. Paget, married Elizabeth Minshul, of a gentleman's 
 family in Cheshire, probably without a fortune. All his wives 
 were virgins ; for he has declared that he thought it gross and 
 indelicate to be a second husband : upon what other principles 
 his choice was made cannot now be known ; but marriage af- 
 forded not much of his happiness. The first wife left him in 
 disgust, and was brought back only by terror ; the second, in- 
 deed, seems to have been more a favorite, but her life was 
 short. The third, as Philips relates, oppressed his children in 
 his lifetime, and cheated them at his death. 
 
 Soon after his marriage, according to an obscure story, he 
 was offered the continuance of his employment, and being 
 pressed by his wife to accept it, answered, " You, like other 
 women, want to ride in your coach ; my wish is to live and die 
 an honest man." If he considered the Latin secretary as ex- 
 ercising any of the powers of government, he that had shared 
 authority, either with the parliament or Cromwell, might have 
 forborne to talk very loudly of his honesty ; and if he thought 
 
MILTON. 
 
 27 
 
 the office purely ministerial, he certainly might have honestly 
 retained it under the king. But this tale has too little evidence 
 to deserve a disquisition ; large offers and sturdy rejections are 
 among the most common topics of falsehood. 
 
 He had so much either of prudence or gratitude that he 
 forbore to disturb the new settlement with any of his political 
 or ecclesiastical opinions, and from this time devoted himself 
 to poetry and Hterature. Of his zeal for learning in all its 
 parts he gave a proof by publishing, the next year (166 1), 
 "Accidence commenced Grammar;" a little book which has 
 nothing remarkable, but that its author, who had been lately de- 
 fending the supreme powers of his country, and was then writ- 
 ing ' ' Paradise Lost, ' ' could descend from his elevation to res- 
 cue children from the perplexity of grammatical confusion, and 
 the trouble of lessons unnecessarily repeated. 
 
 About this time Elwood, the Quaker, being recommended 
 to him as one who would read Latin to him for the advantage 
 of his conversation, attended him every afternoon except on 
 Sundays. Milton, who, in his letter to Hartlib, had declared 
 that " to read Latin with an English mouth is as ill a hearing 
 as law French," required that Elwood should learn and prac- 
 tise the Italian pronunciation, which, he said, was necessary, 
 if he would talk with foreigners. This seems to have been a 
 task troublesome without use. There is little reason for pre- 
 ferring the Italian pronunciation to our own, except that it is 
 more general ; and to teach it to an Englishman is only to 
 make him a foreigner at home. He who travels, if he speaks 
 Latin, may so soon learn the sounds which every native gives 
 it, that he need make no provision before his journey ; and if 
 strangers visit us, it is their business to practise such conformi- 
 ty to our modes as they expect from us in their own countries. 
 Elwood complied with the directions, and improved himself by 
 his attendance ; for he relates that Milton, having a curious 
 ear, knew by his voice when he read what he did not under- 
 stand, and would stop him, " and open the most difficult pas- 
 sages." 
 
 In a short time he took a house in the Artillery Walk, lead- 
 ing to Bunhill Fields ; the mention of which concludes the regis- 
 ter of Milton's removals and habitations. He lived longer in 
 this place than any other. 
 
 He was now busied by ' ' Paradise Lost. ' ' Whence he drew 
 the original design has been variously conjectured by men who 
 cannot bear to think themselves ignorant of that which, at last, 
 neither diligence nor sagacity can discover. Some find the 
 hint in an Italian tragedy. Voltaire tells a wild and unauthor- 
 
28 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 ized Story of a farce seen by Milton in Italy, which opened 
 thus : Let the rainbow be the fiddle-stick of the fiddle of Heaven. 
 It has been already shown that the first conception was a 
 tragedy or mystery, not of a narrative, but a dramatic work, 
 which he is supposed to have begun to reduce to its present 
 form about the time (1655) when he finished his dispute with 
 the defenders of the king. 
 
 He long before had promised to adorn his native country 
 by some great performance, while he had yet, perhaps, no set- 
 tled design, and was stimulated only by such expectations as 
 naturally arose from the survey of his attainments and the con- 
 sciousness of his powers. What he should undertake it was 
 difficult to determine. He was " long choosing, and began 
 late." 
 
 While he was obliged to divide his time between his private 
 studies and affairs of state, his poetical labor must have been 
 often interrupted ; and perhaps he did little more in that busy 
 time than construct the narrative, adjust the episodes, propor- 
 tion the parts, accumulate images and sentiments, and treasure 
 in his memory or preserve in writing such hints as books or 
 meditation would supply. Nothing particular is known of his 
 intellectual operations while he was a statesman ; for having 
 every help and accommodation at hand, he had no need of un- 
 common expedients. 
 
 Being driven from all public stations, he is yet too great not 
 to be traced by curiosity to his retirement, where he has been 
 found by Mr. Richardson, the fondest of his admirers, sitting 
 " before his door in a gray coat of coarse cloth, in warm sultry 
 weather, to enjoy the fresh air ; and so, as in his own room, 
 receiving the visits of the people of distinguished parts as well 
 as quality. ' ' His visitors of high quality must now be imagined 
 to be few ; but men of parts might reasonably court the con- 
 versation of a man so generally illustrious, that foreigners are 
 reported by Wood to have visited the house in Bread Street 
 where he was born. 
 
 According to another account, he was seen in a small 
 house, " neatly enough dressed in black clothes, sitting in a 
 room hung with rusty green ; pale but not cadaverous, with 
 chalk-stones in his hands. He said that if it were not for the 
 gout his blindness would be tolerable." 
 
 In the intervals of his pain, being made unable to use the 
 common exercises, he used to swing m a chair, and sometimes 
 played upon an organ. 
 
 He was now confessedly and visibly employed upon his 
 poem, of which the progress might be noted by those with 
 
MILTON. ^y 
 
 whom he was familiar ; for he was obliged, when he had com- 
 posed as many lines as his memory would conveniently retain, 
 to employ some friend in writing them, having, at least for part 
 of the time, no regular attendant. This gave opportunity to 
 observations and reports. 
 
 Mr. Philips observes that there was a very remarkable cir- 
 cumstance in the composure of ' ' Paradise Lost, " " which I have 
 a particular reason," says he, "to remember; for whereas I 
 had the perusal of it from the very beginning, for some years, 
 as I went from time to time to visit him, in parcels of ten, 
 twenty, or thirty verses at a time (which, being written by what- 
 ever hand came next, might possibly want correction as to the 
 orthography and pointing), having, as the summer came on, not 
 being showed any for a considerable while, and desiring the 
 reason thereof, was answered, that his vein never happily 
 flowed but from the autumnal equinox to the vernal ; and 
 that whatever he attempted at other times was never to his sat- 
 isfaction, though he courted his fancy never so much ; so 
 that, in all the years he was about this poem, he may be said to 
 have spent half his time therein. ' ' 
 
 Upon this relation Toland remarks that in his opinion Phil- 
 ips has mistaken the time of the year ; for Milton, in his elegies, 
 declares that with the advance of the spring he feels the in- 
 crease of his poetical force, redeunt in carmina vires. To this 
 it is answered that Philips could hardly mistake time so well 
 marked ; and it may be added that Milton might find different 
 times of the year favorable to different parts of life. Mr. 
 Richardson conceives it impossible that such a work should be 
 suspended for six months, or for one. It may go on faster or 
 slower, but it must go on. By what necessity it must continu- 
 ally go on, or why it might not be laid aside and resumed, it is 
 not easy to discover. 
 
 This dependence of the soul upon the seasons, those tem- 
 porary and periodical ebbs and flows of intellect, may, I sup- 
 pose, justly be derided as the fumes of vain imagination. Sa- 
 piens dominabitur astris. The author that thinks himself weath- 
 er-bound will find, with a little help from hellebore, that he 
 is only idle or exhausted. But while this notion has posses- 
 sion of the head, it produces the inability which it supposes. 
 Our powers owe much of their energy to our hopes ; possunt 
 quia posse videntur. When success seems attainable, diligence 
 is enforced ; but when it is admitted that the faculties are sup- 
 pressed by a cross wind or a cloudy sky, the day is given up 
 without resistance, for who can contend with the course of 
 Nature ? 
 
30 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 From such prepossessions Milton seems not to have been 
 free. There prevailed in his time an opinion that the world 
 was in its decay, and that we have, had the misfortune to be 
 produced in the decrepitude of Nature. It was suspected that 
 the whole creation languished, that neither trees nor animals 
 had the height or bulk of their predecessors, and that every 
 thing was daily sinking by gradual diminution. Milton ap- 
 pears to suspect that souls partake of the general degeneracy, 
 and is not without some fear that his book is to be written in 
 an age too late for heroic poesy. 
 
 Another opinion wanders about the world, and soirietim'es 
 finds reception among wise men ; an opinion that restrains the 
 operations of the mind to particular regions, and supposes that 
 a luckless mortal may be born in a degree of latitude too high 
 or too low for wisdom or for wit. From this fancy, wild as it 
 is, he had not wholly cleared his head, when he feared lest the 
 climate of his country might be too cold for flights of imagination. 
 
 Into a mind already occupied by such fancies, another not 
 more reasonable might easily find its way. He that could fear 
 lest his genius had fallen upon too old a world, or too chill a 
 climate, might consistently magnify to himself the influence of 
 the seasons, and believe his faculties to be vigorous only half 
 the year. 
 
 His submission to the seasons was at least more reasonable 
 than his dread of decaying nature, or a frigid zone, for general 
 causes must operate uniformly in a general abatement of men- 
 tal power ; if less could be performed by the writer, less like- 
 wise would content the judges of his work. Among this lag- 
 ging race of frosty grovellers he might still have risen into 
 eminence by pipducing something which they should not will- 
 ngly let die. *However inferior to the heroes who were born 
 'in better ageSTTie might still be great among his contemporaries, 
 with the hope of growing every day greater in the dwindle of 
 posterity. He might still be a giant among the pigmies, the 
 one-eyed monarch of the blind. 
 
 Of his artifices of study, or particular hours of composi- 
 tion, we have little account, and there was perhaps little to be 
 told. Richardson, who seems to have been very diligent in his 
 inquiries, but discovers always a wish to find Milton discrimi- 
 nated from other men, relates ' ' that he would sometimes lie 
 awake whole nights, but not a verse could he make ; and on a 
 sudden his poetical faculty would rush upon him with an im- 
 petus or cestrum, and his daughter was immediately called to se- 
 cure what came. At other times he would dictate perhaps forty 
 liries in a breath, and then reduce them to half the number." 
 
MILTON. ' -IX 
 
 These bursts of light and involutions of darkness, these 
 transient and involuntary excursions and retrocessions of in- 
 vention, having some appearance of deviation from the common 
 train of nature, are eagerly caught by the lovers of a wonder. 
 Yet something of this inequality happens to every man in every 
 mode of exertion, manual or mental. The mechanic cannot 
 handle his hammer and his file at all times with equal dexterity ; 
 there are hours, he knows not why, when his hand is out. By 
 Mr. Richardson's relation, casually conveyed, much regard 
 cannot be claimed. That in his intellectual hour Milton called 
 for his daughter " to secure what came," may be questioned ; 
 for unluckily it happens to be known that his daughters were 
 never taught to write ; nor would he have been obliged, as is 
 universally confessed, to have employed any casual visitor in 
 disburdening his memory, if his daughter could have performed 
 the office. 
 
 The story of reducing his exuberance has been told of other 
 authors, and, though doubtless true of every fertile and copious 
 mind, seems to have been gratuitously transferred to Milton. 
 
 What he has told us, and we cannot now know more, is, 
 that he composed much of this poem in the night and morning, 
 I suppose before his mind was disturbed with common busi- 
 ness ; and that he poured out with great fluency his unpremed- 
 itated verse. Versification, free, like his, from the distresses 
 of rhyme, must, by a work so long, be made prompt and ha- 
 bitual ; and, when his thoughts were once adjusted, the words 
 would come at his command. 
 
 At what particular times of his Hfe the parts of his work 
 were written, cannot often be known. The beginning of the 
 third book shows that he had lost his sight ; and the introduc- 
 tion to the seventh that the return of the king had clouded 
 him with discountenance, and that he was offended by the, 
 licentious festivity of the Restoration. There are no other 
 internal notes of rime. Milton, being now cleared from all ef- 
 fects of his disloyalty, had iiofhing required from him but the 
 common duty of living in quiet, to be rewarded with the 
 common right of protection ; but this, which, when he skulked 
 from the approach of his king, was perhaps more than he 
 hoped, seems not to have satisfied him ; for no sooner is he 
 safe than he finds himself in danger, " fallen on evil days and 
 evil tongues, and with darkness and with danger compassed 
 round." This darkness, had his eyes been better employed, 
 had undoubtedly deserved compassion ; but to add the mention 
 of danger was ungrateful and unjust. He was fallen indeed 
 on evil days ; the time was come in which regicides could no 
 
32 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 longer boast their wickedness. But of evil tongues for Milton to 
 complain required impudence at least equal to his other pow- 
 ers ; Milton, whose warmest advocates must allow that he 
 never spared any asperity of reproach or brutality of insolence. 
 
 But the charge itself seems to be false ; for it would be 
 hard to recollect any reproach cast upon him, either serious 
 or ludicrous, through the whole remaining part of his life. 
 He pursued his studies, or his amusements, without persecu- 
 tion, molestation, or insult. Such is the reverence paid to 
 great abilities, however misused : they who contemplated in 
 Milton the scholar and the wit were contented to forget the re- 
 viler of his king. 
 
 When the plague (1665) raged in London, Milton took 
 refuge at Chalfont, in Bucks ; where Elwood, who had taken 
 the house for him, first saw a complete copy of " Paradise 
 Lost ;" and, having perused it, said to him, " Thou hast said 
 a great deal upon ' Paradise Lost ; ' what hast thou to say upon 
 Paradise found ?" 
 
 Next year, when the danger of infection had ceased, he re- 
 turned to Bunhill Fields, and designed the publication of his 
 poem. A license was necessary, and he could expect no great 
 kindness from a chaplain of the Archbishop of Canterbury. 
 He seems, however, to have been treated with tenderness ; for 
 though objections were made to particular passages, and among 
 them to the simile of the sun eclipsed in the first book, yet the 
 license was granted ; and he sold his copy, April 27, 1667, to 
 Samuel Simmons, for an immediate payment of five pounds, 
 with a stipulation to receive five pounds more when thirteen 
 hundred should be sold of the first edition ; and again, five 
 pounds after the sale of the same number of the second 
 edition ; and another five pounds after the same sale of the 
 third. None of the three editions were to be extended beyond 
 fifteen hundred copies. 
 
 The first edition was of ten books, in a small quarto. The 
 titles were varied from year to year ; and an advertisement 
 and the arguments of the books were omitted in some copies, 
 and inserted in others. 
 
 The sale gave him in two years a right to his second pay- 
 ment, for which the receipt was signed April 26, 1669. The 
 second edition was not given till 1674 ; it was printed in small 
 octavo ; and the number of books was increased to twelve, by 
 a division of the seventh and twelfth ; and gome other small 
 improvements were made. The third edition was published in 
 1678 ; and the widow, to whom the copy was then to devolve, 
 sold all her claims to Simmons for eight pounds, according to her 
 
MILTON. 
 
 33 
 
 receipt given December 21, 1680. Simmons had already agreed 
 to transfer the whole right to Brabazon Aylmer, for twenty-five 
 pounds ; and Aylmer sold to Jacob Tonson half, August 17, 
 1683, and' half, March 24, i6go, at a price considerably 
 enlarged. In the history of " Paradise Lost" a deduction thus 
 minute will rather gratify than fatigue. 
 
 The slow sale and tardy reputation of this poem have been 
 always mentioned as evidences of neglected merit, and of the 
 uncertainty of literary fame ; and inquiries have been made, 
 and conjectures offered, about the causes of its long obscurity 
 and late reception. But has the case been truly stated ? Have 
 not lamentation and wonder been lavished on an evil that was 
 never felt ? 
 
 That in the reigns of Charles and James, the " Paradise 
 Lost" received no public acclamations, is readily confessed. 
 Wit and literature were on the side of the court ; and who that 
 solicited favor or fashion would venture to praise the defender 
 of the regicides ? All that he himself could think his due, 
 from evil tongues in evil days, was that reverential silence which 
 was generously preserved. But it cannot be inferred that his 
 poem was not read or not, however unwillingly, admired. 
 
 The sale, if it be considered^ will justify the public. Those 
 who have no power to judge of past times but by their own, 
 should always doubt their conclusions. The call for books was , 
 not in Milton's age what it is in the present. To read was not 
 then a general amusement ; neither traders, nor often gentle- 
 men, thought themselves disgraced by ignorance. The women 
 had not then aspired to literature, nor was every house sup- 
 plied with a closet of knowledge. Those, indeed, who pro- 
 fessed learning were not less learned than at any other time ; 
 but of that middle race of students who read for pleasure or ac- 
 complishment, and who buy the numerous products of modern 
 typography, the number was then comparatively small. To 
 prove the paucity of readers, it may be sufficient to remark 
 that the nation had been satisfied from 1623 to 1664 — that is, 
 forty-one years — with only two editions of the works of Shake- 
 speare, which probably did not together make one thousand 
 copies. 
 
 The sale of thirteen hundred copies in two years, in opposi- 
 tion to so much recent enmity, and to a style of versification new 
 to all and disgusting to many, was an uncommon example of 
 the prevalence of genius. The demand did not immediately in- 
 crease ; for many more readers than were supplied at first the 
 nation did not afford. Only three thousand were sold in 
 eleven years ; for it forced its way without assistance ; its ad- 
 
34 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 mirers did not dare to publish their opinion ; and the opportu- 
 nities now given of attracting notice by advertisements were 
 then very few ; the means of^proclaiming the publication of new 
 books have been produced by that general literature which now 
 pervades the nation through all its ranks. 
 
 But the reputation and price of the copy still advanced, till 
 the Revolution put an end to the secrecy of love, and ' ' Para- 
 dise Lost" broke into open view with sufficient security of kind 
 reception. 
 
 Fancy can hardly forbear to conjecture with what temper 
 Milton surveyed the silent progress of his work, and marked its 
 reputation stealing its way in a kind of subterraneous current 
 through fear and silence. I cannot but conceive him calm and 
 confident, little disappointed, not at all dejected, relying on his 
 own merit with steady consciousness, and waiting without im- 
 patience the vicissitudes of opinion and the impartiality of a 
 future generation. 
 
 In the mean time he continued his studies, and supplied 
 the want of sight by a very odd expedient, of which Philips 
 gives the following account : 
 
 Mr. Philips tells us, " that though our author had daily 
 about him one or other to rea(^, some persons of man's estate, 
 who, of their own accord, greedily catched at the opportunity 
 of being his readers, that they might as well reap the benefit of 
 what they read to him as oblige him by the benefit of their 
 reading ; and others of younger years were sent by their 
 parents to the same end ; yet excusing only the daughter by 
 reason of her bodily infirmity and difficult utterance of speech 
 (which, to say truth, I doubt was the principal cause of excusing 
 her) the other two were condemned to the performance of read- 
 ing, and e}?actly pronouncing of all the languages of whatever 
 book he should, at one time or other, think fit to peruse — viz., 
 the Hebrew (and, I think, the Syriac), the Greek, the Latin, 
 the Italian, Spanish, and French. All which sorts of books to 
 be confined to read, without understanding one word, must 
 needs be a trial of patience almost beyond endurance. Yet it 
 was endured by both for a long time, though the irksomeness 
 of this employment could not be always concealed, but broke 
 out more and more into expressions of uneasiness ; so that at 
 length they were all, even the eldest also, sent out to ' learn 
 some curious and ingenious sorts of manufacture, that are pro- 
 per for women to learn, particularly embroideries in gold or 
 silver." 
 
 In the scene of misery which this mode of intellectual la- 
 bor sets before our eyes, it is hard to determine whether the 
 
MILTON. 35 
 
 daughters or the father are most to be lamented. A language 
 not understood can never be so read as to give pleasure, and 
 very seldom so as to convey meaning. If few men would have 
 had resolution to write books with such embarrassments, few 
 likewise would have wanted ability to find some better expe- 
 dient. 
 
 Three years after his " Paradise Lost" (r667), he published 
 his ' ' History of England, ' ' comprising the whole fable of 
 Geoffrey of Monmouth, and continued to the Norman Inva- 
 sion. Why he should have given the first part, which he seems 
 not to believe, and which is universally rejected, it is difficult 
 to conjecture. The style is harsh ; but it has something of 
 rough vigor, which perhaps may often strike, though it cannot 
 please. 
 
 On this history the licenser again fixed his claws, and be 
 fore ne would transmit it to the press tore out several parts. 
 Some censures of the Saxon monks were taken away, lest they 
 should be applied to the modern clergy ; and a character of the 
 Long Parliament and Assembly of Divines was excluded ; of 
 which the author gave a copy to the Earl of Anglesey, and 
 which, being afterwards published, has been since inserted in 
 its proper place. 
 
 The same year were printed ' ' Paradise Regained ' ' and 
 "Samson Agonistes," a tragedy written in imitation of the 
 ancients, and never designed by the author for the stage. As 
 these poems were published by another bookseller, it has been 
 asked whether Simmons was discouraged from receiving them 
 by the slow sale of the former. Why a writer changed his 
 bookseller a hundred years ago, I am far from hopmg to dis- 
 cover. Certainly he who in two years sells thirteen hundred 
 copies of a volume in quarto, bought for two payments of five 
 pounds each, has no reason to repent his purchase. 
 
 When Milton showed "Paradise Regained." to Elwood, 
 " This," said he, " is owing to you ; for you put it in my head 
 by the question you put to me at Chalfont, which otherwise I 
 had not thought of . " 
 
 His last poetical offspring was his favorite. He could not, 
 as Elwood relates, endure to hear " Paradise Lost" preferred to 
 "Paradise Regained." Many causes may vitiate a winter's 
 judgment of his own works. On that which has cost him much 
 labor he sets a high value, because he is unwilling to think 
 that he has been diligent in vain ; what has been produced 
 without toilsome efforts is considered with delight as a proof 
 of vigorous faculties and fertile invention ; and the last work, 
 whatever it be, has necessarily most of the grace of novelty. 
 
36 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 Milton, however it happened, had this prejudice, and had it to 
 himself. 
 
 To that multiplicity of attainments and extent of compre- 
 hension that entitled this great author to our veneration, may 
 be added a kind of humble dignity, which did not disdain the 
 meanest services to literature. The epic poet, the controvert- 
 ist, the politician, having already descended to accommodate 
 children with a book of rudiments, now, in the last years of his 
 life, composed a book of logic for the initiation of students in 
 philosophy; and ^ubliiheA {i6']2) Artis LogiccB plemor Institu- 
 tio ad Petri Rami Methodum concinnata ; that is, "A new 
 Scheme of Logic, according to the Method of Ramus." I 
 know not whether, even in this book, he did not intend an act 
 of hostility against the universities ; for Ramus was one of the 
 first oppugners of the old philosophy who disturbed with in- 
 novations the quiet of the schools. 
 
 His polemical disposition again revived. He had now been 
 safe so long that he forgot his fears, and published a ' ' Trea- 
 tise of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration, and the best 
 Means to prevent the Growth of Popery. ' ' 
 
 But this little tract is modestly written, with respectful men- 
 tion of the Church of England, and an appeal to the Thirty- 
 nine Articles. His principle of toleration is, agreement in the 
 sufficiency of the Scriptures ; and he extends it to all who, 
 whatever their opinions are, profess to derive them from the 
 Sacred Books. The papists appeal to other testimonies, and 
 are therefore, in his opinion, not to be permitted the liberty of 
 either public or private worship ; for though they plead con- 
 science, ' ' we have no warrant, ' ' he says, ' ' to regard con- 
 science which is not grounded in Scripture. ' ' 
 
 Those who are not convinced by his reasons may be per- 
 haps delighted with his wit. The term Roman Catholic is, he 
 says, "one of the Pope's bulls; it is particular universal, or 
 catholic schismatic. ' ' 
 
 He has, however, something better. As the best preserva-' 
 five against popery, he recommends the diligent perusal of the 
 Scriptures, a duty from which he warns the busy part of man- 
 kind not to think themselves excused. 
 
 He now reprinted his juvenile poems, with some addi- 
 tions. 
 
 In the last year of his life he sent to the press, seeming to 
 take delight in pubHcation, a collection of ' ' Familiar Epistles in 
 Latin ;" to which, being too few to make a volume, he added 
 some academical exercises, which perhaps he perused with 
 pleasure, as they recalled to his memory the days of youth, but 
 
MILTON. 
 
 37 
 
 for which nothing but veneration for his name could now pro- 
 cure a reader. 
 
 When he had attained his sixty-sixth year, the gout, with 
 which he had been long tormented, prevailed over the enfee- 
 bled powers of nature. He died by a quiet and silent expira- 
 tion, about the loth of November, 1674, at his house in Bun- 
 hill Fields ; and was buried next his father in the chancel of St. 
 Giles, at Cripplegate. His funeral was very splendidly and 
 numerously attended. 
 
 Upon his grave there is supposed to have been no memo- 
 rial ; but in our time a monument has been erected in West- 
 minster Abbey " To the Author of Paradise Lost," by Mr. 
 Benson, who has in the inscription bestowed more words upon 
 himself than upon Milton. 
 
 When the inscription for the monument of Philips, in which 
 he was said to be soli Miltono secundus, was exhibited to Dr. 
 Sprat, then Dean of Westminster, he refused to admit it ; the 
 name of Milton was, in his opinion, too detestable to be read 
 on the wall of a building dedicated to devotion. Atterbury, 
 who succeeded him, being author of the inscription, permitted 
 its reception. " And such has been the change of public 
 opinion," said Dr. Gregory, from whom I heard this account, 
 " that I have seen ejected in the church a statue of that man, 
 whose name I once knew considered as a pollution of its 
 walls." /'A_jt 
 
 Milton has the reputation of having been in his youth emi- 
 nently beautiful, so as to have been called the Lady of his col- 
 lege. His hair, which was of a light brown, parted at the fore- 
 top, and hung down upon his shoulders, according to the pic- 
 ture which he has given of Adam. He was, however, not of 
 the heroic stature, but rather below the middle size, according 
 to Mr. Richardson, who mentions him as having narrowly 
 escaped from being short and thick. He was vigorous and 
 active, and delighted in the exercise of the sword, in which he 
 is related to have been eminently skilful. His weapon was, I 
 believe, not the rapier, but the backsword, of which he recom- 
 mends the use in his book on education. 
 
 His eyes are said never to have been bright ; but, if he was 
 a dexterous fencer, they must have been once quick. 
 
 His domestic habits, so far as they are known, were those 
 of a severe student. He drank little strong drink of any kind, 
 and fed without excess in quantity, and in his earlier years 
 without delicacy of choice. In his youth he studied late at 
 night ; but afterwards changed his hours, and rested in bed 
 from nine to four in the summer, and five in the winter. The 
 
58 
 
 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 Course of his day was best known after he was blind. When 
 he first rose, he heard a chapter in the Hebrew Bible, and then 
 studied till twelve ; then took some exercise for an hour ; then 
 dined, then played on the organ, and sang, or heard another 
 sing ; then studied till six ; then entertained his visitors till 
 eight ; then supped, and, after a pipe of tobacco and a glass of 
 water, went to bed. 
 
 So is his life described ; but this even tenor appears attain- 
 able only in colleges. He that lives in the world will some- 
 times have the succession of his practice broken and confused. 
 Visitors, of whom Milton is represented to have had great 
 numbers, will come and stay unseasonably ; business, of which 
 every man has some, must be done when others will do it. 
 
 When he did not care to rise early, he had something read 
 to him by his bedside ; perhaps at this time his daughters were 
 employed. He composed much in the morning, and dictated 
 in the day, sitting obliquely in an elbow-chair, with his leg 
 thrown over the arm. 
 
 Fortune appears not to have had much of his care. In 
 the civil wars he lent his personal estate to the parliament ; but 
 when, after the contest was decided, he solicited repayment, 
 he met not only with neglect, but sharp rebuke ; and, having 
 tired both himself and his friends, was given up to poverty and 
 hopeless indignation, till he showed how able he was to do. 
 greater service. He was then made Latin secretary, with two 
 hundred pounds a year ; and had a thousand pounds for his 
 " Defence of the People." His widow, who, after his death, 
 retired to Namptwich, in Cheshire, and died about 1729, is 
 said to have reported that he lost two thousand pounds by 
 entrusting it to a scrivener ; and that, in the general depreda- 
 tion upon the church, he had grasped an estate of about sixty 
 pounds a year belonging to Westminster Abbey, which, like 
 other sharers of the plunder of rebellion, he was afterwards 
 obliged to return. Two thousand pounds, which he had placed 
 in the Excise Office, were also lost. There is yet no reason to 
 believe that he was ever reduced to indigence. His wants, 
 being few, were competently supplied. He sold his library be- 
 fore his death, and left his family fifteen hundred pounds, on 
 which his widow laid hold, and only gave one hundred to each 
 of his daughters. 
 
 His literature was unquestionably great. He read all the 
 languages which are considered either as learned or polite ; 
 Hebrew with its two dialects, Greek, Latin, Italian, French, 
 and Spanish. In Latin his skill was such as places him in the 
 first rank of writers and critics ; and he appears to have culti- 
 
MiLTOl^. 
 
 39 
 
 vated Italian with uncommon diligence. The books in which 
 his daughter, who used to read to him, represented him as most 
 delighting, after Homer, which he could almost repeat, were 
 Ovid's Metamorphoses and Euripides. His Euripides is, by 
 Mr. Cradock's kindness, now in my hands : the margin is 
 sometimes noted ; but I have found nothing remarkable. 
 
 Of the English poets he set most value upon Spenser, 
 Shakespeare, and Cowley. Spenser was apparently his favor- 
 ite ; Shakespeare he may easily be supposed to like, with every 
 other skilful reader ; but I should not have expected that Cow- 
 ley, whose ideas of excellence were so different from his own, 
 would have had much of his approbation. His character of 
 Dryden, who sometimes visited him, was, that he was a good 
 rhymist, but no poet. 
 
 His theological opinions are said to have been first £alvin- 
 i,sti£ai;.and afterwards, perhaps when he began to hate the 
 Presbyterians, to have tended towards Arminianism. In the 
 mixed questions of theology and government he never thinks 
 that he can recede far enough from popery or prelacy ; but 
 what Baudius says of Erasmus seems applicable to him, magis 
 habuit quod fugeret, quam quod sequeretur. He had determined 
 rather what to condemn than what to approve. He has not 
 associated himself with any denomination of Protestants : we 
 know rather what he was not than what he was. He- was not 
 of the ^Church of Rome ; he was not of the Church of Eng- 
 land. 
 
 To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the 
 rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and 
 hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind, unless it be invigo- 
 rated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls 
 to worship, and the salutary influence- of example. Milton, 
 who appears to have had full conviction of the truth of Chris- 
 tianity, and to have regarded the Holy Scriptures Avith the pro- 
 foundest veneration, and to have been untainted by any hereti- 
 cal peculiarity of opinion, and to have lived in a confirmed be- 
 lief of the immediate and occasional agency of Providence, yet 
 grew old without any visible worship. In the distribution of 
 his hours, there was no hour of prayer, either solitary or with 
 his household ; omitting public prayers, he omitted all. 
 
 Of this omission the reason has been sought upon a suppo- 
 sition which ought never to be made, that men live with their 
 own approbation, and justify their conduct to themselves. 
 Prayer certainly was not thought superfluous by him, who rep- 
 resents our first parents as praying acceptably in the state of 
 innocence, and efficaciously after their fall. That h^ lived 
 
40 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 without prayer can hardly be affirmed ; his studies and medita.' 
 tions were an habitual prayer. The neglect of it in his family 
 was probably a fault for which he condemned himself, and 
 which he intended to correct, but that death, as too often hap- 
 pens, intercepted his reformation, j 
 
 His political notions were thise of an acrimonious and 
 surly republican, for which it is not kaown that he gave any 
 better reason than that " a popular government was the most 
 frugal ; for the trappings of a monarchy would set up an ordi- 
 nary commonwealth." It is surely very shallow policy that 
 supposes money to be the chief good ; and even this, without 
 considering that the support and expense of a court is, for the 
 most part, only a particular kind of traffic, for which money is 
 circulated without any national impoverishment. 
 
 Milton's republicanism was, I am afraid, founded in an 
 envious hatred of- greatness, and a sullen desire of indepen- 
 dence ; in petulance impatient of control, and pride disdainful 
 of superiority. He hated monarchs in the state and prelates 
 in the church ; for he hated all whom he was required to obey. 
 It is to be suspected that his predominant desire was to de- 
 stroy rather than estabhsh, and that he felt not so much the 
 love of liberty as repugnance to authority. 
 
 It has been observed that they who most loudly clamor 
 for liberty do not most liberally grant it. What we know of 
 Milton's character, in domestic relations, is, that he was severe 
 and arbitrary. His family consisted of women ; and there 
 appears in his books something like a Turkish contempt of 
 females, as subordinate and inferior beings. That his own 
 daughters might not break the ranks, he suffered them to be 
 depressed by a mean and penurious education. He thought 
 women made only for obedience, and man only for rebellion. 
 
 Of his family some account may be expected. His sister 
 first married to Mr. Philips, afterwards married to Mr. Agar, a 
 friend of her first husband, who succeeded him in the Crown 
 Office. She had by her first husband Edward and John, the 
 two nephews whom Milton educated ; and by her second, two 
 daughters. 
 
 His brother, Sir Christopher, had two daughters, Mary and 
 Catharine ; and a son, Thomas, who succeeded Agar in the 
 Crown Office, and left a daughter living, in 1749, in Grosvenor 
 Street. 
 
 Milton had children only by his first wife : Anne, Mary, 
 and Deborah. Anne, though deformed, married a master- 
 builder, and died of her first child. Mary died single. Debo- 
 
MILTON. 41 
 
 rah married Abraham Clark, a weaver in Spitalfields, and lived 
 seventy-six years, to August 1727. This is the daughter of 
 whom public mention has been made. She could repeat the 
 first lines of Homer, the Metamorphoses, and some of Euri- 
 pides, by having often read them. Yet here incredulity is 
 ready to make a stand. Many repetitions are necessary to fix 
 in the memory lines not understood ; and why should Milton 
 wish or want to hear them so often ? These lines were at the 
 beginning of the poems. Of a book written in a language not 
 understood, the beginning raises no more attention than the 
 end ; and as those that understand it know commonly the be- 
 ginning best, its rehearsal will seldom bcnecessary. It is not 
 likely that Milton required any passage to be so much repeated 
 as that his daughter could learn it ; nor likely that he desired 
 the initial lines to be read at all ; nor that the daughter, weary 
 of the drudgery of pronouncing unideal sounds, would volun- 
 tarily commit them to memory. 
 
 To this gentlewoman Addison made a present, and prom- 
 ised some establishment, but died soon after. Queen Caroline 
 sent her fifty guineas. She had seven sons and three daugh- 
 ters ; but none of them had any children, except her son Caleb 
 and her daughter Elizabeth. Caleb went to Fort St. George, 
 in the East Indies, and had two sons, of whom nothing is now 
 known. Elizabeth married Thomas Foster, a weaver in Spital- 
 fields ; and had seven children, who all died. She kept a 
 petty grocer's or chandler's shop, first at Holloway, and after- 
 wards in Cock Lane, near Shoreditch Church. She knew little 
 of her grandfather, and that little was not good. She told of 
 his harshness to his daughters, and his refusal to have them 
 taught to write ; and, in opposition to other accounts, repre- 
 sented him as delicate, though temperate, in his diet. 
 
 In 1750, April 5, " Comus" was played for her benefit. She 
 had so little acquaintance with diversion or gayety, that she did 
 not know what was intended when a benefit was offered her. 
 The profits of the night were only one hundred and thirty 
 pounds, though Dr. Newton brought a large contribution ; and 
 twenty pounds were given by Tonson, a man who is to be 
 praised as often as he is named. Of this sum, one hundred 
 pounds were placed in the stocks, after some debate between 
 her and her husband in whose name it should be entered ; and 
 the rest augmented their little stock, with which they removed 
 to Islington. This was the greatest benefaction that " Para- 
 dise Lost" ever procured the author's descendants ; and to 
 this he who has now attempted to relate his life had the honor 
 of contributing a prologue. 
 
42 DR. SAMUEL yOHNSON ON 
 
 In the examination of Milton's poetical works I shall pay 
 so much regard to time as to begin with his juvenile produc- 
 tions. For his early pieces he seems to have had a degree of 
 fondness not very laudable ; what he has once written he 
 resolves to preserve, and gives to the public an unfinished 
 poem, which he broke off because he was ' ' nothing satisfied 
 with what he had done, ' ' supposing his readers less nice than 
 himself. These preludes to his future labors are in Italian, 
 Latin, and English. Of the Italian I cannot pretend to speak 
 as a critic ; but I have heard them commended by a man well 
 qualified to decide their merit. The Latin pieces are lus- 
 ciously elegant ; but the delight which they afford is rather by 
 the exquisite imitation of the ancient writers, by the purity of 
 the diction, arid the harmony of the numbers, than by any 
 power of invention or vigor of sentiment. They are not all 
 of equal value ; the elegies excel the odes ; and some of the 
 exercises on Gunpowder Treason might have been spared. 
 
 The English poems, though they make no promises of 
 ' ' Paradise Lost, ' ' have this evidence of genius, that they have 
 a cast original and unborrowed. But their peculiarity is not 
 excellence ; if they differ from the verses of others, they differ 
 for the worse ; for they are too often distinguished by repul- 
 sive harshness ; the combinations of words are new, but they 
 are not pleasing ; the rhymes and epithets seem to be labori- - 
 ously sought and violently applied. 
 
 That in the early parts of his life he wrote with much care 
 appears from his manuscripts, happily preserved at Cam- 
 bridge, in which many of his smaller works are found as they 
 were first written, with the subsequent corrections. Such rel- 
 ics show how excellence is acquired ; what we hope ever to do 
 with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence. 
 
 Those who admire the beauties of this great poet sometimes 
 force their own judgment into false approbation of his little 
 pieces, and prevail upon themselves to think that admirable 
 which is only singular. All that short compositions can com- 
 monly attain is neatness and elegance. Milton never learned 
 the art of doing little things with grace ; he overlooked the 
 milder excellence of suavity and softness ; he was a lion that 
 had no skill in dangling the kid. 
 
 One of the poems on which much praise has been be- 
 stowed is "Lycidas," of which the diction is harsh, the 
 rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing. What beauty 
 there is we must therefore seek in the sentiments and images. 
 It is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion ; for 
 passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions. 
 
MILTON. 
 
 43 
 
 Passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls 
 upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of rough satyrs and 
 " fauns with cloven heel." Where there is leisure for fiction 
 there is little grief. 
 
 In this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth ; there 
 is no art, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pas- 
 toral ; easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting, whatever images 
 it can supply are long ago exhausted ; and its inherent improb- 
 abihty always forces dissatisfaction on the mind. When Cow- 
 ley tells of Hervey, that they studied together, it is easy to sup- 
 pose how much he must miss the companion of his labors 
 and the partner of his discoveries ; but what image of tender- 
 ness can be excited by these lines ? 
 
 " We drove a-field, and both together heard 
 What time the gray fly winds her sultry horn, 
 Battening our flocks with the fresh dews of night." 
 
 We know that they never drove a-field, and they had no 
 flocks to batten ; and though it be allowed that the representa- 
 tion may be allegorical, the true meaning is so uncertain and 
 remote, that it is never sought, because it cannot be known 
 when it is found. 
 
 Among the flocks, and copses, and flowers appear the 
 heathen deities : Jove and Phoebus, Neptune and^olus, with 
 a long train of mythological imagery, such as a college easily 
 supplies. Nothing can less display knowledge, or less exercise 
 invention, than to tell how a shepherd has lost his companion, 
 and must now feed his flocks alone, without any judge of his 
 skill in piping ; and how one god asks another god what has 
 become of Lycidas, and how neither god can tell. He who 
 thus grieves will excite no sympathy ; he who thus praises will 
 confer no honor. 
 
 This poem has yet a grosser fault. With these trifling fic- 
 tions are mingled the most awful and sacred truths, such as 
 ought never to be polluted with such irreverent combinations. 
 The shepherd likewise is now a feeder of sheep, and afterwards 
 an ecclesiastical pastor, a superintendent of a Christian flock. 
 Such equivocations are always unskilful ; but here they are in- 
 decent, and at least approach to impiety, of which, however, I 
 believe the writer not to have been conscious. 
 
 Such is the power of reputation justly -acquired, that its 
 blaze drives away the eye from nice examination. Surely no] 
 man could have fancied that he read " Lycidas" with pleasure,! 
 had he not known the author. ■ 
 
 Of the two pieces, " L' Allegro" and " II Penseroso," I be- 
 
44 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 lieve opinion is uniform ; every man that reads them reads 
 them with pleasure. The author's design is not, what Theo- 
 bald has remarked, merely to show how objects derive their 
 colors from the mind, by representing the operation of the same 
 things upon the gay and the melancholy temper, or upon the 
 same man as he is differently disposed ; but rather how, among 
 the successive variety of appearances, every disposition of 
 mind takes hold on those by which it may be gratified. 
 
 The cheerful man hears the lark in the morning ; the pen- 
 sive man hears the nightingale in the evening. The cheerful 
 man sees the cock strut, and hears the horn and hounds echo 
 in the wood ; then walks, not unseen, to observe the glory of 
 the rising sun, or listen to the singing milkmaid, and view the 
 labors of the ploughman and the mower ; then casts his eyes 
 about him over scenes of smiling plenty, and looks up to the 
 distant tower, the residence of some fair inhabitant ; thus he 
 pursues real gayety through a day of labor or of play, and 
 delights himself at night with the fanciful narratives of super- 
 stitious ignorance. 
 
 The pensive man, at one time, walks unseen to muse at mid- 
 night ; and at another hears the sullen curfew. If the weather 
 drives him home, he sits in a room lighted only by glowing em- 
 bers ; or by a lonely lamp outwatches the north star, to dis- 
 cover the habitation of separate souls, and varies the shades 
 of meditation by contemplating the magnificent or pathetic 
 scenes of tragic and epic poetry. When the morning comes, a 
 morning gloomy with rain and wind, he walks into the dark 
 trackless woods, falls asleep by some murmuring water, and 
 with melancholy enthusiasm expects some dream of prognosti- 
 cation, or some music played by aerial performers. 
 
 Both Mirth and Melancholy are solitary, silent inhabitants 
 of the breast, that neither receive nor transmit communication : 
 no mention is therefore made of a philosophical friend or a 
 pleasant companion. The seriousness does not arise from any 
 participation of calamity, nor the gayety from the pleasures of 
 the bottle. 
 
 The man of cheerfulness, having exhausted the country, 
 tries what towered cities will afford, and mingles with scenes of 
 splendor, gay assemblies, and nuptial festivities ; but he min- 
 gles a mere spectator, as, when the learned comedies of Jon- 
 son, or the 3vild_ dramas of Shakespeare, are exhibited, he 
 attends the theatre. 
 
 The pensive man never loses himself in crowds, but walks 
 the cloister or frequents the cathedral. Milton probably had 
 not yet forsaken the church, 
 
MILTON. 45 
 
 Both his characters delight in music ; but he seems to think 
 that cheerful notes would have obtained from Pluto a complete 
 dismission of Eurydice, of whom solemn sounds only procured 
 a conditional release. 
 
 For the old age of Cheerfulness he makes no provision ; but 
 Melancholy he conducts with great dignity to the close of life. 
 His cheerfulness is without levity, and his pensiveness without 
 asperity. 
 
 Through these two poems the images are properly selected 
 and nicely distinguished ; but the colors of the diction seem 
 not sufficiently discriminated. I know not whether characters 
 are kept sufficiently apart. No mirth can, indeed, be found in 
 his melancholy ; but I am afraid that I always meet some mel- 
 ancholy in his mirth. They are two noble efforts of imagina- 
 tion. 
 
 The greatest of his juvenile performances is the " Mask of 
 Comus, " in which may very plainly be discovered the dawn 
 or twilight of " Paradise Lost." Milton appears to have 
 formed very early that system of diction and mode of verse 
 which his maturer judgment approved, and from which he 
 never endeavored nor desired to deviate. 
 
 Nor does " Comus" afford only a specimen of his lan- 
 guage ; it exhibits likewise his power of description and his 
 vigor of sentiment, employed in the praise and defence of 
 virtue. A work more truly poetical is rarely found ; allusions, 
 images, and descriptive epithets embellish almost every period 
 with lavish decoration. As a series of lines, therefore, it may 
 be considered as worthy of all the admiration with which the 
 votaries have received it. 
 
 As a drama it is deficient. The action is not probable. A 
 mask, in those parts where supernatural intervention is admit- 
 ted, must indeed be given up to all the freaks of imagination ; 
 but, so far as the action is merely human, it ought to be rea- 
 sonable, which can hardly be said of the conduct of the two 
 brothers ; who, when their sister sinks with fatigue in a path- 
 less wilderness, wander both away together in SQarch of berries 
 too far to find their way back, and leave a helpless lady to all 
 the sadness and danger of solitude. This, however, is a defect 
 overbalanced by its convenience. 
 
 What deserves more reprehension is, that the prologue 
 spoken in the wildwood by the attendant Spirit is addressed to 
 the audience ; a mode of communication so contrary to the 
 nature of dramatic representation, that no precedents can sup- 
 port it. 
 
 The discourse of the Spirit is too long ; an objection that 
 
46 DR. SAMUEL yOHNSON 0?/ 
 
 may be made to almost all the following speeches; they have 
 not the sprightliness of a dialogue animated by reciprocal con- 
 tention, but seem rather declamations deliberately composed, 
 and formally repeated on a moral question. The auditor 
 therefore listens as to a lecture, without passion, without 
 anxiety. 
 
 The song of Comus has airiness and jollity ; but, what may 
 recommend Milton's morals as well as his poetry, the invita- 
 tions to pleasure are so general that they excite no distinct 
 images of corrupt enjoyment, and take no dangerous hold on 
 the fancy ! 
 
 The following soliloquies of Comus and the Lady are ele- 
 gant, but tedious. The song must owe much to the voice if it 
 ever can delight. At last the brothers enter with too much 
 tranquillity ; and, when they have feared lest their sister should 
 be in danger, and hoped that she is not in danger, the elder 
 makes a speech in praise of chastity, and the younger finds 
 how fine it is to be a philosopher. 
 
 Then descends the Spirit in the form of a shepherd ; and the 
 brother, instead of being in haste to ask his help, praises his 
 singing, and inquires his business in that place. It is remark- 
 able that at this interview the brother is taken with a short fit 
 of rhyming. The Spirit relates that the lady is in the power of 
 Comus ; the brother moralizes again ; and the Spirit makes a 
 long narration, of no use because it is false, and therefore un- 
 suitable to a good being. 
 
 In all these parts the language is poetical and the senti- 
 ments are generous ; but there is something wanting to allure 
 attention. 
 
 The dispute between the Lady and Comus is the most ani- 
 mated and affecting scene of the drama, and wants nothing but 
 a brisker reciprocation of objections and replies to invite atten- 
 tion and detain it. 
 
 The songs are vigorous and full of imagery ; but they are 
 harsh in their diction and not very musical in their numbers. 
 
 Throughout the whole the figures are too bold, and the lan- 
 guage too luxuriant for dialogue. It is a drama in the epic 
 style, inelegantly splendid and tediously instructive. 
 
 The Sonnets were written in different parts of Milton's life, 
 upon di fferent occasions. They deserve not any particular criti- 
 cism ; for of the best it can only be said that they are not 
 bad ; and perhaps only the eighth and the twenty-first are truly 
 entitled to this slender commendation. The fabric of a son- 
 net, however adapted to the Italian language, ha§ never sue- 
 
MILTON. 4^ 
 
 ceeded in ours, which, having greater variety of termination, 
 requires the rhymes to be often changed. 
 
 Those little pieces may be despatched without much anx- 
 iety ; a greater work calls for greater care. I am now to ex- 
 amine "Paradise Lost;"- a poem which, considered with 
 respect to design, may claim the first place, and with respect to 
 performance, the second, among the productions of the human 
 mind. 
 
 . By the general consent of critics, the first praise of genius 
 is due to the writer of an epic poem, as it requires an assem- 
 blage of all the powers which are singly sufficient for other 
 compositions. Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with 
 truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason. Epic 
 poetry undertakes to teach the most important truths by the 
 most pleasing precepts, and therefore relates some great event 
 in the most affecting manner. History must supply the writer 
 with the rudiments of narration, which he must improve and 
 exalt by a nobler art, must animate by dramatic energy, and 
 diversify by retrospection and anticipation ; morality must 
 teach him the exact bounds and different shades of vice and 
 virtue ; from policy, and the practice of life, he has to learn 
 the discriminations of character and the tendency of the pas- 
 sions, either single or combined ; and physiology must supply 
 him with illustrations and images. To put these materials to 
 poetical use, is required an imagination capable of painting 
 nature and realizing fiction. Nor is he yet a poet till he has 
 attained the whole extension of his language, distinguished all 
 the delicacies of phrase and all the colors of words, and 
 learned to adjust their different sounds to all the varieties of 
 metrical modulation. 
 
 Bossu is of opinion that the poet's first work is to find a 
 moral, which his fable is afterwards to illustrate and establish. 
 This seems to have been the process only of Milton ; the 
 moral of other poems is incidental and consequent ; in Mil- 
 ton's only it is essential and intrinsic. His p urpose was the 
 most useful and the most arduous : " to vmrTrrate the ways nf 
 God to man ;'' to show the reasonableness of religion, and the 
 necessity ot o DeaTence to the divine law. 
 
 'lo convey tms^ moral th ere must be a fable, a narration art- 
 fully coiiifructe37'sorasj;o~excite curiosfty and surprise expec- 
 tation.; Iln this_partjof_iiis_ffiB.rk._M 
 
 have f-qiia11eiT every other poet. He has involved in his ac- 
 count ot tfie'tall of man the events which preceded and those 
 that were to follow it : he has interwoven the whole system of 
 theology with such propriety, that every part appears to be 
 
48 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 necessary ; and scarcely any recital is wished shorter for the 
 sake of quickening the progress of the main action. 
 
 The subject of an epic poem is naturally an event of great 
 importance. That of Milton is not the destruction of a city, 
 the conduct of a colony, or the foundation of an empire. His 
 subject is the fate of worlds, the revolutions of heaven and of 
 earth ; rebellion against the supreme King, raised by the high- 
 est order of created beings ; the overthrow of their host and 
 the punishment of their crime ; the creation of a new race of 
 reasonable creatures, their original happiness and innocence, 
 their forfeiture of immortality,, and their restoration to hope 
 and peace. 
 
 Great events can be hastened or retarded only by persons 
 of elevated dignity. Before the greatne ss displayed in Mil- 
 ton's poem all other greatness" shrinTcs' away. The weakest of 
 his agents are the higE^Fand nobrest of human beings, the 
 original parents of mankind ; with whose actions the elements 
 consented ; on whose rectitude or deviation of will depended 
 the state of terrestrial nature and the condition of all the 
 future inhabitants of the globe. 
 
 Of the other agents in the poem, the chief are such as it is 
 irreverence to name on slight occasions. The rest were lower 
 powers ; 
 
 ' ' of which the least could wield 
 
 Those elements, and arm him with the force 
 Of all their regions ; 
 
 powers which only the control of Omnipotence restrains from 
 laying creation waste and filling the vast expanse of space with 
 ruin and confusion. To display the motives and actions of 
 beings thus superior, so far as human reason can examine them, 
 or human imagination represent them, is the task which this 
 mighty poet has undertaken and performed. 
 
 In the examination of epic poems much speculation is 
 commonly employed upon the characters. The characters in 
 the "Paradise Lost" which admit of examination are those of 
 angels and of man ;/of angels good and evil ; of man in his 
 innocent and sinful'state. 
 
 Among the angels, the virtue of Raphael is mild and pla- 
 cid, of easy condescension and free communication ; that of 
 Michael is regal and lofty, and, as may seem, attentive to 
 the dignity of his own nature. Abdiel and Gabriel appear 
 occasionally, and act as every incident requires ; the solitary 
 fidelity of Abdiel is very amiably painted. 
 
 Of the evil angels the characters are more diversified. To 
 Satan, as Addison observes, such sentiments are given as suit 
 
MILTON. 
 
 49 
 
 "the most exalted and most depraved being." Milton has 
 been censured by Clarke ' for the impiety which sometimes 
 breaks from Satan's mouth ; for there are thoughts, as he justly 
 remarks, which no observation of character can justify, because 
 no good man would willingly permit them to pass, however 
 transiently, through his own mind. To make Satan speak as a 
 rebel, without any such expressions as might taint the reader's 
 imagination, was indeed one of the great difficulties in Milton's 
 undertaking ; and I cannot but think that he has extricated 
 himself with great happiness. There is in Satan's speeches lit- 
 tle that can give pain to a pious ear. The language of rebel- 
 lion cannot be the same with that of obedience. The malig- 
 nity of Satan foams in haughtiness and obstinacy ; but his 
 expressions are commonly general, and noTotherwise offensive 
 than as they are wicked. '^ 
 
 The other chiefs of the celestial rebellion are very judi- 
 ciously discriminated in the first and second books ; and the 
 ferocious charjicter of Moloch appears, both in the battle and 
 the council, with exact consistency. 
 
 To Adam and to Eve are given, during their innocencef 
 such sentiments as innocence can generate and utter. Their 
 love is pure benevolence and mutual veneration ; their repasts 
 are without luxury, and their diligence without toil. Their 
 addresses to their Maker have little more than the voice of 
 admiration and gratitude. Fruition left them nothing to ask ; 
 and innocence left them nothing to fear. -- 
 
 But with guilt enter distrust and discord, mutual accusation, 
 and stubborn self- defence : they regard each other with alienated 
 minds, and dread their Creator as the avenger of their trans- 
 gression. At last they seek shelter in his mercy, soften to 
 repentance, and melt in supplication. Both before and after 
 the fall the superiority of Adam is diligently sustained. 
 
 Of the probable and the marvellous, two parts of a vulgar 
 epic poem, which immerge the critic in deep consideration, the 
 " Paradise Lost" requires little to be said. It contains the 
 history of a miracle, of i^creation and redemption ; it displays 
 the power and the mercy of the Supreme Being : the probable 
 therefore is marvellous, and the marvellous is probable. The 
 substance of the narrative is truth ; and, as truth allows no 
 choice, it is, like necessity, superior to rule. To the accidental 
 or adventitious parts, as to every thing human, some slight 
 exceptions may be made ; but the main fabric is immovably 
 supported. 
 
 It is 'justly remarked by Addison that this poem has, by 
 
 ' Author of tlie " Essay on Study." 
 
50 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 the nature of its subject, the advantage above all others, that it 
 is universally and perpetually interesting. All mankind will, 
 through all ages, bear the same relation to Adam and to Eve, i 
 and must partake of that good and evil which extend to them- 
 selves. , , ^ 
 
 Of the machinery, so called from ©eoS ano fxrfxavrii, by 
 which is meant the occasional interposition of supernatural 
 power, another fertile topic of critical remarks, here is no room 
 to speak, because every thing is done under the immediate and 
 visible direction of Heaven ; but the rule is so far observed 
 that no part of the action could have been accomplished by 
 any other means. j 
 
 Of episodes, I think there are only two contained in'Tla- 
 phael's relation of the war in heaven, and Michael's prophetic 
 account of the changes to happen in this world. Both are 
 closely connected with the great action ; one was necessary to 
 Adam as a warning, the other as a consolation. 
 
 To the completeness or integrity of the design, nothing can 
 be objected ; it has distinctly and clearly what Aristotle 
 requires — a beginning, a middle, and an end. There is per- 
 haps no poem, of the same length, from which so little can 
 be taken without apparent mutilation. Here are no funeral 
 games, nor is there any long 'description of a shield. The 
 short digressions at the beginning of the third, seventh, and 
 ninth books might doubtless be spared ; but superfluities so 
 beautiful who would take away ? or who does not wish that the 
 author of the " Iliad" had gratified succeeding ages with a lit- 
 tle knowledge of himself ? Perhaps no passages are more fre- 
 quently or more attentively read than those extrinsic para- 
 graphs ; and, since the end of poetry is pleasure, that cannot 
 be unpoetical with which all are pleased. 
 
 The questions, whether the action of the poem be strictiy 
 one, whether the poem can be properly termed heroic, and who 
 is the hero, are raised by such readers as draw their principles 
 of judgment rather from books than from reason. Milton, 
 though he entitled ' ' Paradise Lost' ' only a poem, yet calls it 
 himself heroic song. Dryden petulantly and indecently denies 
 the heroism of Adam, because he was overcome ; but there is 
 no reason why the hero should not be unfortunate, except 
 established practice, since success and virtue do not go neces- 
 sarily together. Cato is the hero of Lucan ; but Lucah's 
 authority will not be suffered by Quintilian to decide. How- 
 ever, if success be necessary, Adam's deceiver was at last 
 crushed ; Adam was restored to his Maker's favor, and there- 
 fore may securely resume his human rank. 
 
MILTON. 
 
 51 
 
 After the scheme and fabric of the poem, must be consid- 
 ered its component parts, the sentiments and the diction. 
 
 The sentiments, as expressive of manners, or appropriat- 
 ed to characters, are, for the "greater part, unexceptionably 
 just. 
 
 Splendid passages, containing lessons of morality or pre- 
 cepts of prudence, occur seldom. Such is the original forma- 
 tion of this poem, that, as it admits no human manners till the 
 fall, it can give little assistance to human conduct. Its end is 
 to raise the thoughts above sublunary cares or pleasures. Yet 
 the praise of that fortitude, with which Abdiel maintained his 
 singularity of virtue against the scorn of multitudes, may be 
 accommodated to all times ; and Raphael's reproof of Adam's 
 curiosity after the planetary motions, with the answer returned 
 by Adam, may be confidently opposed to any rule of life which 
 any poet has delivered. 
 
 The thoughts which are occasionally called forth in the prog- 
 ress are such as could only be produced by an imagination in 
 the highest degree fervid and active, to which materials were 
 supplied by incessant study and unlimited curiosity. The heat 
 of Milton's mind may be said to sublimate his learning, to 
 throw off into his work the spirit of science, unmingled with its 
 grosser parts. 
 
 He had considered creation in its whole extent, and his 
 descriptions are therefore learned. He had accustomed his 
 imagination to unrestrained indulgence, and his conceptions 
 therefore were extensive. The characteristic quality of h is 
 poem is sublim ity. He sometimes descends to the elegant, but 
 ins ejpment is" the great. He can occasionally invest himself 
 with grace ; but his natural port is gigantic loftiness. ' He can 
 please when pleasure is required ; but it is his peculiar power 
 to astonish. 
 
 He seems to have been well acquainted with his own 
 genius, and to know what it was that nature had bestowed 
 upon him more bountifully than upon others ; the power of 
 displaying the vast, illuminating the splendid, enforcing the 
 awful, darkening the gloomy, and aggravating the dreadful ; 
 he therefore chose a subject on which too much could not be 
 said, on which he might tire his fancy without the censure of 
 extravagance. 
 
 The appearances of nature, and the occurrences of life, did 
 
 not satiate his appetite of greatness. To paint things as they 
 
 are requires a minute attention, and employs the memory 
 
 rather than the fancy. Milton's delight was to sport in the 
 
 ■" Algarotti terms it gigantesca subliinitli Miltoniana. 
 
52 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 wide regions of possibility ; reality was a scene too narrow for 
 his mind. He sent his faculties out upon discovery into 
 worlds where only imagination can travel, and delighted to 
 form new modes of existence, and furnish sentiment and action 
 to superior beings, to trace the counsels of hell, or accompany 
 the choirs of heaven. 
 
 But he could not be always in other worlds ; he must some- 
 times revisit earth, and tell of .things visible and known. When 
 he cannot raise wonder by the sublimity of his mind, he gives 
 delight by its fertility. 
 
 Whatever be his subject, he never fails to fill the imagina- 
 tion ; but his images and descriptions of the scenes or opera- 
 tions of nature do not seem to be always copied from original 
 form, nor to have the freshness, raciness, and energy of imme- 
 diate observation. He saw Nature, as Dryden expresses it, 
 "through the spectacles of books ;" and on most occasions 
 calls learning to his assistance. The garden of Eden brings to 
 his mind the vale of Enna, where Proserpine was gathering 
 flowers. Satan makes his way through fighting elements like 
 Argo between the Cyanean rocks ; or Ulysses, between the 
 two Sicilian whirlpools, when he shunned Charybdis on the 
 larboard. The mythological allusions have been justly cen- 
 sured, as not being always used with notice of their vanity ; 
 but they contribute variety to the narration, and produce an 
 alternate exercise of the memory and the fancy. 
 
 His similes are less numerous and more various than those 
 of his predecessors. But he does not confine himself within 
 the limits of rigorous comparison : his great excellence is 
 amplitude ; and he expands the adventitious image beyond the 
 dimensions which the occasion required. Thus, comparing 
 the shield of Satan to the orb of the moon, he crowds the im- 
 agination with the discovery of the telescope, and all the won- 
 ders which the telescope discovers. 
 
 Of his moral sentiments it is hardly praise to affirm that 
 they excel those of all other poets ; for this superiority he was 
 indebted to his acquaintance with the sacred writings. The 
 ancient epic poets, wanting the light of Revelation, were very 
 unskilful teachers of virtue ; their principal characters may be 
 great, but they are not amiable. The reader may rise from 
 their works with a greater degree of active or passive fortitude, 
 and sometimes of prudence ; but he will be able to carry atvay 
 few precepts of justice, and none of mercy. 
 
 From the Italian writers it appears that the advantages of 
 even Christian knowledge may be possessed in vain. Ariosto's 
 pravity is generally known; and though the " Deliverance of 
 
MILTON. 
 
 53 
 
 Jerusalem" may be considered as a sacred subject, the poet 
 ■lias been very sparing of moral instruction. 
 
 In Milton every line breathes sanctity of thought and purity 
 of manners, except when the train of the narration requires the 
 introduction of the rebellious spirits ; and even they are com- 
 pelled to a.cknowledge their subjection to God, in such a man- 
 ner as excites reverence and confirms piety. 
 
 Of human beings there are but two ; but those two are the 
 parents of mankind, venerable before their fall for dignity and 
 innocence, and amiable after it for repentance and submission. 
 In the first state their affection is tender without weakness, and 
 their piety sublime without presumption. When they have 
 sinned, they show how discord begins in mutual frailty, and 
 how it ought to cease in mutual forbearance ; how confidence 
 of the divine favor is forfeited by sin, and how hope of par- 
 don may be obtained by penitence and prayer. A state of 
 innocence we can only conceive, if, indeed, in our present mis- 
 er)', it be possible to conceive it ; but the sentiments and wor- 
 ship proper to a fallen and offending being, we have all to 
 learn, as we have all to practise. 
 
 The poet, whatever be done, is always great. Our progeni- 
 tors, in their first state, conversed with angels ; even when 
 folly and sin had degraded them, they had not in their humilia- 
 tion the port of mean suitors ; and they rise again to reverential 
 regard when we find that their prayers were heard. 
 
 As human passions did not enter the world before the fall, 
 there is in the " Paradise Lost" little opportunity fqr the 
 pathetic ; but what little there is has not been lost. That pas- 
 sion which is peculiar to rational nature, the anguish arising 
 from the consciousness of transgression, and the horrors at- 
 tending the sense of the Divine displeasure, are very justly de- 
 scribed and forcibly impressed. But the passions are moved 
 only on one occasion ; sublimity is the general and prevailing 
 quality of this poem ; sublimity variously modified, sometimes 
 descriptive, sometimes argumentative. 
 
 The defects and faults of ' ' Paradise Lost, ' ' for faults and 
 defects every work of man must have, it is the business of im- 
 partial criticism to discover. As, in displaying the excellence 
 of Milton, I have not made long quotations, because of select- 
 ing beauties there had been no end, I shall in the same general 
 manner mention that which seems, to deserve censure ; for 
 what Englishman can take delight in transcribing passages 
 which, if they lessen the reputation of' Milton, diminish in 
 some degree the honor of our country ?J 
 
 The generality of my scheme does not admit the frequent 
 
54 DR- SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 notice of verbal inaccuracies ; which Bentley, perhaps better 
 skilled in grammar than in poetry, has often found, though he 
 sometimes made them, and which he imputed to the obtru- 
 sions of a reviser, whom the author's blindness obliged him to 
 employ ; a supposition rash and groundless, if he thought it 
 true ; and vile and pernicious, if, as is said, he in private 
 allowed it to be false. 
 
 The plan of " Paradise Lost" has this inconvenience, that 
 it comprises neither human actions nor human manners. The 
 man and woman who act and suffer are in a state which no 
 other man or woman can ever know. The reader finds no 
 transaction in which he can be engaged ; beholds no condition 
 in which he can by any effort of imagination place himself ; 
 he has, therefore, little natural curiosity or sympathy. 
 
 We all, indeed, feel the effects of Adam's disobedience ; 
 we all sin like Adam, and like him must all bewail our offences ; 
 we have restless and insidious enemies in the fallen angels ; 
 and in the blessed spirits we have guardians and friends : in 
 the redemption of mankind we hope to be included ; and in 
 the description of heaven and hell we are surely interested, as 
 we are all to reside hereafter either in the regions of horror or 
 of bliss. 
 
 But these truths are too important to be new ; they have 
 been taught to our infancy ; they have mingled with our soli- 
 tary thoughts and familiar conversations, and are habitually 
 interwoven with the whole texture of life. Being therefore not 
 new, they raise no unaccustomed emotion in the mind ; what 
 we knew before we cannot learn ; what is not unexpected can- 
 not surprise. 
 
 Of the ideas suggested by these awful scenes, from some 
 we recede with reverence, except when stated hours require 
 their association ; and from others we shrink with horror, or 
 admit them only as salutary inflictions, as counterpoises to our 
 interests and passions. Such images rather obstruct the ca- 
 reer of fancy than incite it. 
 
 Pleasure and terror are, indeed, the genuine sources of 
 poetry ; but poetical pleasure must be such as human imagina- 
 tion can at least conceive ; and poetical terror such as human 
 strength and fortitude may combat. The good and evil of 
 eternity are too ponderous for the wings of wit ; the mind 
 sinks under them with passive helplessness, content with calm 
 belief and humble adoration. 
 
 Known truths, however, may take a different appearance, 
 and be conveyed to the mind by a new train of intermediate 
 images. This Milton has undertaken, and performed with 
 
MILTON. 55 
 
 pregnancy and vigor of mind peculiar to himself. Whoever 
 considers the few radical positions which the Scriptures 
 afforded him, will wonder by what energetic operation he ex- 
 panded them to such extent, and ramified them to so much 
 variety, restrained as he was by religious reverence from licen- 
 tiousness of fiction. 
 
 Here is a full display of the united force of study and ge-; 
 nius ; of a great accumulation of materials, with judgment tol 
 digest and fancy to combine them : Milton was able to select ' 
 from nature, or from story, from ancient fable, or from mod- 
 ern science, whatever could illustrate or adorn his thoughts. 
 An accumulation of knowledge impregnated his mind, fer- 
 mented by study and exalted by imagination. 
 
 It has been therefore said, without an indecent hyperbole, 
 by one of his encomiasts, that in reading " Paradise Lost," 
 __we read a book of universal knowledge. 
 
 But original deficience cannot be supplied. The want of 
 human interest is always felt. " Paradise Lost" is one of the 
 books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to 
 take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its 
 perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for 
 inst/uction, retire harassed and overbur(iened, and look else- 
 where for recreation ; we desert our master, and seek for com- 
 panions. " 
 
 Another inconvenience of Milton's design is, that it re- 
 quires the description of what cannot be described, the agency 
 of spirits. He saw that immateriahty supplied no images, and 
 that he could not show angels acting but by instruments of 
 action : he therefore invested them with form and matter. 
 This, being necessary, was therefore defensible ; and he Aould 
 have secured the consistency of his system by keeping imma- 
 teriality out of sight, and enticmg his reader to drop it from 
 his thoughts. But he has unhappily perplexed his poetry with 
 his philosophy. His infernal and celestial powers are some- 
 times pure spirit, and sometimes animated body. When Satan 
 walks with his lance upon the burning marl, he has a body ; 
 when, in his passage between hell and the new world, he is in 
 danger of sinking in the vacuity, and is supported by a gust of 
 rising vapors, he has a body ; when he animates the toad, he 
 seems to be mere spirit, that can penetrate, matter at pleasure ; 
 when he starts up in his own shape, he has at least a determined 
 form ; and when he is brought before Gabriel, he has a spear 
 and a shield, which he had the power of hiding in the toad, 
 though the arms of the contending angels are evidently 
 material. 
 
56 t>R. SAMUEL yOHNSON ON 
 
 The vulgar inhabitants of Pandemonium, being incorpo- 
 real spirits, are at large, though without number, in a limited 
 space : yet in the battle, when they were overwhelmed by 
 mountains, their armor hurt them, crushed in upon their sub- 
 stance, now grown gross by sinning. This likewise happened to 
 the uncorrupted angels, who were overthrown the sooner for 
 their arms, for unarmed they might easily as spirits have evaded 
 by contraction or remove. Even as spirits they are hardly 
 spiritual ; for contraction and remove are images of matter ; but 
 if they could have escaped without their armor, they might 
 have escaped from it, and left only the empty cover to be bat- 
 tered. Uriel, when he rides on a sunbeam, is material ; Satan 
 is material when he is afraid of the prowess of Adam. 
 
 The confusion of spirit and matter which pervades the 
 whole narration of the war of Heaven fills it with incongruity ; 
 and the book in which it is related is, I believe, the favorite of 
 children, and gradually neglected as knowledge is increased. 
 
 After the operation of immaterial agents which cannot be 
 explained, may be considered that of allegorical persons which 
 have no real existence. To exalt causes into agents, to invest 
 abstract ideas with form, and animate them with activity, has 
 always been the right of poetry. But such airy beings are, 
 for the most part, suffered only to do their natural office, and 
 retire. Thus Fame tells a tale, and Victory hovers over a 
 general or perches on a standard ; but Fame and Victory can 
 do no more. To give them any real employment, or ascribe 
 to them any material agency, is to make them allegorical no 
 longer, but to shock the mind by ascribing effects to non- 
 entity. In the " Prometheus" of .iEschylus we see Violence 
 and Strength, and in the " Alcestis" of Euripides we see 
 Death, brought upon the stage, all as active persons of the 
 drama ; but no precedents can justify absurdity. 
 
 Milton's allegory of Sin and Death is undoubtedly faulty. 
 Sin is indeed the mother of Death, and may be allowed to be 
 the portress of hell ; but when they stop the journey of Satan, 
 a journey described as real, and when Death offers him battle, 
 the allegory is broken. That Sin and Death should have 
 shown the way to hell, might have been allowed ; but they 
 cannot facilitate the passage by building a bridge, because the 
 difficulty of Satan's passage is described as real and sensible, 
 and the bridge ought to be only figurative. The hell assigned 
 to the rebellious spirits is described as not less local than the 
 residence of man. It is placed in some distant part of space, 
 separated from the regions of harmony and order by a chaotic 
 waste and an unoccupied vacuity ; but Sin and Death worked 
 
Mil toi^. 
 
 57 
 
 up a mole of aggravated soil, cemented with asphaltus ; a work 
 too bulky for ideal architects. 
 
 This unskilful allegory appears to me one of the greatest 
 faults of the poem ; and to this there was no temptation but 
 the author's opinion of its beauty. 
 
 To the conduct of the narrative some objections may be 
 made. Satan is with great expectation brought before Gabriel 
 in Paradise, and is suffered to go away unmolested. The 
 creation of man is represented as the consequence of the 
 vacuity left in heaven by the expulsion of the rebels ; yet 
 Satan mentions it as a report rife in heaven before his de- 
 parture. 
 
 To find sentiments for the state of innocence was very diffi- 
 cult ; and something of anticipation, perhaps, is now and then 
 discovered. Adam's discourse of dreams seems not to be the 
 speculation of a new-created being. I know not whether his 
 answer to the angel's reproof for curi'osity does not want some- 
 thing of propriety ; it is the speech of a man acquainted with 
 many other men. Some philosophical notions, especially when 
 the philosophy is false, might have been better omitted. The 
 angel, in a comparison, speaks of timorous deer, before deer 
 were yet timorous, and before Adam could understand the 
 comparison. 
 
 Dryden remarks that Milton has some flats among his 
 elevations. This is only to say that all the parts are not equal. 
 In every work one part must be for the sake of others : a 
 palace must have passages ; a poem must have transitions. It 
 is no more to be required that wit should always be blazing, 
 than that the sun should always stand at noon. In a great 
 work there is a vicissitude of luminous and opaque parts, 
 as there is in the world a succession of day and night. Milton, 
 when he has expatiated in the sky, may be allowed sometimes 
 to revisit earth ; for what other author ever soared so high, or 
 sustained his flight so long ? 
 
 Milton, being well versed in the Italian poets, appears to 
 have borrowed often from them ; and, as every man catches 
 something from his companions, his desire of imitating Ariosto's 
 levity has disgraced his work with the " Paradise of Fools ;" 
 a fiction not in itself ill-imagined, but too ludicrous for its 
 place. 
 
 His play on words, in which he delights too often ; his 
 equivocations, which Bentley endeavors to defend by the ex- 
 ample of the ancients ; his unnecessary and ungraceful use of 
 terms of art, it is not necessary to mention, because they are 
 easily remarked and generally censured ; and at last bear so 
 
58 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON- ON 
 
 little proportion to the whole that they scarcely deserve the 
 attention of a critic. 
 
 Such are the faults of that wonderful performance, " Para- 
 dise Lost ;" which he who can put in balance with its beau- 
 ties must be considered not as nice but as dull, as less to be 
 censured for want of candor than pitied for want of sensibility. 
 
 Of " Paradise Regained " the general judgment seems now 
 to be right, that it is in many parts elegant, and everywhere 
 instructive. It was not to be supposed that the writer of 
 " Paradise Lost" could ever write without great effusions of 
 fancy and exalted precepts of wisdom. The basis of ' ' Para- 
 dise Regained " is narrow ; a dialogue without action can 
 never please like an union of the narrative and dramatic 
 powers. Had this poem been written not by Milton, but by 
 some imitator, it would have claimed and received universal 
 praise. 
 
 If ' ' Paradise Regained ' ' has been too much depreciated, 
 " Samson Agonistes" has in requital been too much admired. 
 It could only be by long prejudice, and the bigotry of learning, 
 that Milton could prefer the ancient tragedies, with their en- 
 cumbrance of a chorus, to the exhibitions of the French and 
 English stages ; and it is only by a blind confidence in the re- 
 putation of Milton that a drama can be praised in which the 
 intermediate parts have neither cause nor consequence, neither 
 hasten nor retard the catastrophe. 
 
 In this tragedy are, however, many particular beauties, 
 many just sentiments and striking lines ; but it wants that 
 power of attracting the attention which a well-connected plan 
 produces. 
 
 Milton would not have excelled in dramatic writing ; he 
 knew human nature only in the gross, and had never studied 
 the shades of character, nor the combinations of concurring, or 
 the perplexity of contending, passions. He had read much, 
 and knew what books could teach ; but had mingled little in 
 the world, and was deficient in the knowledge which experi- 
 ence must confer. 
 
 Through all his greater works there prevails an uniform 
 peculiarity of diction, a mode and cast of expression which 
 bears little resemblance to that of any former writer ; and 
 which is so far removed from common use that an unlearned 
 reader, when he first opens his book, finds himself surprised 
 by a new language. 
 
 This novelty has been, by those who can find nothing 
 wrong in Milton, imputed to his laborious endeavors after 
 words suitable to the grandeur of his ideas. Our language, 
 says Addisoiv. sunk under him. But the truth is, that, both in 
 
MILTON. 
 
 59 
 
 prose and verse, he had formed his style by a perverse and 
 pedantic principle. He was desirous to use English words with 
 a foreign idiom. This in all his prose is discovered and con- 
 demned ; for there judgment operates freely, neither softened 
 by the beauty nor awed by the dignity of his thoughts ; but 
 such is the power of his poetry that his call is obeyed without 
 resistance, the reader feels himself in captivity to a higher and 
 a nobler mind, and criticism sinks in admiration. 
 
 Milton's style was not modified by his subject ; what is 
 shown with greater extent in ' ' Paradise Lost ' ' may be found 
 in "Comus." One source of his peculiarity was his fami- 
 liarity with the Tuscan poets ; the disposition of his words is, 
 I think, frequently Italian ; perhaps sometimes combined with 
 other tongues. ~~ 
 
 Of him, at least, may be said what Jonson says of Spenser, 
 that he wrote no language, but has formed what Butler calls a 
 Baiylonish dialect, in itself harsh and barbarous, but made by 
 exalted genius and extensive learning the vehicle of so much 
 instruction and so much pleasure, that, like other lovers, we 
 find grace in its deformity. 
 
 Whatever be the faults of his diction he cannot want the 
 praise of copiousness and variety : he was master of his lan- 
 guage in its full extent ; and has selected the melodious words 
 with such diligence that from his book alone the art of Eng- 
 lish poetry might be learned. 
 
 After his diction something must be said of his versifica- 
 tion. The measure, he says, is the .£nglisk heroic verse without 
 rhyme. Of this mode he had many examples among the Ital- 
 ians, and some in his own country. The Earl of Surrey is 
 said to have translated one of Virgil's books without rhyme ; 
 and, beside our tragedies, a few short poems had appeared in 
 blank verse, particularly one tending to reconcile the nation to 
 Raleigh's wild attempt upon Guiana, and probably written by 
 Raleigh himself. These petty performances cannot be sup- 
 posed to have much influenced Milton, who more probably 
 took his hint from Trissino's Italia Liber ata ; and, finding 
 blank verse easier than rhyme, was desirous of persuading 
 himself that it is better. 
 
 Rhyme, he says, and says truly, is no necessary adjunct of 
 true poetry. But, perhaps, of poetry, as a mental operation, 
 metre or music is no necessary adjunct : it is, however, by the 
 music of metre that poetry has been discriminated in all lan- 
 guages ; and, in languages melodiously constructed with a due 
 proportion of long and short syllables, metre is sufficient. 
 But one language cannot communicate its rules to another ; 
 where metre is scanty and imperfect, some help is necessary. 
 
6o DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON MILTON. 
 
 The music of the Enghsh heroic lines strikes the ear so faintly 
 that it is easily lost, unless all the syllables of every line co- 
 operate together ; this co-operation can be only obtained by 
 the preservation of every verse unmingled with another as a 
 distinct system of sounds ; and this distinctness is obtained 
 and preserved by the artifice of rhyme. The variety of pauses, 
 so much boasted by the lovers of blank verse, changes the 
 measures of an English poet to the periods of a declaimer ; 
 and there are only a few skilful and happy readers of Milton 
 who enable their audience to perceive where the lines end or 
 begin. Blank verse, said an ingenious critic, seems to be verse 
 only to the eye. 
 
 Poetry may subsist without rhyme, but English poetry will 
 not often please ; nor can rhyme ever be safely spared but 
 where the subject is able to support itself. Blank verse makes 
 some approach to that which is called the lapidary style ; has 
 neither the easiness of prose nor the melody of numbers, and 
 therefore tires by long continuance. Of the Italian writers 
 without rhyme, whom Milton alleges as precedents, not one is 
 popular ; what reason could urge in its defence has been con- 
 futed by the ear. 
 
 But, whatever be the advantages of rhyme, I cannpt prevail 
 on myself to wish that Milton had been a rhymer ; for I can- 
 not wish his work to be other than it is ; yet, like other heroes, 
 he is to be admired rather than imitated. He that thinks him- 
 self capable of astonishing may write blank verse ; but those 
 that hope only to please must condescend to rhyme. 
 _ The highest praise of genius is original invention. Milton 
 cannot be said to have contrived the structure of an epic poem, 
 a,nd therefore owes reverence to tha!t vigor and amplitude of 
 mind to which all generations must be indebted for the art of 
 poetical narration, for the textures of the fable, the variation 
 of incidents, the interposition of dialogue, and all the strata- 
 gems that surprise and enchain attention. But, of all the bor- 
 rowers from Homer, Milton is perhaps the least indebted. He 
 was naturally a thinker for himself, confident of his own abili- 
 ties, and disdainful of help or hindrance : he did not refuse 
 admission to the thoughts or images of his predecessors, but 
 he did not seek them. From his contemporaries he neither 
 • courted nor received support ; there is in his writings nothing 
 by which the pride of other authors might be gratified, or 
 favor gained, no exchange of praige, nor solicitation of support. 
 His great works were performed under discountenance, and in 
 blindness ; but difficulties vanished at his touch ; he was born 
 ; for whatever is arduous ; and his work is not the greatest of , 
 heroic poems, only because it is not the first, " , 
 
DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON DRYDEN. 
 
 Of the great poet, whose life I am about to delineate, the 
 curiosity which his reputation must excite will require a dis- 
 play more ample than can now be given. His contemporaries, 
 however they reverenced his genius, left his life unwritten ; 
 and nothing therefore can be known beyond what casual men- 
 tion and uncertain tradition have supplied. 
 
 John Dryden was born August 9, 1631, at Aldwinkle, 
 near Oundle, the son of Erasmus Dryden, of Titchmersh, 
 who was the third son of Sir Erasmus Dryden, baronet, of 
 Canons Ashby. All these places are in Northamptonshire ; 
 but the original stock of the family was in the couiity of 
 Huntingdon. 
 
 He is reported by his last biographer. Derrick, to have in- 
 herited from his father an estate of two hundred a year, and 
 to have been bred, as was said, an anabaptist. For either of 
 these particulars no authority is given. Such a fortune ought 
 to have secured him from that poverty which seems always to 
 have oppressed him ; or, if he had wasted it, to have made him 
 ashamed of publishing his necessities. But though he had 
 many enemies, who undoubtedly examined his life with a scru- 
 tiny sufficiently malicious, I do not remember that he is ever 
 charged with waste of his patrimony. He was, indeed, some- 
 times reproached for his first religion. I am therefore inclined 
 to believe that Derrick's intelligence was partly true and 
 partly erroneous. 
 
 From Westminster School, where he was instructed as one 
 of the King's scholars by Dr. Busby, whom he long after con- 
 tinued to reverence, he was, in 1650, elected to one of the 
 Westminster scholarships at Cambridge. 
 
 Of his school performances has appeared only a poem on 
 the death of Lord Hastings, composed with great ambition of 
 such conceits as, notwithstanding the reformation begun by 
 Waller and Denham, the example of Cowley still kept in repu- 
 tation. Lord Hastings died of the small-pox ; and his poet 
 has made of the pustules first rose-buds and then gems : at 
 last exalts them into stars ; and says, 
 
 ■' No comet need foretell his change drew on, 
 Whose corpse might seem a constellation." 
 
 At the University he does not appear to have been eager qi 
 
62 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 poetical distinction, or to have lavished his early wit either on 
 fictitious subjects or public occasions. He probably con- 
 sidered that he who proposed to be an author ought first to be 
 a student. He obtained, whatever was the reason, no fellow- 
 ship in the college. Why he was excluded cannot now be 
 known, and it is vain to guess : had he thought himself in- 
 jured, he knew how to complain. In the " Life of Plutarch " 
 he mentions his education in the college with gratitude ; but in 
 a 'prologue at Oxford, he has these lines : 
 
 " Oxford to him a dearer name shall be 
 Than his own mother-university ; 
 Thebes did his rude, unknowing youth engage ; 
 He chooses Athens in his riper age." 
 
 It was not till the death of Cromwell, in 1658, that he be- 
 came a public candidate for fame, by publishing " Heroic 
 Stanzas on the late Lord Protector;" which, compared with 
 the verses of Sprat and Waller, on the same occasion, were 
 sufficient to raise great expectations of the rising poet. 
 
 When the king was restored, Dryden, like the other pane- 
 gyrists of usurpation, changed his opinion, or his profession, 
 and published " Astrea Redux, a Poem on the happy Res- 
 toration and Return of his most sacred Majesty King Charles 
 the Second." 
 
 The reproach of inconstancy was, on this occasion, shared 
 with such numbers that it produced neither hatred nor dis- 
 grace ! if he changed, he changed with the nation. It was, 
 however, not totally forgotten when his reputation raised him 
 enemies. 
 
 The same year he praised the new king in a second poem 
 on his restoration. In the " Astrea" was the line 
 
 " An horrid stillness first invades the ear. 
 And in that silence we a tempest fear — " 
 
 for which he was persecuted with perpetual ridicule, perhaps 
 with more than was deserved. Silence is indeed mere priva- 
 tion, and, so considered, cannot invade ; but privation likewise 
 certainly is darkness, and probably cold ; yet poetry has never 
 been refused the right of ascribing effects or agency to them as 
 to positive powers. No man scruples to say that darkness 
 hinders him from his work, or that cold has killed the plants. 
 Death is also privation ; yet who has made any difficulty of as- 
 signing to Death a dart and the power of striking ? 
 
 In settling the order of his works there is some difficulty ; 
 for, even when they are important enough to be formally 
 offered to a patron, he does not commonly date his dedica- 
 
DR YDEN. 63 
 
 tion ; the time of writing and publishing is not always the 
 same ; nor can the first editions be easily found, if even from 
 them could be obtained the necessary information. 
 
 The time at which his first play was exhibited is not cer- 
 tainly known, because it was not printed till it was, some years 
 afterwards, altered and revised ; but since the plays are said to 
 be printed in the order in which they were written, from the 
 dates of some those of others may be inferred ; and thus it 
 may be collected, that in 1663, in the thirty-second year of his 
 life, he commenced a writer for the stage ; compelled undoubt- 
 edly by necessity, for he appears never to have loved that exer- 
 cise of his genius, or to have much pleased himself with his 
 own dramas. 
 
 Of the stage, when he had once invaded it, he kept posses- 
 sion for many years ; not indeed without the competition of 
 rivals who sometimes prevailed, or the censure of critics, which 
 was often poignant and often just ; but with such a degree of 
 reputation as made him at least secure of being heard, what- 
 ever might be the final determination of the public. 
 
 His first piece was a comedy called ' ' The Wild Gallant. ' ' 
 He began with no happy auguries ; for his performance was 
 so much disapproved that he was compelled to recall it, and 
 change it from its imperfect state to the form in which it now 
 appears, and which is yet sufficiently defective to vindicate the 
 critics. 
 
 I wish that there were no necessity of following the prog- 
 ress of his theatrical fame, or tracing the meanders of his 
 mind through the whole series of his dramatic performances ; 
 it will be fit, however, to enumerate them, and to take especial 
 notice of those that are distinguished by any peculiarity, intrin- 
 sic or concomitant ; for the composition and fate of eight-and- 
 twenty dramas include too much of a poetical life to be 
 omitted. 
 
 In 1664 he published "The Rival Ladies," which he dedi- 
 cated to the Earl of Orrery, a man of high reputation both as a 
 writer and as a statesman. In this play he made his essay of 
 dramatic rhyme, which he defends, in his dedication, with 
 sufficient certainty of a favorable hearing ; for Orrery was 
 himself a writer of rhyming tragedies. 
 
 He then joined with Sir Robert Howard in " The Indian 
 Queen, ' ' a tragedy in rhyme. The parts which either of them 
 wrote are not distinguished. 
 
 "The Indian Emperor" was published in 1667. It is a 
 trage4y in rhyme, intended for a sequel to Howard's " Indian 
 Queen. ' ' Of this connection notice was given to the audience 
 
64 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 by printed bills, distributed at the door ; an expedient sup- 
 posed to be ridiculed in ' ' The Rehearsal, ' ' where Bayes tells 
 how many reams he has printed, to instil into the audience 
 some conception of his plot. 
 
 In this play is the description of Night, which Rymer has 
 made famous by preferring it to those of all other poets. 
 
 The practice of making tragedies in rhyme was introduced 
 soon after the Restoration, as it seems by the Earl of Orrery, in 
 compliance with the opinion of Charles the Second, who had 
 formed his taste by the French theatre ; and Dryden, who 
 wrote, and made no difficulty of declaring that he wrote only to 
 please, and who perhaps knew that by his dexterity of versifi- 
 cation he was more likely to excel others in rhyme than with- 
 out it, very readily adopted his master's preference. He 
 therefore made rhyming tragedies, till, by the prevalence of 
 manifest propriety, he seems to have grown ashamed of making 
 them any longer. 
 
 To this play is prefixed a vehement defence of dramatic 
 rhyme, in confutation of the preface to " The Duke of 
 Lerma, ' ' in which Sir Robert Howard had censured it. 
 
 In 1667 he published " Annus Mirabilis, the Year of Won- 
 ders," which may be esteemed one of his most elaborate 
 works. 
 
 It is addressed to Sir Robert Howard by a letter, which is 
 not properly a dedication ; and, writing to a poet, he has inter- 
 spersed many critical observations, of which some are common, 
 and some perhaps ventured without much consideration. He 
 began, even now, to exercise the domination of conscious ge- 
 nius, by recommending his own performance : "I am satisfied 
 that as the Prince and General" [Rupert and Monk] " are in- 
 comparably the best subjects I ever had, so what I have written 
 on them is much better than what I have performed on any 
 other. As I have endeavored to adorn my poem with noble 
 thoughts, so much more to express those thoughts with elocu- 
 tion. " 
 
 It is written in quatrains, or heroic stanzas of four lines ; a 
 measure which he had learned from the " Gondibert" of Da- 
 venant, and which he then thought the most majestic that the 
 English language affords. Of this stanza he mentions the en- 
 cumbrances, increased as they were by the exactness which the 
 age required. It was, throughout his life, very much his cus- 
 tom to recommend his works by representation of the difficul- 
 ties that he had encountered, without appearing to have suffi- 
 ciently considered that where there is no difficulty there is no 
 praise, 
 
dryden: 65 
 
 There seems to be, in the conduct of Sir Robert Howard 
 and Dryden towards each other, something that is not now 
 easily to be explained. Dryden, in his dedication to the EarJ 
 of Orrery, had defended dramatic rhyme ; and Howard, in a 
 preface to a collection of plays, had censured his opinion. 
 Dryden vindicated him.self in his "Dialogue on Dramatic 
 Poetry :" Howard, in his preface to " The Duke of Lerma," 
 animadverted on the vindication ; and Dryden, in a preface to 
 The Indian Emperor, ' ' replied to the animadversions with 
 great asperity, and almost with contumely. The dedication to 
 this play is dated the year in which the ' ' Annus Mirabilis' ' 
 was published. Here appears a strange inconsistency ; but 
 Langbaine affords some help, by relating that the answer to 
 Howard was not published in the first edition of the play, but 
 was added when it was afterwards reprinted ; and as " The 
 Duke of Lerma" did not appear till 1668, the same year in 
 which the dialogue was published, there was time enough for 
 enmity to grow up between authors, who, writing both for the 
 theatre, were naturally rivals. 
 
 He was now so much distinguished that in 1668 he suc- 
 ceeded Sir William Davenant as poet-laureate. The salary of 
 the laureate had been raised in favor of Jonson, by Charles 
 the First, from a hundred marks to one hundred pounds a 
 year, and a tierce of wine : a revenue in those days not inade- 
 quate to the conveniences of life. 
 
 The same year he published his essay on Dramatic Poetry, 
 an elegant and instructive dialogue, in which we are told, by 
 Prior, that the principal character is meant to represent the 
 Duke of Dorset. This work seems to have given Addison a 
 model for his Dialogues upon Medals. 
 
 " Secret Love, or the Maiden Queen" (1668) is a tragi- 
 comedy. In the preface he discusses a curious question, 
 whether a poet can judge well of his own productions ? and 
 determines very justly that, of the plan and disposition, and 
 all that can be reduced to principles of science, the author may 
 depend upon his own opinion ; but that, in those parts where 
 fancy predominates, self-love may easily deceive. He might 
 have observed that what is good only because it pleases can- 
 not be pronounced good till it has been found to please. 
 
 " Sir Martin Mar-all " (1668) is a comedy, published with- 
 out preface or dedication, and at first without the name of the 
 author. Langbaine charges it, like most of the rest, with 
 plagjafism ; and observes that the song is translated from Voi- 
 ture, allowing, however, that both the sense and measure are 
 exactly observed. 
 
66 DR. SAMVEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 " The Tempest" (1670) is an alteration of Shakespeare's 
 play, made by Dry den in conjunction with Davenant ; 
 " whom," says he, "I found of so quick a fancy that nothing 
 was proposed to him in which he could not suddenly produce 
 a thought extremely pleasant and surprising ; and those first 
 thoughts of his, contrary to the Latin proverb, were not always 
 the least happy ; and as his fancy was quick, so likewise were 
 the products of it remote and new. He borrowed not of any 
 other ; and his imaginations were such as could not easily 
 enter into any other man." 
 
 The effect produced by the conjunction of these two power- 
 ful minds was, that to Shakespeare's monster, Caliban, is added 
 a sister-monster, Sycorax ; and a woman, who, in the original 
 play, had never seen a man, is in this brought acquainted with 
 a man that had never seen a woman. 
 
 About this time, in 1673, Dryden seems to have had his 
 quiet much disturbed by the success of ' ' The Empress of 
 Morocco, ' ' a tragedy written in rhyme by Elkanah Settle ; 
 which was so much applauded as to make him think his suprem- 
 acy of reputation in some danger. Settle had not only been 
 prosperous on the stage, but, in the confidence of success, had 
 published his play, with sculptures and a preface of defiance. 
 Here was one offence added to another ; and, for the last 
 blast of inflammation, it was acted at Whitehall by the court 
 ladies. 
 
 Dryden could not now repress those emotions which he 
 called indignation, and others jealousy ; but wrote upon the 
 play and the dedication such criticism as malignant impatience 
 could pour out in haste. 
 
 Of Settle he gives this character: "He's an animal of a 
 most deplored understanding, without reading and conversa- 
 tion. His being is in a twilight of sense, and some glimmering 
 of thought which he never can fashion into wit or English. 
 His style is boisterous and rough hewn, his rhyme incorrigibly 
 lewd, and his numbers perpetually harsh and ill-sounding. 
 The little talent which he has is fancy. He sometimes labors 
 with a thought ; but with the pudder he makes to bring it into 
 the world, 'tis commonly still-born ; so that for want of learn- 
 ing and elocution, he will never be able to express any thing 
 either naturally or justly. ' ' 
 
 This is not very decent ; yet this is one of the pages in 
 which criticism prevails over brutal fury. He proceeds : " He 
 has a heavy hand at fools, and a great felicity in writing non- 
 sense for them. Fools they will be in spite of him. His king, 
 his two empresses, his villain, and his sub-villain, nay, his hero, 
 
DRYDElf. 67 
 
 have all a certain natural cast of the father — their folly was 
 born and bred in them, and something of the Elkanah will be 
 visible." 
 
 This is Dryden's general declamation ; I will not withhold 
 from the reader a particular remark. Having gone through 
 the first act, he says, ' ' to conclude this act with the most rum- 
 bling piece of nonsense spoken yet : 
 
 " ' To flattering lightning our feign'd smiles conform, 
 Which, back'd with thunder, do but gild a storm.' 
 
 Conform a smile to lightning, make a smile imitate lightning, and 
 flattering lightning : lightning sure is a threatening thing. 
 And this lightning must gild a storm. Now, if I must conform 
 my smiles to lightning, then my smiles must gild a storm too : 
 to gild with smiles is a new invention of gilding. And gild a 
 storm by being backed with thunder. Thunder is part of the 
 storm ; so one part of the storm must help to gild another 
 part, and help by backing ; as if a man would gild a thing the 
 better for being backed, or having a load upon his back. So 
 that here is gilding by conforming, smiling, lightning, backing, 
 and thundering. The whole is as if I should say thus : I will 
 make my counterfeit smiles look like a flattering stone-horse, 
 which, being backed with a trooper, does but gild the battle. I 
 am mistaken if nonsense is not here pretty thick sown. Sure 
 the poet writ these two lines aboard some smack in a storm, 
 and, being sea-sick, spewed up a good lump of clotted non- 
 sense at once. ' ' 
 
 Here is perhaps a sufficient specimen ; but as the pamphlet, 
 though Dryden's, has never been thought worthy of republica- 
 tion, and is not easily to be found, it may gratify curiosity to 
 quote it more largely : 
 
 " ' — Whene'er she bleeds, 
 He no severer a damnation needs. 
 Than dares pronounce the sentence of her death. 
 Than the infection that attends that breath.' 
 
 That attends that breath. The poet is at breath again ; breatk 
 can never 'scape him ; and here he brings in a breath that must 
 be infectious with pronouncing a sentence ; and this sentence is 
 not to be pronounced till the condemned party bleeds ; that is, 
 she must be executed first, and sentenced after ; and ihs. pro- 
 nouncing of this sentence will be infectious ; that is, others will 
 catch the disease of that sentence, and this infecting of others 
 will torment a man's self. The whole is thus : when she bleeds, 
 thou needest no greater hell or torment to thyself than infecting of 
 other! by pronouncing a sentence upon her. What hodge-podge 
 
68 DR. SAMUEL yOHNSOrf OM 
 
 does he make here ! Never was Dutch grout such clogging, 
 thick, indigestible stuff. But this is but a taste to stay the 
 stomach ; we shall have a more plentiful mess presently. 
 " Now to dish up the poet's broth, that I promised : 
 
 " ' For when we're dead, and our freed souls enlarg'd. 
 Of nature's grosser burden we're discharg'd ; 
 Then, gentle as a happy lover's sigh, 
 Like wand'ring meteors through the air we'll fly. 
 And in our airy walk, as subtle guests, 
 We'll steal into our cruel fathers' breasts. 
 There read their souls, and track each passion's sphere. 
 See how Revenge moves there, Ambition here ; 
 And in their orbs view the dark characters 
 Of sieges, ruins, murders, blood, and wars. 
 We'll blot out all those hideous draughts, and write 
 Pure and white forms ; then with a radiant light 
 Their breasts encircle, till their passions be 
 Gentle as Nature in its infancy ; 
 Till, soften'd by our charms, their furies cease. 
 And their revenge resolves into a peace. 
 Thus by our death their quarrel ends. 
 Whom living we made foes, dead we 11 make friends.' 
 
 If this be not a very liberal mess, I will refer myself to the 
 stomach of any moderate guest. And a rare mess it is, far ex- 
 celling any Westminster white-broth. It is a kind of giblet 
 porridge, made of the giblets of a couple of young geese, 
 stodged full of meteors, orbs, spheres, track, hideous draughts, 
 dark characters, white forms, and radiant lights, designed not 
 only to please appetite, and indulge luxury ; but it is also 
 physical, being an approved medicine to purge choler ; for it 
 is propounded, by Morena, as a recipe to cure their fathers of 
 their choleric humors ; and, were it written in characters as 
 barbarous as the words, might very well pass for a doctor's 
 bill. To conclude ; it is porridge, 'tis a recipe, 'tis a pig with 
 a pudding in the belly, 'tis I know not what : for, certainly, 
 never any one that pretended to write sense had the impudence 
 before to put such stuff as this into the mouths of those that 
 were to speak it before an audience, whom he did not take to 
 be all fools ; and after that to print it too, and expose it to the 
 examination of the world. But let us see what we can make 
 of this stuff : 
 
 " ' For when we're dead, and our freed souls enlarg'd — ' 
 
 Here he tells us what it is to be dead ; it is to have our freed 
 souls set free. Now, if to have a soul set free is to be dead, 
 then to have z. freed soul set free is to have a dead man die. 
 " ' Then, gentle as a happy lover's sigh — ' 
 
DR YDEN. 6g 
 
 They two like One sigh, and that one sigh like two wander- 
 ing meteors, 
 
 " ' shall fly through the air — ' 
 
 that is, they shall mount above like falling stars, or else 
 they shall skip like two Jacks with Ian thorns, or Will with a 
 whisp, and Madge with a candle. ' ' 
 
 ' ' And in the airy walk steal into their cruel fathers' breasts, 
 like subtle guests. So, that their fathers' breasts must be in an 
 airy walk, an airy walk of a flier. And there they will read 
 their souls, and track the spheres of their passions. That is, 
 these walking fliers. Jack with a lanthorn, etc. , will put on his 
 spectacles, and fall a reading souls ; and put on his pumps, and 
 fall a tracking of spheres : so that he will read and run, walk 
 and fly, at the same time ! Oh ! nimble Jack ! Then he will 
 see how revenge here, how ambition there — ^The birds will hop 
 about. And then view the dark characters of sieges, ruins, mur- 
 ders, blood, and wars, in their orbs : track the characters to their 
 forms ! Oh ! rare sport for Jack ! Never was place so full of 
 game as these breasts ! You cannot stir, but flush a sphere, 
 start a character, or unkennel an orb !" 
 
 Settle's is said to have been the first play embellished with 
 sculptures ; those ornaments seem to have given poor Dryden 
 great disturbance. He tries, however, to ease his pain by vent- 
 ing his malice in a parody. 
 
 " The poet has not only been so imprudent to expose all 
 this stuff, but so arrogant to defend it with an epistle ; like a 
 saucy booth-keeper, that, when he had put a cheat upon the 
 people, would wrangle and fight with any that would not like 
 it, or would offer to discover it ; for which arrogance our poet 
 receives this correction ; and, to jerk him a little the sharper, I 
 will not transpose his verse, but by the help of his own words 
 transnonsense sense, that, by my stuff, people may judge the 
 better what his is : 
 
 " Great Boy, thy tragedy and sculptures done, 
 From press and plates, in fleets do homeward run ; 
 And, in ridiculous and humble pride, 
 Their course in ballad-singers' baskets guide, 
 Whose greasy twigs do all new beauties take, 
 From the gay shows thy dainty sculptures make. 
 Thy lines a mess of rhyming nonsense yield, 
 A senseless tale, with flattering fustian fiU'd. 
 No grain of sense does in one line appear. 
 Thy words big bulks of boisterous bombast bear. 
 With noise they move, and from players' mouths rebound, 
 When their tongues dance to thy words' empty sound. 
 By thee inspir'd the rumbling verses roll, 
 As if that rhyme and bombast lent a soul ; 
 
70 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON- ON 
 
 And with that soul they seem taught duty too ; 
 To huffing words does humble nonsense bow, 
 As if it would thy worthless worth enhance, 
 To th' lowest rank of fops thy praise advance. 
 To whom, by instinct, all thy stuff is dear : 
 Their loud claps echo to the theatre. 
 From breaths of fools thy commendation spreads. 
 Fame sings thy praise with mouths of logger-heads. 
 With noise and laughing each thy fustian greets, 
 'Tis clapt by choirs of empty-headed cits. 
 Who have their tribute sent, and homage given, 
 As men in whispers send loud noise to heaven. 
 
 " Thus I have daubed him with his own puddle : and now 
 we are come from aboard his dancing, masking, rebounding, 
 breathing fleet ; and, as if we had landed at Gotham, we meet 
 nothing but fools and nonsense." 
 
 Such was the criticism to which the genius of Dryden could 
 be reduced, between rage and terror ; rage with little provoca- 
 tion, and terror with little danger. To see -the highest mind thus 
 levelled with the meanest, may produce some solace to the con- 
 sciousness of weakness, and some mortification to the pride of 
 wisdom. But let it be remembered that minds are not levelled 
 in their powers but when they are first levelled in their desires. 
 Dryden and Settle had both placed their happiness in the claps 
 of multitudes. 
 
 " An Evening's Love, or the Mock Astrologer," a comedy 
 (1671), is dedicated to the illustrious Duke of Newcastle, whom 
 he courts by adding to his praises those of his lady, not only as 
 a lover but a partner of his studies. It is unpleasing to think 
 how many names, once celebrated, are since forgotten. Of 
 Newcastle's works nothing is now known but his Treatise on 
 Horsemanship. 
 
 The preface seems very elaborately written, and contains 
 many just remarks on the fathers of the English drama. 
 Shakespeare's plots, he says, are in the hundred novels of Cin- 
 thio ; those of Beaumont and Fletcher in Spanish stories ; 
 Jonson only made them for himself. His criticisms upon 
 tragedy, comedy, and farce are judicious and profound. He 
 endeavors to defend the immorality of some of his comedies 
 by the example of former writers ; which is only to say that he 
 was not the first nor perhaps the greatest offender. Against 
 those that accused him of plagiarism he alleges a favorable ex- 
 pression of the king : " He only desired that they who accuse 
 me of thefts would steal him plays like mine;" and then 
 relates how much labor he spends in fitting for the English 
 stage what he borrows from others. 
 
 " Tyrannic Love, or the Virgin Martyr" (1672), was another 
 
DR YDEN. 
 
 7^ 
 
 tragedy in rhyme, conspicuous for many passages of strength 
 and elegance, and many of empty noise and ridiculous turbu- 
 lence. The rants of Maximin have been always the sport of 
 criticism ; and were at length, if his own confession may be 
 trusted, the shame of the writer. 
 
 Of this play he has taken care to let the reader know that it 
 was contrived and written in seven weeks. Want of time was 
 often his excuse, or perhaps shortness of time was his private 
 boast in the form of an apology. 
 
 It was written before "The Conquest of Granada," but 
 published after it. The design is to recommend piety. ' ' I 
 considered that pleasure was not the only end of poesy ; and 
 that even the instructions of morality were not so wholly the 
 business of a poet, as that the precepts and examples of piety 
 were to be omitted ; for to leave that employment altogether to 
 the clergy were to forget that religion was first taught in verse, 
 which the laziness or dulness of succeeding priesthood turned 
 afterwards into prose." Thus foolishly could Dryden write, 
 rather than not show his malice to the parsons. 
 
 The two parts of " The Conquest of Granada" (1672) are 
 written with a seeming determination to glut the public with 
 dramatic wonders, to exhibit in its highest elevation a theatri- 
 cal meteor of incredible love and impossible valor, and to 
 leave no room for a wilder flight to the extravagance of pos- 
 terity. All the rays of romantic heat, whether amorous or 
 warlike, glow in Almanzor by a kind of concentration. He is 
 above all laws ; he is exempt from all restraints ; he ranges the 
 world at will, and governs wherever he appears. He fights 
 without inquiring the cause, and loves in spite of the obliga- 
 tions of justice, of rejection by his mistress, and of prohibition 
 from the dead. Yet the scenes are, for the most part, delight- 
 ful ; they exhibit a kind of illustrious depravity and majestic 
 madness, such as, if it is sometimes despised, is often rever- 
 enced, and in which the ridiculous is mingled with the aston- 
 ishing. 
 
 In the epilogue to the second part of ' ' The Conquest of 
 Granada," Dryden indulges his favorite pleasure of discredit- 
 ing his predecessors ; and this epilogue he has defended by a 
 long postscript. He had promised a second dialogue, in which 
 he should more fully treat of the virtues and faults of the Eng- 
 lish poets, who have written in the dramatic, epic, or lyric way. 
 This promise was never formally performed ; but, with respect 
 to the dramatic writers, he has given us in his prefaces, and in 
 this postscript, something equivalent ; but his purpose being to 
 
72 DR. SAMUEL JOBNSON ON 
 
 exalt himself by the comparison, he shows faults distinctly, and 
 only praises excellence in general terms. 
 
 A play thus written, in professed defiance of probability, 
 naturally drew upon itself the vultures of the theatre. One of 
 the critics that attacked it was Martin Clifford, to whom Sprat 
 addressed the Life of Cowley, with such veneration of his criti- 
 cal powers as might naturally excite great expectations of in- 
 struction from his remarks. But let honest credulity beware 
 of receiving characters from contemporary writers. Clifford's 
 remarks, by the favor of Dr. Percy, were at last obtained ; 
 and, that no man may ever want them more, I will extract 
 enough to satisfy all reasonable desire. 
 
 In the first letter his observation is only general : ' ' You do 
 live, ' ' says he, " in as much ignorance and darkness as you did 
 in the womb ; your writings are like a Jack-of-all-trades' shop ; 
 they have a variety, but nothing of value ; and if thou art not 
 the dullest plant-animal that ever the earth produced, all that I 
 have conversed with are strangely mistaken in thee. 
 
 In the second he tells him that Almanzor is not more 
 copied from Achilles than from ancient Pistol. " But I am," 
 says he, " strangely mistaken if I have not seen this very 
 Almanzor of yours in some disguise about this town, and pass- 
 ing under another name. Pr'ythee tell me true, was not this 
 huffcap once the Indian Emperor ? and at another time did he 
 not call himself Maximin ? Was not Lyndaraxa once called 
 Almeria ? I mean, under Montezuma, the Indian Emperor. 
 I protest and vow they are either the same, or so alike that I 
 cannot, for my heart, distinguish one from the other. You are 
 therefore a strange unconscionable thief ; thou art not content 
 to steal from others, but dost rob thy poor wretched self too." 
 
 Now was Settle's time to take his revenge. He wrote a 
 vindication of his own lines ; and, if he is forced to yield any 
 thing, makes his reprisals upon his enemy. To say that his 
 answer is equal to the censure is no high commendation. To 
 expose Dryden's method of analyzing his expressions, he tries 
 the same experiment upon the same description of the ships in 
 The Indian Emperor, ' ' of which, however, he does not deny 
 the excellence ; but intends to show, that by studied miscon- 
 struction every thing may be equally represented as ridiculous. 
 After so much of Dryden's elegant animadversions, justice 
 requires that something of Settle's should be exhibited. The 
 following observations are therefore extracted from a quarto 
 pamphlet of ninety-five pages : 
 
 " ' Fate after him below with pain did move, 
 And victory could scarce keep pace above .' 
 
DRVDEN. >j^ 
 
 These two lines, if he can show me any sense or thought in, 
 or any thing but bombast and noise, he shall make me believe 
 every word in his observations on ' Morocco ' sense. 
 " In the ' Empress of Morocco ' were these lines : 
 
 " ' I'll travel then to some remoter sphere, 
 
 Till I find out new worlds, and crown you there. ' 
 
 On which Dryden made this remark : 
 
 ' ' I believe our learned author takes a sphere for country ; 
 the sphere of Morocco ; as if Morocco were the globe of earth 
 and water ; but a globe is no sphere neither, by his leave, ' ' etc. 
 " So sphere must not be sense, unless it relates to a circular 
 motion about a globe, in which sense the astronomers use it. 
 I would desire him to expound those lines in ' Granada ' : 
 
 " ' I'll to the turrets of the palace go, 
 
 And add new fire to those that fight below. 
 Thence, hero-like, with torches by my side, 
 (Far be the omen tho') my love I'll guide. 
 No, like his better fortune I'll appear, 
 With open arms, loose veil, and flowing hair. 
 Just flying forward from my rolling sphere. ' 
 
 I wonder, if he be so strict, how he dares make so bold with 
 the sphere himself, and to be so critical in other men's writings. 
 Fortune is fancied standing on a globe, not on a sphere, as he 
 told us in the first act. 
 
 " Because ' Elkanah's similes are the most unlike things to 
 what they are compared in the world,' I'll venture to start a 
 simile in his ' Annus Mirabilis : ' he gives this poetical descrip- 
 tion of the ship called the London : 
 
 " ' The goodly London in her gallant trim. 
 The phoenix-daughter of the vanquisht old, 
 Like a rich bride does on the ocean swim, 
 And on her shadow rides in floating gold. 
 Her flag aloft spread ruffling in the wind, 
 And sanguine streamers seem'd the flood to fire : 
 The weaver, charm'd with what his loom design'd. 
 Goes on to sea, and knows not to retire. 
 With roomy decks her guns of mighty strength. 
 Whose low-laid mouths each mountain billow laves. 
 Deep in her draught, and warlike in her length. 
 She seems a sea-wasp flying in the waves. ' 
 
 What a wonderful pother is here, to make all these poetical 
 beautifications of a ship ; that is, a phoenix in the first stanza, 
 and but a wasp in the last : nay, to make his humble compari- 
 son of a wasp more ridiculous, he does not say it flies upon the 
 waves as nimbly as a wasp, or the like, but it seemed a wasp 
 
74 -OiP. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 But our author at the writing of this was not in his altitudes, 
 to compare ships to floating palaces : a comparison to the pur- 
 pose was a perfection he did not arrive to till the Indian Em- 
 peror's days. But perhaps his similitude has more in it than 
 we imagine ; this ship had a great many guns in her, and they, 
 put all together, made the sting in the wasp's tail ; for this is 
 all the reason I can guess why it seemed a wasp. But because 
 we will allow him all we can to help out, let it be a phcenix sea- 
 wasp, and the rarity of such an animal may do much towards 
 heightening the fancy. 
 
 " It had been much more to his purpose, if he had designed 
 to render the senseless play little, to have searched for some 
 such pedantry as this : 
 
 ' ' ' Two if s scarce make one possibility. 
 If justice will take all, and nothing give, 
 Justice, methinks, is not distributive, 
 To die or kill you is the alternative. 
 Rather than take your life, I will not live.' 
 
 " Observe how prettily our author chops logic in heroic 
 verse. Three such fustian canting words as distributive, alter- 
 native, and two ifs, no man but himself would have come 
 within the noise of. But he's a man of general learning, and 
 all comes into his play. 
 
 " 'Twould have done well too if he could have met with 
 the rant or two, worth the observation : such as, 
 
 " ' Move swiftly. Sun, and fly a lover's pace. 
 
 Leave months and weeks behind thee in thy race.' 
 
 " But surely the sun, whether he flies a lover's or not a 
 lover's pace, leaves weeks and months, nay, years too, behind 
 him in his race. 
 
 " Poor Robin, or any other of the philo-mathematics, 
 would have given him satisfaction in the point. 
 
 " ' If I could kill thee now. thy fate's so low, 
 That I must stoop ere I can give the blow. 
 But mine is fixed so far above thy crown, 
 That all thy men. 
 Piled on thy back, can never pull it down.' 
 
 " Now where that is, Almanzor's fate is fixed, I cannot 
 guess : but, wherever it is, I believe Almanzor, and think that 
 all Abdalla's subjects, piled upon one another, might not pull 
 down his fate so well as without piling ; besides, I think 
 Abdalla so wise a man. that if Almanzor had told him piling 
 his men upon his back might do the feat, he would scarcely 
 
DRY DEN. 75 
 
 bear such a weight, for the pleasure of the exploit ; but it is a 
 huff, and let Abdalla do it if he dare. 
 
 ' ' ' The people like a headlong torrent go, 
 And every dam they break or overflow. 
 But, unoppos'd, they either lose their force, 
 Or wind in volumes to their former course.' 
 
 A very pretty allusion, contrary to all sense or reason. Tor- 
 rents, I take it, let them wind never so much, can never return 
 to their former course, unless he can suppose that fountains 
 can go upwards, which is impossible ; nay more, in the fore- 
 going page he tells us so too ; a trick of a very unfaithful 
 memory. 
 
 " ' But can no more than fountains upward flow.' 
 
 Which of a torrent, which signifies a rapid stream, is much 
 more impossible. Besides, if he goes to quibble and say that 
 it is impossible by art water may be made return, and the same 
 water run twice in one and the same channel, then he qii-<^e 
 confutes what he says ; for it is by being opposed that it runs 
 into its former course ; for all engines that make water so 
 return do it by compulsion and opposition. Or, if he means 
 a headlong torrent for a tide, which would be ridiculous, yet 
 they do not wind in volumes, but come fore-right back (if their 
 upright lies straight to their former course), and that by oppo- 
 sition of the sea-water, that drives them back again. 
 
 " And for fancy, when he lights of any thing like it, 'tis a 
 wonder if it be not borrowed. As here, for example of, I find 
 this fanciful thought in his ' Ann. Mirab ' : 
 
 " ' Old father Thames rais'd up his reverend head : 
 But fear'd the fate of Simois would return ; 
 Deep in his ooze he sought his sedgy bed ; 
 And shrunk his waters back into his urn.' 
 
 This is stolen from Cowley's ' Davideis,' p. 9 : 
 
 " ' Swift Jordan started, and straight backward fied. 
 Hiding amongst thick reeds his aged head. 
 And when the Spaniards their assault begin, ^ 
 At once beat those without and those within.' 
 
 " This Almanzor speaks of himself ; and sure for one rnan 
 to conquer an army within the city, and another without the city, 
 at once, is something difficult : but this flight is pardonable to 
 some we meet with in ' Granada : ' Osmin, speaking of Alman- 
 zor, 
 
 " ' Who, like a tempest that outrides the wind, 
 Made a just battle ere the bodies joio'd.' 
 
76 X)R. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 Pray, what does this honorable person mean by a tempest that 
 outrides the wind! a tempest that outrides itself ? To suppose 
 a tempest without wind is as bad as supposing a man to walk 
 without feet ; for if he supposes the tempest to be something 
 distinct from the wind, yet, as being the effect of wind only, to 
 come before the cause, is a little preposterous ; so that if he 
 takes it one way, or if he takes it the other, those two ifs will 
 scarcely make one possibility." Enough of Settle. 
 
 " Marriage a-la-mode" (1673) is a comedy dedicated to the 
 Earl of Rochester ; whom he acknowledges not only as the 
 defender of his poetry, but the promoter of his fortune. 
 Langbaine places this play in 1673. The Earl of Rochester, 
 therefore, was the famous Wilmot, whom yet tradition always 
 represents as an enemy to Dryden, and who is mentioned by 
 him with some disrespect in the preface to ' ' Juvenal. ' ' 
 
 "The Assignation, or Love in a Nunnery," a comedy 
 (1673), was driven off the stage, against the opinion, as the 
 author says, of the best judges. It is dedicated in a very elegant 
 address to Sir Charles Sedley ; in which he finds an opportu- 
 nity for his usual complaint of hard treatment and unreasona- 
 ble censure. 
 
 " Amboyna" (1673) is a tissue of mingled dialogue in verse 
 and prose, and was perhaps written in less time than " The 
 Virgin Martyr ;" though the author thought not fit, either 
 ostentatiously or mournfully, to tell how little labor it cost 
 him, or at how short a warning he produced it. It was a tem- 
 porary performance, written in the time of the Dutch war, to 
 inflame the nation against their enemies ; to whom he hopes, as 
 he declares in his epilogue, to make his poetry not less de- 
 structive than that by which Tyrtaeus of old animated the Spar- 
 tans. This play was written in the second Dutch war in 1673. 
 
 " Troilus and Cressida" (1679) is a play altered from Shake- 
 speare ; but so altered that, even in Langbaine's opinion, " the 
 last scene in the third act is a masterpiece." It is introduced 
 by a discourse on " The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy," to 
 which I suspect that Rymer's book h?d given occasion. 
 
 " The Spanish Friar" (1681) is a tragi-qomedy, eminent for 
 the happy coincidence and coalition of the two plots. As ^t 
 was written against the papists, it would naturally at that timii 
 have friends and enemies ; and partly by the popularity which 
 it obtained at first, and partly by the real power both of the 
 serious and risible part, it continued long a favorite cf 'H^ 
 public. 
 
 It was Dryden' s opinion, at least for some time, and he 
 maintains it in the dedication of this play, that the drama 
 
DRY DEN. J J 
 
 required an alternation of comic and tragic scenes ; and that it 
 is necessary to mitigate by alleviations of merriment the pres- 
 sure of ponderous events, and the fatigue of toilsome passions. 
 " Whoever," says he, " cannot perform both parts is but half 
 a writer for the stage. ' ' 
 
 " The Duke of Guise," a tragedy (1683), written in con- 
 junction with Lee, as " OEdipus" had been before, seems to 
 deserve notice only for the offence which it gave to the rem- 
 nant of the Covenanters, and in general to the enemies of the 
 court, who attacked him with great violence, and were an- 
 swered by him ; though at last he seems to withdraw from the 
 conflict by transferring the greater part of the blame or merit 
 to his partner. It happened that a contract had been made 
 between them, by which they were to join in writing a play : 
 and " he happened," says Dryden, " to claim the promise just 
 upon the finishing of a poem, when I would have been glad of 
 a little respite. Two-thirAs of it belonged to him ; and to me 
 only the first scene of the play, the whole fourth act, and the 
 first half, or somewhat more, of the fifth. 
 
 This was a play written professedly for the party of the 
 Duke of York, whose succession was then opposed. A parallel 
 is intended between the Leaguers of France and the Covenanters 
 of England ; and this intention produced the controversy. 
 
 "Albion and Albanius" (1685) is a musical drama or 
 opera,, written, like ' ' The Duke of Guise, ' ' against the repub- 
 licans. With what success it was performed I have not 
 found. 
 
 "The State of Innocence and Fall of Man" (1675) is 
 termed by him an opera : it is rather a tragedy in heroic 
 rhyme, but of which the personages are such as cannot de- 
 cently be exhibited on the stage. Some such production was 
 foreseen by Marvell, who writes thus to Milton ; 
 
 " Or if a work so infinite be spann'd, 
 Jealous I was lest some less skilful hand 
 (Such as disquiet always what is well, 
 And by ill-imitating would excel). 
 Might hence presume the whole creation's day 
 To change in scenes, and show it in a play." 
 
 It is another of his hasty productions ; for the heat of his 
 imagination raised it in a month. 
 
 This composition is addressed to the Princess of Modena, 
 then Duchess of York, in a strain of flattery which disgraces 
 genius, and which it was wonderful that any man that knew the 
 meaning of his owri wpr(Js could use without self-detestatipn. 
 
78 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 It is an attempt to mingle earth and heaven, by praising human 
 excellence in the language of religion. 
 
 The preface contains an apology for heroic verse and poetic 
 license ; by which is meant not any liberty taken in contracting 
 or extending words, but the use of bold fictions and ambitious 
 figures. 
 
 The reason which he gives for printing what was never 
 acted cannot be overpassed : " I was induced to it in my own 
 defence, many hundred copies of it being dispersed abroad with- 
 out my knowledge or consent ; and every one gathering new 
 faults, it became at length a libel against me. ' ' These copies, as 
 they gathered faults, were apparently manuscript, and he lived 
 in an age very unlike ours, if many hundred copies of fourteen 
 hundred lines were likely to be transcribed. An author has a 
 right to print his own works, and need not seek an apology in 
 falsehood ; but he that could bear to write the dedication felt 
 no pain in writing the preface. 
 
 " Aureng Zebe" (1676) is a tragedy founded on the actions 
 of a great prince then reigning, but over nations not likely to 
 employ their critics upon the transactions of the English stage. 
 If he had known and disliked his own character, our trade was 
 not in those times secure from his resentment. His country is 
 at such a distance, that the manners might be safely falsified 
 and the incidents feigned ; for the remoteness of place is 
 remarked, by Racine, to afford the same conveniences to a 
 poet as length of time. 
 
 This play is written in rhyme, and has the appearance of 
 being the most elaborate of all the dramas. The personages 
 are imperial ; but the dialogue is often domestic, and therefore 
 susceptible of sentiments accommodated to familiar incidents. 
 The complaint of life is celebrated ; and there are many other 
 passages that may be read with pleasure. 
 
 This play is addressed to the Earl of Mulgrave, afterwards 
 Duke of Buckingham, himself, if not a poet, yet a writer of 
 verses and a critic. In this address Dryden gave the first 
 hints of his intention to write an epic poem. He mentions his 
 design in terms so obscure that he seems afraid lest his plan 
 should be purloined, as, he says, happened to him when he 
 told it more plainly in his preface to " Juvenal." " The de- 
 sign," says he, "you know is great, the story English, and 
 neither too near the present times nor too distant from them. ' ' 
 
 " All for Love, or the World well Lost " (1678), a tragedy 
 founded upon the story of Antony and Cleopatra, he tells us, 
 " is the only play which he wrote for himself :" the rest were 
 given to the people. It is by universal consent accounted ths 
 
DRYDEN. 7g 
 
 work in which he has admitted the fewest improprieties of style 
 or character ; but it has one fault equal to many, though rather 
 moral than critical, that, by admitting the romantic omnipo- 
 tence of Love, he has recommended, as laudable and worthy of 
 imitation, that conduct which, through all ages, the good have 
 censured as vicious, and the bad despised as foolish. 
 
 Of this play the prologue and the epilogue, though written 
 upon the common topics of malicious and ignorant criticisms, 
 and without any particular relation to the characters or inci- 
 dents of the drama, are deservedly celebrated for their elegance 
 and sprightliness. 
 
 " Limberham, or the Kind Keeper" (1680), is a comedy, 
 which, after the third night, was prohibited as too indecent for 
 the stage. What gave offence was in the printing, as the 
 author says, altered or omitted. Dryden confesses that its in- 
 decency was objected to ; but Langbaine, who yet seldom 
 favors him, imputes its expulsion to resentment, because it 
 " so much exposed the keeping part of the town." 
 
 " CEdipus" (1679) is a tragedy formed by Dryden and 
 Lee, in conjunction, from the works of Sophocles, Seneca, and 
 Corneille. Dryden planned the scenes, and composed the first 
 and third acts. 
 
 " Don Sebastian" (i6go) is commonly esteemed either the 
 first or second of his dramatic performances. It is too long to be 
 all acted, and has many characters and many incidents ; and 
 though it is not without sallies of frantic dignity, and more 
 noise than meaning, yet, as it makes approaches to the possibil- 
 ities of real life, and has some sentiments which leave a strong 
 impression, it continued long to attract attention. Amidst the 
 distresses of princes and the vicissitudes of empire are in- 
 serted several scenes which the writer intended for comic ; but 
 which, I suppose, that age did not much commend, and this 
 would not endure. There are, however, passages of excellence 
 universally acknowledged ; the dispute and the reconciliation 
 of Dorax and Sebastian has always been admired. 
 
 This play was first acted in 1690, after Dryden had for 
 some years discontinued dramatic poetry. 
 
 " Amphytrion" is a comedy derived from Plautus and Mo- 
 liere. The dedication is dated October, 1690. This play seems 
 to have succeeded at its first appearance, and was, I think, long 
 considered as a very diverting entertainment. 
 
 " Cleomenes" (1692) is a tragedy only remarkable a< it oc- 
 casioned an incident related in the " Guardian," and allusively 
 mentioned by Dryden in his preface. As he came out froin the 
 representation he was accosted thus by some airy stripling ; 
 
8o DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON .. 
 
 " Had I been left alone with a young beauty, I would not have 
 spent my time like your Spartan." "That, sir," said Dry- 
 den, " perhaps is true ; but give me leave to tell you that you 
 are no hero." 
 
 " King Arthur" (1691) is another opera. It was the last 
 work that Dryden performed for King Charles, who did not 
 live to see it exhibited, and it does not seem to have been ever 
 brought upon the stage. In the dedication to the Marquis of 
 Halifax, there is a very elegant character of Charles, and a 
 pleasing account of his later life. When this was first brought 
 upon the stage, news that the Duke of Monmouth had landed 
 was told in the theatre ; upon which the company departed, 
 and " Arthur" was exhibited no more. 
 
 His last drama was ' ' Love Triumphant, ' ' a tragi-comedy. 
 In his dedication to the Earl of Salisbury he mentions " the 
 lowness of fortune to which he has voluntarily reduced himself, 
 and of which he has no reason to be ashamed. ' ' 
 
 This play appeared in 1694. It is said to have been un- 
 successful. The catastrophe, proceeding merely from a change 
 of mind, is confessed by the author to be defective. Thus he 
 began and ended his dramatic labors with ill success. 
 
 From such a number of theatrical pieces, it will be sup- 
 posed, by most readers, that he must have improved his for- 
 tune ; at least that such diligence with such abilities must have 
 set penury at defiance. But in Dryden's time the drama was 
 very far from that universal approbation which it has now ob- 
 tained. The playhouse was abhorred by the Puritans, and 
 avoided by those who desired the character of seriousness or 
 decency. A grave lawyer would have debased his dignity, and 
 a young trader would have impaired his credit, by appearing in 
 those mansions of dissolute licentiousness. The profits of the 
 theatre, when so many classes of the people were deducted 
 from the audience, were not great ; and the poet had, for a 
 long time, but a single night. The first that had two nights 
 was Southern ; and the first that had three was Rose. There 
 were, however, in those days, arts of improving a poet's profit, 
 which Dryden forbore to practise ; and a play therefore seldom 
 produced him more than a hundred pounds, by the accumu- 
 lated gain of the third night, the dedication, and the copy. 
 
 Almost every piece had a dedication, written with such ele- 
 gance and luxuriance of praise, as neither haughtiness nor 
 avarice could be imagined able to resist. But he seems to have 
 made flattery too cheap. That praise is worth nothing of 
 which the price is known. 
 
 To increase the value of his copies, he often accompanied 
 
DRYDEN. 8 1 
 
 his work with a preface of criticism ; a kind of learning then 
 almost new in English language, and which he, who had con- 
 sidered with great accuracy the principles of writing, was able 
 to distribute copiously as occasions arose. By these disserta- 
 tions the public judgment must have been much improved ; 
 and Swift, who conversed with Dryden, relates that he regret- 
 ted the success of his own instructions, and found his readers 
 made suddenly too skilful to be easily satisfied. 
 
 His prologues had such reputation, that for some time a 
 play was considered as less likely to be well received if some of 
 his verses did not introduce it. The price of a prologue was 
 two guineas, till, being asked to write one for Mr. Southern, 
 he demanded three ; ' ' Not, " ' said he, ' ' young man, out of 
 disrespect to you ; but the players have had my goods too 
 cheap. ' ' 
 
 Though he declares that in his own opinion his genius was 
 not drairiatic, he had great confidence in his own fertility ; for 
 he is said to have engaged, by contract, to furnish four plays a 
 year. 
 
 It is certain that in one year, 1678, he published " All for 
 Love," "Assignation," two parts of the " Conquest of Gra- 
 nada," " Sir Martin Mar-all," and the " State of Innocence," 
 six complete plays, with a celerity of performance, which, 
 though all Langbaine's charges of plagiarism should be 
 allowed, shows such facility- of composition, such readiness of 
 language, and such copiousness of sentiment, as, since the time 
 of Lopez de Vega, perhaps no other author has ever possessed. 
 
 He did not enjoy his reputation, however great, nor his 
 profits, however small, without molestation. He had critics to 
 endure and rivals to oppose. The two most distinguished 
 wits of the nobility, the Duke of Buckingham and Earl of 
 Rochester, declared themselves his enemies. 
 
 Buckingham characterized him, in 167 1, by the name of 
 Bayes in " The Rehearsal ;" a farce which he is said to have 
 written with the assistance of Butler, the author of " Hudi- 
 bras ;" Martin Clifford, of the Charter House ; and Dr. Sprat, 
 the friend of Cowley, then his chaplain. Dryden and his 
 friends laughed at the length of time and the number of 
 hands employed upon this performance ; in which, though by 
 some artifice of action it yet keeps possession of the stage, it is 
 not possible now to find any thing that might not have been 
 written without so long delay, or a confederacy so numerous. 
 
 To adjust the minute events of literary history is tedious 
 and troublesome ; it requires indeed no great force of under- 
 standing, but often depends upon inquiries which there is no 
 
82 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 opportunity of making, or is to be fetched from books and 
 pamphlets not always at hand. 
 
 " The Rehearsal" was played in 167 1, and yet is repre- 
 sented as ridiculing passages in ' ' The Conquest of Granada' ' 
 and "Assignation," which were not published till 1678; in 
 " Marriage a-la-mode," published in 1673 ; and in " Tyran- 
 nic Love," in 1677. These contradictions show how rashly 
 satire is applied. 
 
 It is said that this farce was originally intended against 
 Davenant, who, in the first draught, was characterized by the 
 name of Bilboa. Davenant had been a soldier and an adven- 
 turer. 
 
 There is one passage in ' ' The Rehearsal ' ' still remaining, 
 which seems to have related originally to Davenant. Bayes 
 hurts his nose, and comes in with brown paper applied to the 
 bruise ; how this affected Dryden does not appear. Dave- 
 nant's nose had suffered such diminution by mishaps among 
 the women that a patch upon that part evidently denoted 
 him. 
 
 It is said likewise that Sir Robert Howard was once meant. 
 The design was probably to ridicule the reigning poet, whoever 
 he might be. 
 
 Much of the personal satire, to which it might owe its first 
 reception, is now lost or obscured. Bayes probably imitated 
 the dress and mimicked the manner of Dryden : the cant 
 words which are so often in his mouth may be supposed to 
 have been Dryden's habitual phrases or customary exclama- 
 tions. Bayes, when he is to write, is blooded and purged ; 
 this, as Lamotte relates himself to have heard, was the real 
 practice of the poet. 
 
 There were other strokes in ' ' The Rehearsal ' ' by which 
 malice was gratified ; the debate between Love and Honor, 
 which keeps Prince Volscius in a single boot, is said to have 
 alluded to the misconduct of the Duke of Ormond, who lost 
 Dublin to the rebels while he was toying with a mistress. 
 
 The Earl of Rochester, to suppress the reputation of Dry- 
 den, took Settle into his protection, and endeavored to per- 
 suade the public that its approbation had been to that time 
 misplaced. Settle was a while in high reputation ; his ' ' Em- 
 press of Morocco," having first delighted the town, was carried 
 in triumph to Whitehall, and played by the ladies of the court. 
 Now was the poetical meteor at the highest : the next mo- 
 ment began its fall. Rochester withdrew his patronage, seem- 
 ingly resolved, says one of his biographers, " to have a judg- 
 ment contrary to that of the town ;" perhaps being unable to 
 
DRYDEN. 83 
 
 endure any reputation beyond a certain height, even when he 
 had himself contributed to raise it. 
 
 Neither critics nor rivals did Dryden much mischief, unless 
 they gained from his own temper the power of vexing him, 
 which his frequent bursts of resentment give reason to suspect. 
 He is always angry at some past or afraid of some future cen- 
 sure ; but he lessens the smart of his wounds by the balm of 
 his own approbation, and endeavors to repel the shafts of 
 criticism by opposing a shield of adamantine confidence. 
 
 The perpetual accusation produced against him was that of 
 plagiarism, against which he never attempted any vigorous de- 
 fence ; for though he was perhaps sometimes injuriously cen- 
 sured, he would, by denying part of the charge, have confessed 
 the rest ; and, as his adversaries had the proof in their own 
 hands, he, who knew that wit had little power against facts, 
 wisely left, in that perplexity which it generally produces, a 
 question which it was his interest to suppress, and which, un- 
 less provoked by vindication, few were likely to examine. 
 
 Though the life of a writer, from about thirty-five to sixty- 
 three, may be supposed to have been sufficiently busied by the 
 composition of eight-and-twenty pieces for the stage, Dryden 
 found room in the same space for many other undertakings. 
 
 But, how much soever he wrote, he was at least once sus- 
 pected of writing more ; for, in 1679, a paper of verses, called 
 "An Essay on Satire," was shown about in manuscript, by 
 which the Earl of Rochester, the Duchess of Portsmouth, and 
 others were so much provoked, that, as was supposed (for the 
 actors were never discovered), they procured Dryden, whom 
 they suspected as the author, to be waylaid and beaten. This 
 incident is mentioned by the Duke of Buckingham, the 
 true writer, in his ' ' Art of Poetry, ' ' where he says of Dryden, 
 
 " Though prais'd and beaten for another's rhymes, 
 His own deserve as great applause sometimes." 
 
 His reputation in time was such that his name was thought 
 necessary to the success of every poetical or literary perform- 
 ance, and therefore he was engaged to contribute something, 
 whatever it might be, to many publications. He prefixed the 
 "Life of Polybius" to the translation of Sir Henry Sheers ; 
 and those of Lucian and Plutarch to versions of their works by 
 different hands. Of the English Tacitus he translated the first 
 book ; and, if Gordon be credited, translated it from the 
 French. Such a charge can hardly be mentioned without 
 some degree of indignation ; but it is not, 1 suppose, so much 
 to be inferred that Dryden wanted the literature necessary to 
 
84 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 the perusal of Tacitus, as that, considering himself as hid- 
 den in a crowd, he had no awe of the public ; and, writing 
 merely for money, was contented to get it by the nearest way. 
 
 In 1680, the " Epistles of Ovid " being translated by the 
 poets of the time, among which one was the work of Dryden, 
 and another of Dryden and Lord Mulgrave, it was necessary to 
 introduce them by a preface ; and Dryden, who on such occa- 
 sions was regularly summoned, prefixed a discourse upon 
 translation, which was then struggling for the liberty that it 
 now enjoys. Why it should find any difficulty in breaking the 
 shackles of verbal interpretation, which must forever debar it 
 from elegance, it would be difficult to conjecture, were not the 
 power of prejudice every day observed. The authority of 
 Jonson, Sandys, and Holiday had fixed the judgment of the 
 nation ; and it was not easily believed that a better way could 
 be found than they had taken, though Fanshaw, Denham, 
 Waller, and Cowley had tried to give examples of a different 
 practice. 
 
 In 1 68 1 Dryden became yet more conspicuous by uniting 
 politics with poetry in the memorable satire called " Absalom 
 and Achitophel, ' ' written against the faction which, by Lord 
 Shaftesbury's incitement, set the Duke of Monmouth at its 
 head. 
 
 Of this poem, in which personal satire was applied to the 
 support of public principles, and in which therefore every mind 
 was interested, the reception was eager, and the sale so large 
 that my father, an old bookseller, told me he had not known 
 it equalled but by Sacheverell's Trial. 
 
 The reason of this general perusal Addison has attempted 
 to derive from the delight which the mind feels in the investi- 
 gation of secrets ; and thinks that curiosity to decipher the 
 names procured readers to the poem. There is no need to in- 
 quire why those verses were read, which, to all the attractions 
 of wit, elegance, and harmony, added the co-operation of all 
 the factious passions, and filled every mind with triumph or 
 resentment. 
 
 It could not be supposed that all the provocation given by 
 Dryden would be endured without resistance or reply. Both 
 his person and his party were exposed in their turns to the 
 shafts of satire, which, though neither so well pointed nor per- 
 haps so well aimed, undoubtedly drew blood. 
 
 One of these poems is called " Dryden' s Satire on his 
 Muse ;" ascribed, though, as Pope says, falsely, to Somers, 
 who was afterwards chancellor. The poem, whosesoever it 
 (;'as, has much virulence and some sprightliness. The writer 
 
dryden: 85 
 
 tells all the ill that he can collect both of Dryden and his 
 friends. 
 
 The poem of ' ' Absalom and Achitophel ' ' had two answers, 
 now both forgotten; one called " Azaria and Hushai ;" the 
 other, "Absalom Senior." Of these hostile compositions, 
 Dryden apparently imputes ' ' Absalom Senior' ' to Settle, by 
 quoting in his verses against him the second line. ' ' Azaria 
 and Hushai ' ' was, as Wood says, imputed to him, though it is 
 somewhat unlikely that he should write twice on the same occa- 
 sion. This is a difficulty which I cannot remove, for want of 
 a minuter knowledge of poetical transactions. 
 
 The same year he published " The Medal," of which the 
 subject is a medal struck on Lord Shaftesbury's escape from a 
 prosecution, by the ignoramus of a grand jury of Londoners. 
 
 In both poems he maintains the same principles, and saw 
 them both attacked by the same antagonist. Elkanah Settle, 
 who had answered ' ' Absalom, ' ' appeared with equal courage 
 in opposition to " The Medal ;" and published an answer 
 called " The Medal Reversed," with so much success in both 
 encounters that he left the palm doubtful, and divided the 
 suffrages of the nation. Such are the revolutions of fame, or 
 such is the prevalence of fashion, that the man whose works 
 have not yet been thought to deserve the care of collecting them, 
 who died forgotten in a hospital, and whose latter years were 
 spent in contriving shows for fairs, and carrying an elegy or 
 epithalamium, of which the beginning and end were occasion- 
 ally varied, but the intermediate parts were always the same, to 
 every house where there was a funeral or a wedding, might 
 with truth have had inscribed upon his stone, 
 
 Here lies the Rival and Antagonist of Dryden. 
 
 Settle was, for his rebellion, severely chastised by Dryden, 
 under the name of " Doeg, " in the second part of " Absalom 
 and Achitophel ;" and was, perhaps, for his factious audacity, 
 made the city poet, whose annual ofiice was to describe the 
 glories of the Mayor's day. Of these bards he was the last, 
 and seems not much to have deserved even this degree of 
 regard, if it was paid to his political opinions ; for he after- 
 wards wrote a panegyric on the virtues of Judge Jefferies ; and 
 what more could have been done by the meanest zealot for 
 prerogative ? 
 
 Of translated fragments or occasional poems, to enumerate 
 the titles or settle the dates would be tedious, with little use. 
 It may be observed that as Dryden' s genius was commonly 
 
86 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 excited by some personal regard, he rarely writes upon a gen- 
 eral topic. 
 
 Soon after the accession of King James, when the design of 
 reconciling the nation to the Church of Rome became ap- 
 parent, and the religion of the court gave the only efificacious title 
 to its favors, Dryden declared himself a convert to popery. 
 This at any other time might have passed with little censure. 
 Sir Kenelm Digby embraced popery ; the two Reynolds 
 reciprocally converted one another ; and Chillingworth himself 
 was awhile so entangled in the wilds of controversy as to retire 
 for quiet to an infallible church. If men of argument and 
 study can find such difficulties or such motives as may either 
 unite them to the Church of Rome or detain them in uncer- 
 tainty, there can be no wonder that a man who perhaps never 
 inquired why he was a Protestant, should by an artful and ex- 
 perienced disputant be made a papist, overborne by the sudden 
 violence of new and unexpected arguments, or deceived by a 
 representation which shows only the doubts on one part and 
 only the evidence on the other. 
 
 That conversion will always be suspected that apparently 
 concurs with interest. He that never finds his error till' it 
 hinders his progress towards wealth or honor will not be- 
 thought to love truth only for herself. Yet it may easily hap- 
 pen that information may come at a commodious time ; and 
 as truth and interest are not by any fatal necessity at variance, 
 that one may by accident introduce the other. When opinions 
 are struggling into popularity, the arguments by which they are 
 opposed or defended become more known ; and he that 
 changes his profession would perhaps have changed it before, 
 with the like opportunities of instruction. This was the then 
 state of popery ; every artifice was used to show it in its fairest 
 form ; and it must be owned to be a religion of external 
 appearance sufficiently attractive. 
 
 It is natural to hope that a comprehensive is likewise an 
 elevated soul, and that whoever is wise is also honest. I am 
 willing to believe that Dryden, having employed his mind, 
 active as it was, upon different studies, and filled it, capacious 
 as it was, with other materials, came unprovided to the contro- 
 versy, and wanted rather skill to discover the right than virtue 
 to maintain it. But inquiries into the heart are not for man ; 
 we must now leave him to his Judge. 
 
 The priests, having strengthened their cause by so powerful 
 an adherent, were not long before they brought him into 
 action. They engaged him to defend the controversial papers 
 
DRYDEU. 87 
 
 found in the strong-box of Charles II. ; and, what yet was 
 harder, to defend them against Stillingfieet. 
 
 With hopes of promoting popery, he was employed to trans- 
 late Maimbourg's " History of the League ;" which he pub- 
 lished with a large introduction. His name is likewise pre- 
 fixed to the English Life of Francis Xavier ; but I know not 
 that he ever owned himself the translator. Perhaps the use of 
 his name was a pious fraud ; which, however, seems not to 
 have had much effect, for neither of the books, I believe, was 
 ever popular. 
 
 The version of Xavier's Life is commended by Brown, 
 in a pamphlet not written to flatter ; and the occasion of it is 
 said to have been, that the queen, when she solicited a son, 
 made vows to him as her tutelary saint. 
 
 He was supposed to have undertaken to translate Varillas's 
 " History of Heresies ;" and, when Burnet published remarks 
 upon it, to have written an Answer ; upon which Burnet 
 makes the following observation : 
 
 " I have been informed from England that a gentleman, 
 who is famous both for poetry and several other things, had 
 spent three months in translating M. Varillas's History ; 
 hut that, as soon as my Reflections appeared, he discontin- 
 ued his labor, finding the credit of his author was gone. 
 Now, if he thinks it is recovered by his Answer, he will 
 perhaps go on with his translation ; and this may be, for aught 
 I know, as good an entertainment for him as the conversation 
 that he had set on between the hinds and panthers, and all the 
 rest of animals, for whom M. Varillas may serve well enough 
 as an author ; and this history and that poem are such extraor- 
 dinary things of their kind, that it will be but suitable to see 
 the author of the worst poem become likewise the translator of 
 the worst history that the age has produced. If his grace and 
 his wit improve both proportionably, he will hardly find that he 
 has gained much by the change he has made, from having no 
 religion, to choose one of the worst. It is true he had some- 
 what to sink from in matter of wit ; but as for his morals, it is 
 scarcely possible for him to grow a worse man than he was. 
 He has lately wreaked his malice on me for spoiling his three 
 months' labor ; but in it he has done me all the honor that 
 any man can receive from him, which is to be railed at by him. 
 If I had ill-nature enough to prompt me to wish a very bad 
 wish for him, it should be that he would go on and finish 
 his translation. By that it will appear whether the English 
 nation, which is the most competent judge in this matter, has, 
 upon the seeing our debate, pronounced in M. Varillas's 
 
88 DR. SAMUEL yOHNSON ON 
 
 favor or in mine. It is true Mr. D. will suffer a little by it ; 
 but, at least, it will serve to keep him in from other extrava- 
 gances ; and if he gains little honor by this work, yet he can- 
 not lose so much by it as he has done by his last employ- 
 ment. " 
 
 Having probably felt his own inferiority in theological con- 
 troversy, he was desirous of trying whether, by bringing poetry 
 to aid his arguments, he might become a more efficacious 
 defender of his new profession. To reason in verse was, in- 
 deed, one of his powers ; but subtilty and harmony united 
 are still feeble when opposed to truth. 
 
 Actuated therefore by zeal for Rome, or hope of fame, he 
 published " The Hind and Panther," a poem in which the 
 Church of Rome, figured by the ' ' milk-white Hind, ' ' defends 
 her tenets against the Church of England, represented by the 
 Panther, a beast beautiful, but spotted. 
 
 A faisle which exhibits two beasts talking theology appears 
 at once full of absurdity ; and it was accordingly ridiculed in 
 the ' ' City Mouse and Country Mouse, ' ' a parody, written 
 by Montague, afterwards Earl of Halifax, and Prior, who then 
 gave the first specimen of his abilities. 
 
 The conversion of such a man, at such a time, was not 
 likely to pass uncensured. Three dialogues were published by 
 the facetious Thomas Brown, of which the two first were 
 called " Reasons of Mr. Bayes's chan^ng his Religion ;" and 
 the third, "The Reasons of Mr. Hains the Player's Conver- 
 sion and Re-conversion. " The first was printed in 1688, the 
 second not till 1690, the third in 1691. The clamor seems to 
 have been long continued, and the subject to have strongly 
 fixed the public attention. 
 
 In the two first dialogues Bayes is brought into the com- 
 pany of Crites and Eugenius, with whom he had formerly 
 debated on dramatic poetry. The two talkers in the third are 
 Mr. Bayes and Mr. Hains. 
 
 Brown was a man not deficient in literature nor destitute 
 of fancy ; but he seems to have thought it the pinnacle of 
 excellence to be a merry fellow ; and therefore laid out his 
 powers upon small jests or gross buffoonery ; so that his per- 
 formances have little intrinsic value, and were read only while 
 they were recommended by the novelty of the event that occa- 
 sioned them. 
 
 These dialogues are like his other works : what sense or 
 knowledge they contained is disgraced by the garb in which it 
 is exhibited. One great source of pleasure is to call Dryden 
 little Bayes. Ajax, who happens to be mentioned, is " he'that 
 
DS. YDEN 89 
 
 wore as many cowhides upon his shield as would have fur- 
 nished half the king's army with shoe-leather." 
 
 Being asked whether he had seen the " Hind and Pan- 
 ther," Crites answers : " Seen it ! Mr. Bayes, why I can't stir 
 nowhere but it pursues me ; it haunts me worse than a pew- 
 ter-buttoned sergeant does a decayed cit. Sometimes I meet it 
 in a bandbox, when my laundress brings home my linen ; 
 sometimes, whether I will or no, it lights my pipe at a coffee- 
 house ; sometimes it surprises me in a trunk-maker's shop ; 
 and sometimes it refreshes my memory for me on the back-side 
 of a Chancery-lane parcel. For your comfort, too, Mr. Bayes, 
 I have not only seen it, as you may perceive, but have read it 
 too, and can quote it as freely upon occasion as a frugal 
 tradesman can quote that noble treatise, ' The Worth of a 
 Penny,' to his extravagant 'prentice, that revels in stewed 
 apples and penny custards. ' ' 
 
 The whole animation of these compositions arises from a 
 profusion of ludicrous and affected comparisons. " To secure 
 one's chastity !" says Bayes, " little more is necessary than to 
 leave off a correspondence with the other sex, which, to a wise 
 man, is no greater a punishment than it would be to a fanatic 
 person to forbid seeing " The Cheats" and " The Committee ;" 
 or for my Lord Mayor and aldermen to be interdicted the sight 
 of " The London Cuckolds." This is the general strain, and 
 therefore I shall be easily excused the labor of more tran- 
 scription. 
 
 Brown does not wholly forget past transactions : " You 
 began," says Crites to Bayes, " a very different religion, and 
 have not mended the matter in your last choice. It was but 
 reason that your muse, which appeared first in a tyrant's quar- 
 rel, should employ her last efforts to justify the usurpation of 
 the Hind." 
 
 Next year the nation was summoned to celebrate the birth 
 of the prince. Now was the time for Dryden to rouse his im- 
 agination and strain his voice. Happy days were at hand, 
 and he was willing to enjoy and diffuse the anticipated bless- 
 ings. He published a poem, filled with predictions of greatness 
 and prosperity — predictions of which it is not necessary to tell 
 how they have been verified. 
 
 A few months passed after these joyful notes, and every 
 blossom of popish hope was blasted forever by the Revolution. 
 A papist now could be no longer laureate. The revenue, which 
 he had enjoyed with so much pride and praise, was transferred 
 to Shadwell, an old enemy, whom he had formerly stigniatized 
 by the name of Og. Dryden could not decently complain that 
 
go DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 he was deposed ; but seemed very angry that Shadwell sue 
 ceeded him, and has therefore celebrated the intruder's inaugu- 
 ration in a poem exquisitely satirical, called " Mac Flecknoe ;" 
 of which the ' ' Dunciad, ' ' as Pope himself declares, is an imi- 
 tation, though more extended in its plan and more diversified 
 in its incidents. 
 
 It is related by Prior that Lord Dorset, when as chamber- 
 lain he was constrained to eject Dryden from his office, gave 
 him from his own purse an allowance equal to the salary. 
 This is no romantic or incredible act of generosity ; a hundred 
 a year is often enough given to claims less cogent by men less 
 famed for liberality. Yet Dryden always represented himself 
 as suffering under a public infliction ; and once particularly 
 demands respect for the patience with which he endured the 
 loss of his little fortune. His patron might, indeed, enjoin 
 him to suppress his bounty ; but, if he suffered nothing, he 
 should not have complained. 
 
 During the short reign of King James he had written noth- 
 ing for the stage, being, in his opinion, more profitably em- 
 ployed in controversy and flattery. Of praise he might, per- 
 haps, have been less lavish without inconvenience, for James 
 was never said to have much regard for poetry : he was to be 
 flattered only by adopting his religion. 
 
 Times were now changed : Dryden was no longer the 
 court-poet, and was to look back for support to his former 
 trade ; and having waited about two years, either considering 
 himself as discountenanced by the public, or perhaps expecting 
 a second Revolution, he produced " Don Sebastian" in 1690, 
 and in the next four years four dramas more. 
 
 In 1693 appeared a new version of Juvenal and Persius. 
 Of Juvenal he translated the first, third, sixth, tenth, and 
 sixteenth satires ; and of Persius the whole work. On 
 this occasion he introduced his two sons to the public as 
 nurselings of the muses. The fourteenth of Juvenal was 
 the work of John and the seventh of Charles Dryden. He 
 prefixed a very ample preface, in the form of a dedication to 
 Lord Dorset ; and there gives an account of the design which 
 he had once formed to write an epic poem on the actions 
 either of Arthur or the Black Prince. He considered the epic 
 as necessarily including some kind of supernatural agency, and 
 had imagined a new kind of contest between the guardian 
 angels of kingdoms, of whom he conceived that each might be 
 represented zealous for his charge, without any intended oppo- 
 sition to the purposes of the Supreme Being, of which all ere- 
 ated minds must in part be ignorant. 
 
DRYDEM. 
 
 91 
 
 This is the most reasonable scheme of celestial interposi- 
 tion that ever was formed. The surprises and terrors of 
 enchantments, which have succeeded to the intrigues and 
 oppositions of pagan deities, afford very striking scenes, and 
 open a vast extent to the imagination ; but, as Boileau ob- 
 serves (and Boileau will be seldom found mistaken), with this 
 incurable defect, that, in a contest between Heaven and Hell, 
 we know at the beginning which is to prevail ; for this reason 
 we follow Rinaldo to the enchanted wood with more curiosity 
 than terror. 
 
 In the scheme of Dryden there is one great difficulty, which 
 yet he would, perhaps, have had address enough to surmount. 
 In a war justice can be but on one side ; and, to entitle the 
 hero to the protection of angels, he must fight in defence of in- 
 dubitable right. Yet some of the celestial beings, thus opposed 
 to each other, must have been represented as defending guilt. 
 
 That this poem was never written, is reasonably to be 
 lamented. It would doubtless have improved our numbers 
 and enlarged our language, and might perhaps have contrib- 
 uted by pleasing instructions to rectify our opinions and purify 
 our manners. 
 
 What he required as the indispensable condition of such an 
 undertaking, a public stipend, was not likely in these times to 
 be obtained. Riches were not become familiar to us ; nor had 
 the nation yet learned to be liberal. 
 
 This plan he charged Blackmore with stealing; "only," 
 says he, ' ' the guardian angels of kingdoms were machines too 
 ponderous for him to manage. 
 
 In 1694 he began the most laborious and difficult of all his 
 works, the translation of Virgil, from which he borrowed two 
 months that he might turn Fresnoy's " Art of Painting" into 
 English prose. The preface, which he boasts to have written 
 in twelve mornings, exhibits a parallel of poetry and painting, 
 with a miscellaneous collection of critical remarks, such as cost 
 a mind stored like his no labor to produce them. 
 
 In 1697 he published his version of the works of Virgil ; 
 and, that no opportunity of profit might be lost, dedicated the 
 " Pastorals" to the Lord Clifford, the " Georgics" to the Earl 
 of Chesterfield, and the ' ' ^neid ' ' to the Earl of Mulgrave. 
 This economy of flattery, at once lavish and discreet, did not 
 pass without observation. 
 
 This translation was censured by Milbourne, a clergyman, 
 styled by Pope ' ' the fairest of critics, ' ' because he exhibited 
 his- own version to be compared with that which he con- 
 demned. 
 
92 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 His last work was his ' ' Fables, ' ' published in consequence, 
 as is supposed, of a contract now in the hands of Mr. Tonson ; 
 by which he obliged himself, in consideration of three hundred 
 pounds, to finish for the press ten thousand verses. 
 
 In this volume is comprised the well-known Ode on St. 
 Cecilia's Day, which, as appeared by a letter communicated 
 to Dr. Birch, he spent a fortnight in composing and correct- 
 ing. But what is this to the patience and diligence of Boi- 
 leau, whose ' ' Equivoque, ' ' a poem of only three hundred and 
 forty-six lines, took from his life eleven months to write it, and 
 three years to revise it .' 
 
 Part of his book of " Fables" is the first " Iliad " in Eng- 
 lish, intended as a specimen of a version of the whole. Con- 
 sidering into what hands Homer was to fall, the reader cannot 
 but rejoice that this project went no further. 
 
 The time was now at hand which was to put an end to all 
 his schemes and labors. On the first of May, 1701, having 
 been some time, as he tells us, a cripple in his limbs, he died, 
 in Gerard Street, of a mortification in his leg. 
 
 There is extant a wild story relating to some vexatious 
 events that happened at his funeral, which at the end of Con- 
 greve's Life, by a writer of I know not what credit, are thus 
 related, as I find the account transferred to a biographical dic- 
 tionary : 
 
 " Mr. Dryden dying on the Wednesday morning, Dr. 
 Thomas Sprat, then Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westmin- 
 ster, sent the next day to the Lady Elizabeth Howard, Mr. 
 Dryden's widow, that he would make a present of the ground, 
 which was forty pounds, with all the other abbey fees. The 
 Lord Halifax likewise sent to the Lady Elizabeth, and Mr. 
 Charles Dryden, her son, that, if they would give him leave to 
 bury Mr. Dryden, he would inter him with a gentleman's pri- 
 vate funeral, and afterwards bestow five hundred pounds on a 
 monument in the abbey ; which, as they had no reason to 
 refuse, they accepted. On the Saturday following the com- 
 pany came ; the corpse was put into a velvet hearse ; and 
 eighteen mourning coaches, filled with company, attended. 
 When they were just ready to move, the Lord Jefferies, son of 
 the Lord Chancellor Jefferies, with some of his rakish compan- 
 ions, coming by, asked whose funeral it was ; and being told 
 Mr. Dryden's, he said, ' What, shall Dryden, the greatest 
 honor and ornament of the nation, be buried after this private 
 manner ! No, gentlemen, let all that loved Mr. Dryden, and 
 honor his memory, alight and join with me in gaining my 
 lady's consent to let me have the honor of his interment, 
 
DRYDEN. 93 
 
 which shall be after another manner than this ; and I will be- 
 stow a thousand pounds on a monument in the abbey for him.' 
 The gentlemen in the coaches, not knowing of the Bishop of 
 Rochester's favor, nor of the Lord Halifax's generous design 
 (they both having, out of respect to the family, enjoined the 
 Lady Elizabeth and her son to keep their favor concealed to 
 the world, and let it pass for their own expense), readily came 
 out of their coaches, and attended Lord Jefferies up to the 
 lady's bedside, who was then sick. He repeated the purport 
 of what he had before said ; but she absolutely refusing, he fell 
 on his knees, vowing never to rise till his request was granted. 
 The rest of the company by his desire kneeled also ; and the 
 lady, being under a sudden surprise, fainted away. As soon 
 as she recovered her' speech, she cried, No, no. 'Enough, 
 gentlemen, ' replied he ; ' my lady is very good, she says. Go, 
 go. ' She repeated her former words with all her strength, but 
 in vain, for her feeble voice was lost in their acclamations of 
 joy ; and the Lord Jefferies ordered the hearsemen to carry the 
 corpse to Mr. Russel's, an undertaker in Cheapside, and leave 
 it there till he should send orders for the embalmment, which, he 
 added, should be after the royal manner. His directions were 
 obeyed, the company dispersed, and Lady Elizabeth and her 
 son remained inconsolable. The next day Mr. Charles Dry- 
 den waited on the Lord Halifax and the bishop, to excuse his 
 mother and himself, by relating the real truth. But neither his 
 lordship nor the bishop would admit of any plea ; especially 
 the latter, who had the abbey lighted, the ground opened, the 
 choir attending, an anthem ready set, and himself waiting for 
 some time without any corpse to bury. The undertaker, after 
 three days' expectance of orders for embalmment without receiv- 
 ing any, waited on the Lord Jefferies ; who, pretending igno- 
 rance of the matter, turned it ofiE with an ill-natured jest, say- 
 ing that those who observed the orders of a drunken frolic 
 deserved no better ; that he remembered nothing at all of it ; 
 and that he might do what he pleased with the corpse. Upon 
 this the undertaker waited upon the Lady Elizabeth and her 
 son, and threatened to bring the corpse home and set it before 
 the door. They desired a day's respite, which was granted. 
 Mr. Charles Dryden wrote a handsome letter to the Lord 
 Jefferies, who returned it with this cool answer : That he knew 
 nothing of the matter, and would be troubled no more about 
 it. He then addressed the Lord Halifax and the Bishop of 
 Rochester, who absolutely refused to do any thing in it. In 
 this distress Dr. Garth sent for the corpse to the College of 
 Physicians, and proposed a funeral by subscription, to which 
 
94 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 himself set a most noble example. At last a day, about three 
 weeks after Mr. Dryden's decease, was appointed for the inter- 
 ment. Dr. Garth pronounced a fine Latin oration, at the col- 
 lege, over the corpse ; which was attended to the Abbey by a 
 numerous train of coaches. When the funeral was over, Mr. 
 Charles Dryden sent a challenge to the Lord Jefferies, who 
 refusing to answer it, he sent several others and went often 
 himself ; but could neither get a letter delivered nor admit- 
 tance to speak to him, which so incensed him that he 
 resolved, since his lordship refused to answer him like a gen- 
 tleman, that he would watch an opportunity to meet and fight 
 off-hand, though with all the rules of honor ; which his lord- 
 ship hearing left the town ; and Mr. Charles Dryden could 
 never have the satisfaction of meeting him, though he sought it 
 till his death with the utmost application." 
 
 This story I once intended to omit, as it appears with no 
 great evidence ; nor have I met with any confirmation, but in a 
 letter of Farquhar ; and he only relates that the funeral of 
 Dryden was tumultuary and confused. 
 
 Supposing the story true, we may remark that the gradual 
 change of manners, though imperceptible in the process, ap- 
 pears great when different times, and those not very distant, 
 are compared. If at this time a young drunken lord should 
 interrupt the pompous regularity of a magnificent funeral, what 
 would be the event but that he would be jostled out of the 
 way and compelled to be quiet ? If he should thrust himself 
 into a house, he would be sent roughly away ; and, what is yet 
 more to the honor of the present time, I believe that those 
 who had subscribed to the funeral of a man like Dryden 
 would not, for such an accident, have withdrawn their contri- 
 butions. 
 
 He was buried among the poets in Westminster Abbey, 
 where, though the Duke of Newcastle had, in a general dedica- 
 tion prefixed by Congreve to his dramatic works, accepted 
 thanks for his intention of erecting him a monument, he lay 
 long without distinction, till the Duke of Buckingham gave 
 him a tablet, inscribed only with the name of DRYDEN. 
 
 He married the Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter to the 
 Earl of Berks, with circumstances, according to the satire im- 
 puted to Lord Somers, not very honorable to either party : 
 by her he had three sons, Charles, John, and Henry. Charles 
 was usher of the palace to Pope Clement XI., and, visiting 
 England in 1704, was drowned in an attempt to swim across 
 the Thames at Windsor. 
 
 John was author of a comedy called " The Husband his 
 
DRY DEN. 
 
 95 
 
 own Cuckold." He is said to have died at Rome. Henry 
 entered into some religious order. It is some proof of Dry- 
 den's sincerity in his second religion that he taught it to his 
 sons. A man conscious of hypocritical profession in himself 
 is not likely to convert others ; and as his sons were qualified, 
 in 1693, to appear among the translators of Juvenal, they must 
 have been taught some religion before their father's change. 
 
 Of the person of Dryden I know not any account ; of 
 his mind, the portrait, which has been left by Congreve, who 
 knew him with great familiarity, is such as adds our love of his 
 manners to our admiration of his genius. ' ' He was, ' ' we are 
 told, " of a nature exceedingly humane and compassionate, 
 ready to forgive injuries, and capable of a sincere reconcilia- 
 tion with those who had offended him. His friendship, where 
 he professed it, went beyond his profession. He was of a very 
 easy, of very pleasing access, but somewhat slow, and, as it 
 were, diffident in his advances to others ; he had that in nature 
 which abhorred intrusion into any society whatever. He was 
 therefore less known, and consequently his character became 
 more liable to misapprehensions and misrepresentations ; he 
 was very modest, and very easily to be discountenanced in his 
 approaches to his equals or superiors. As his reading had 
 been very extensive, so was he very happy in a memory tena- 
 cious of every thing that he had read. He was not more pos- 
 sessed of knowledge than he was communicative of it ; but 
 then his communication was by no means pedantic or imposed 
 upon the conversation, but just such, and went so far, as, by 
 the natural turn of the conversation in which he was engaged, 
 it was necessarily promoted or required. He was extremely 
 ready and gentle in his correction of the errors of any writer 
 who thought fit to consult him, and full as ready and patient to 
 admit the reprehensions of others in respect of his own over- 
 sights or mistakes. ' ' 
 
 To this account of Congreve nothing can be objected but 
 the fondness of friendship ; and to have excited that fondness 
 in such a mind is no small degree of praise. The disposition 
 of Dryden, however, is shown in this character rather as it ex- 
 hibited itself in cursory conversation than as it operated on 
 the more important parts of life. His placability and his 
 friendship indeed were solid virtues ; but courtesy and good- 
 humor are often found with little real worth. Since Con- 
 greve, who knew him well, has told us no more, the rest must 
 be collected as it can from other testimonies, and particularly 
 from those notices which Dryden has very liberally given us of 
 himself. 
 
96 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 The modesty which made him so slow to advance, and so 
 easy to be repulsed, was certainly no suspicion of deficient 
 merit, or unconsciousness of his ' own value ; he appears to 
 have known, in its whole extent, the dignity of his own char- 
 acter, and to have set a very high value on his own powers 
 and performances. He probably did not offer his conversa- 
 tion, because he expected it to be solicited ; and he retired 
 from a cold reception, not submissive but indignant, with such 
 deference of his own greatness as made him unwilling to ex- 
 pose it to neglect or violation. 
 
 His modesty was by no means inconsistent with ostenta- 
 tiousness ; he is diligent enough to remind the world of his 
 merit, and expresses with very little scruple his high opinion of 
 his own powers ; but his self-commendations are read without 
 scorn or indignation ; we allow his claims and love his frank- 
 ness. 
 
 Tradition, however, has not allowed that his confidence in 
 himself exempted him from jealousy of others. He is accused 
 of envy and insidiousness ; and is particularly charged with in- 
 citing Creech to translate Horace that he might lose the repu- 
 tation which Lucretius had given him. 
 
 Of this charge we immediately discover that it is merely 
 conjectural ; the purpose was such as no man would confess ; 
 and a crime that admits no proof why should we believe ? 
 
 He has been described as magisterially presiding over the 
 younger writers, and assuming the distribution of poetical fame ; 
 but he who excels has a right to teach, and he whose judg- 
 ment is incontestable may without usurpation examine and 
 decide. 
 
 Congreve represents him as ready to advise and instruct ; 
 but there is reason to believe that his communication was 
 rather useful than entertaining. He declares of himself that 
 he was saturnine, and not one of those whose sprightly sayings 
 diverted company ; and one of his censurers makes him say, 
 
 " Nor wine nor love could ever see me gay ; 
 To writing bred, I knew not what to say." 
 
 There are men whose powers operate only at leisure and in 
 retirement, and whose intellectual vigor deserts them in con- 
 versation ; whom merriment confuses, and objection discon- 
 certs ; whose bashfulness restrains their exertion, and suffers 
 them not to speak till the time of speaking is past ; or whose 
 attention to their own character makes them unwilling to utter 
 at hazard what has not been considered and cannot be re- 
 called. 
 
DRY DEN. 97 
 
 Of Dryden's sluggishness in conversation it is vain to 
 search or to guess the cause. He certainly wanted neither sen- 
 timents nor language ; his intellectual treasures were great, 
 though they were locked up from his own use. " His 
 thoughts," when he wrote, " flowed in upon him so fast, that 
 his only care was which to choose and which to reject." 
 Such rapidity of composition naturally promises a flow of 
 talk ; yet we must be content to believe what an enemy says 
 of him, when he likewise says it of himself. But, whatever 
 was his character as a companion, it appears that he lived in 
 familiarity with the highest persons of his time. It is related, 
 by Carte, of the Duke of Ormond, that he used often to pass a 
 night with Dryden and those with whom Dryden consorted : 
 who they were Carte has not told, but certainly the convivial 
 table at which Ormond sat was not surrounded with a plebeian 
 society. He was indeed reproached with boasting of his fami- 
 liarity with the great ; and Horace will support him in the 
 opinion that to please superiors is not the lowest kind of merit. 
 
 The merit of pleasing must, however, be estimated by the 
 means. Favor is not always gained by good actions or lauda- 
 ble qualities. Caresses and preferments are often bestowed on 
 the auxiliaries of vice, the procurers of pleasure, or the flat- 
 terers of vanity. Dryden has never been charged with any 
 personal agency unworthy of a good character : he abetted vice 
 and vanity only with his pen. One of his enemies has accused 
 him of lewdness in his conversation ; but if accusation with- 
 out proof be credited, who shall be innocent ? 
 
 His works afford too many examples of dissolute licentious- 
 ness and abject adulation ; but they were probably, like his 
 merriment, artificial and constrained ; the effects of study and 
 meditation, and his trade rather than his pleasure. 
 
 Of the mind that can trade in corruption, and can deliber- 
 ately pollute itself with ideal wickedness for the sake of spread- 
 ing the contagion in society, I wish not to conceal or excuse 
 the depravity. Such degradation of the dignity of genius, 
 such abuse of superlative abilities, cannot be contemplated but 
 with grief and indignation. What consolation can be had 
 Dryden has afforded, by living to repent and to testify his re- 
 pentance. 
 
 Of dramatic immorality he did not want examples among 
 his predecessors, or companions among his contemporaries ; but 
 in the meanness and servility of hyperbolical adulation I know 
 not whether, since the days in which the Roman emperors 
 were deified, he has been ever equalled, except by Afra Behn 
 in an address to Eleanor Gwyn. When once be has under- 
 
98 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 taken the task of praise, he no longer retains shame in himself 
 nor supposes it in his patron. As many odoriferous bodies are 
 observed to diffuse perfumes from year to year, without sensi- 
 ble diminution of bulk or weight, he appears never to have im- 
 poverished his mint of flattery by his expenses, however lavish. 
 He had all the forms of excellence, intellectual and moral, com- 
 bined in his mind, with endless variation ; and, when he had 
 scattered on the hero of the day the golden shower of wit and 
 virtue, he had ready for him, whom he wished to court on the 
 morrow, new wit and virtue with another stamp. Of this kind 
 of meanness he never seems to decline the practice or lament 
 the necessity : he considers the great as entitled to encomiastic 
 homage, and brings praise rather as a tribute than a gift, more 
 delighted with the fertility of his invention than mortified by 
 the prostitution of his judgment. It is indeed not certain that 
 on these occasions his judgment much rebelled against his in- 
 terest. There are minds which easily sink into submission, 
 that look on grandeur with undistinguishing reverence, and dis- 
 cover no defect where there is elevation of rank and affluence 
 of riches. 
 
 With his praises of others and of himself is always inter- 
 mingled a strain of discontent and lamentation, a sullen growl 
 of resentment, or a querulous murmur of distress. His works 
 are undervalued, his merit is unrewarded, and " he has few 
 thanks to pay his stars that he was born among Englishmen. ' ' 
 To his critics he is sometimes contemptuous, sometimes re- 
 sentful, and sometimes submissive. The writer who thinks his 
 works formed for duration mistakes his interest when he men- 
 tions his enemies. He degrades his own dignity by showing 
 that he was affected by their censures, and gives lasting impor- 
 tance to names which, left to themselves, would vanish from 
 remembrance. From this principle Dryden did not often de- 
 part ; his complaints are for the greater part general ; he sel- 
 dom pollutes his pages with an adverse name. He conde- 
 scended indeed to a controversy with Settle, in which he per- 
 haps may be considered rather as assaulting than repelling ; 
 and since Settle is sunk into oblivion, his libel remains injuri- 
 ous only to himself. 
 
 Among answers to critics no poetical attacks or alterca- 
 tions are to be included ; they are like other poems, effusions 
 of genius, produced as much to obtain praise as to obviate 
 censure. These Dryden practised, and in these he excelled. 
 
 Of Collier, Blackmore, and Milbourne he has made men- 
 tion in the preface of his " Fables." To the censure of Col- 
 lier, whose remarks may be rather termed admonitions than 
 
DRYDEtf. 99 
 
 criticisms, he makes little reply ; being, at the age of sixty- 
 eight, attentive to better things than the claps of a play-house. 
 He complains of Collier's rudeness, and the " horse-play of his 
 raillery ;" and asserts that " in many places he has perverted 
 by his glosses the meaning" of what he censures ; but in other 
 things he confesses that he is justly taxed ; and says, with 
 great calmness and candor, " I have pleaded guilty to all 
 thoughts or expressions of mine that can be truly accused of 
 obscenity, immorality, or profaneness, and retract them. If 
 he be my enemy, let him triumph ; if he be my friend, he will 
 be glad of my repentance. ' ' Yet as our best dispositions are 
 imperfect, he left standing in the same book a reflection on 
 Collier of great asperity, and indeed of more asperity than 
 wit. 
 
 Blackmore he represents as made his enemy by the poem of 
 "Absalom and Achitophel," which "he thinks a little hard 
 upon his fanatic patrons ;' ' and charges him with borrowing 
 the plan of his " Arthur" from the Preface to Juvenal, 
 ' ' though he had, ' ' says he, ' ' the baseness not to acknowledge 
 his benefactor, but instead of it to traduce me in a libel. ' ' 
 
 The libel in which Blackmore traduced him was a " Satire 
 upon Wit ;" in which, having lamented the exuberance of false 
 wit and the deficiency of true, he proposes that all wit should 
 be recoined before it is current, and appoints masters of assay, 
 who shall reject all that is light or debased. 
 
 " 'Tis true, that when the coarse and worthless dross 
 Is purg'd away, there will be mighty loss : 
 E'en Congreve, Southern, manly Wycherly, 
 When thus refin'd, will grievous sufferers be. 
 Into the melting pot when Dryden comes. 
 What horrid stench will rise, what noisome fumes ! 
 How will he shrink, when all his lewd allay, 
 And wicked mixture, shall be purg'd away !" 
 
 Thus Stands the passage in the last edition ; but in the orig- 
 inal there was an abatement of the censure, beginning thus : ., 
 
 " But what remains will be so pure, 'twill bear 
 Th' examination of the most severe." 
 
 Blackmore, finding the censure resented and the civility 
 disregarded, ungenerously omitted the softer part. Such vari- 
 ations discover a writer who consults his passions more than 
 his virtue ; and it may be reasonably supposed that Dryden 
 imputes his enmity to its true cause. 
 
 Of Milbourne he wrote only in general terms, such as are 
 always ready at the call of anger, whether just or not : a short 
 
lOO DR. SAMUEL yoBNSON- ON 
 
 extract will be sufficient. " He pretends a quarrel to me, that 
 I have fallen foul upon priesthood ; if I have, I am only to ask 
 pardon of good priests, and am afraid his share of the repara- 
 tion will come to little. Let him be satisfied that he shall 
 never be able to force himself upon me for an adversary ; I 
 contemn him too much to enter into competition with him. 
 
 " As for the rest of those who have written against me they 
 are such scoundrels that they deserve not the least notice to be 
 taken of them. Blackmore and Milbourne are only distin- 
 guished from the crowd by being remembered to their in- 
 famy." 
 
 Dryden indeed discovered, in many of his writings, an 
 affected and absurd malignity to priests and priesthood, which 
 naturally raised him many enemies, and which was sometimes 
 as unseasonably resented as it was exerted. Trapp is angry 
 that he calls the sacrificer in the " Georgics" the holy butcher : 
 the translation is not indeed ridiculous ; but Trapp's anger 
 arises from his zeal, not for the author, but the priest ; as if 
 any reproach of the follies of paganism could be extended to 
 the preachers of truth. 
 
 Dryden's dislike of the priesthood is imputed by Lang- 
 baine, and I think by Brown, to a repulse which he suffered 
 when he solicited ordination ; but he denies, in the preface to 
 his ' ' Fables, ' ' that he ever designed to enter into the church ; 
 and such a denial he would not have hazarded if he could 
 have been convicted of falsehood. 
 
 Malevolence to the clergy is seldom at a great distance 
 from irreverence of religion, and Dryden affords no exception 
 to this observation. His writings exhibit many passages, 
 which, with all the allowance that can be made for characters 
 and occasions, are such as piety would not have admitted, and 
 such as may vitiate light and unprincipled minds. But there 
 is no reason for supposing that he disbelieved the religion 
 which he disobeyed. He forgot his duty rather than disowned 
 it. His tendency to profaneness is the effect of levity, negli- 
 gence, and loose conversation, with a desire of accommodating 
 himself to the corruption of the times, by venturing to be 
 wicked as far as he durst. When he professed himself a con- 
 vert to popery, he did not pretend to have received any new 
 conviction of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. 
 
 The persecution of critics was not the worst of his vexations ; 
 he was much more disturbed by the importunities of want. 
 His complaints of poverty are so frequently repeated, either 
 with the dejection of weakness sinking in helpless misery, or 
 the indignation of merit claiming its tribute from mankind, 
 
DkYDBM. 101 
 
 that It is impossible not to detest the age which could impose 
 on such a man the necessity of such solicitations, or not to de- 
 spise the man who could submit to such solicitations without 
 necessity. 
 
 Whether by the world's neglect or his own imprudence, I 
 am afraid that the greatest part of his life was passed in exi- 
 gencies. Such outcries were surely never uttered but in severe 
 pain. Of his supplies or his expenses no probable, estimate 
 can now be made. Except the salary of the laureate, to which 
 King James added the office of Historiographer, perhaps with 
 some additional emoluments, his whole revenue seems to have 
 been casual ; and it is well known that he seldom lives frugally 
 who lives by chance. Hope is always liberal ; and they that 
 trust her promises make little scruple of revelling to-day on the 
 profits of the morrow. 
 
 Of his plays the profit was not great ; and of the produce 
 of his other works very little intelligence can be had. By dis- 
 coursing with the late amiable Mr. Tonson, I could not find 
 that any memorials of the transactions between his predecessor 
 and Dryden had been preserved, except the following papers : 
 
 " I do hereby promise to pay John Dryden, Esq., or order, 
 on the 2Sth of March, 1699, the sum of two hundred and fifty 
 guineas, in consideration of ten thousand verses, which the said 
 John Dryden, Esq., is to deliver to me Jacob Tonson, when 
 finished, whereof seven thousand five hundred verses, more or 
 less, are already in the said Jacob Tonson's possession. And 
 I do hereby farther promise, and engage myself to make up the 
 said sum of two hundred and fifty guineas three hundred 
 pounds sterling to the said John Dryden, Esq., his executors, 
 administrators, or assigns, at the beginning of the second im- 
 pression of the said ten thousand verses. 
 
 " In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and 
 seal, this 20th day of March, 1698-9. 
 
 " Jacob Tonson. 
 
 " Sealed and delivered, being 
 first duly stamped, pursuant 
 to the acts of parliament for 
 that purpose, in the pres- 
 ence of 
 
 " Ben. Portlock, 
 " Will. Congreve.' 
 
 " March 24, 1698. 
 
 " Received then of Mr. Jacob Tonson the sum of two hun- 
 dred sixty-eight pounds fifteen shillings, in pursuance of an 
 agreement for ten thousand verses, to be delivered by ine to 
 the said Jacob Tonson, whereof I have already delivered to 
 
I02 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 him about seven thousand five hundred, more or less : he the 
 said Jacob Tonson being obliged to make up the foresaid sum 
 of two hundred sixty-eight pounds fifteen shillings three hun- 
 dred pounds, at the beginning of the second impression of the 
 foresaid ten thousand verses ; 
 
 " I say, received by me, 
 
 " John Dryden. 
 " Witness, Charles Dryden." 
 
 Two hundred and fifty guineas, at i/. \s. 6d. is 268/. i^s. 
 
 It is manifest, from the dates of this contract, that it relates 
 to the volume of " Fables," which contains about twelve thou- 
 sand verses, and for which therefore the payment must have 
 been afterwards enlarged. 
 
 I have been told of another letter yet remaining, in which he 
 desires Tonson to bring him money to pay for a watch which 
 he had ordered for his son, and which the maker would not 
 leave without the price. 
 
 The inevitable consequence of poverty is dependence. 
 Dryden had probably no recourse in his exigencies but to his 
 bookseller. The particular character of Tonson I do not 
 know ; but the general conduct of traders was much less lib- 
 eral in those times than in our own ; their views were nar- 
 rower and their manners grosser. To the mercantile rugged- 
 ness of that race the delicacy of the poet was sometimes ex- 
 posed. Lord Bolingbroke, who in his youth had cultivated 
 poetry, related to Dr. King, of Oxford, that one day when he 
 visited Dryden, they heard, as they were conversing, another 
 person entering the house. ' ' This, ' ' said Dryden, ' ' is Ton- 
 son. You will take care not to depart before he goes away ; 
 for I have not completed the sheet which I promised him ; and 
 if you leave me unprotected, I must suffer all the rudeness to 
 which his resentment can prompt his tongue. ' ' 
 
 What rewards he obtained for his poems, besides the pay- 
 ment of the bookseller, cannot be known. Mr. Derrick, who 
 consulted some of his relations, was informed that his 
 " Fables" obtained five hundred pounds from the Duchess of 
 Ormond ; a present not unsuitable to the magnificence of that 
 splendid family ; and he quotes Moyle as relating that forty 
 pounds were paid by a musical society for the use of ' ' Alex- 
 ander's Feast." 
 
 , In those days the economy of government was yet un- 
 settled, and the payments of the Exchequer were dilatory and 
 uncertain ; of this disorder there is reason to believe that the 
 laureate sometimes felt the effects ; for, in one of his prefaces, 
 he complains of those who, being entrusted wifr. the distribu- 
 
DRVDE^r, 
 
 103 
 
 tion of the prince's bounty, suffer those that depend upon it to 
 languish in penury. 
 
 Of his petty habits or shght amusements, tradition has re- 
 tained Httle. Of the only two men whom I have found, to 
 whom he was personally known, one told me that at the house 
 which he frequented, called Will's Coffee-house, the appeal 
 upon any literary dispute was made to him ; and the other re- 
 lated that his arm-chair, which in the winter had a settled 
 and prescriptive place by the fire, was in the summer placed in 
 the balcony, and that he called the two places his winter and 
 his summer seat. This is all the intelligence which his two 
 survivors afforded me. 
 
 One of his opinions will do him no honor in the present 
 age, though in his own time, at least in the beginning of it, he 
 was far from having it confined to himself. He put great con- 
 fidence in the prognostications of judicial astrology. In the 
 Appendix to the Life of Congreve is a narrative of some of his 
 predictions wonderfully fulfilled ; but I know not the writer's 
 means of information or character of veracity. That he had 
 the configurations of the horoscope in his mind, and con- 
 sidered them as influencing the affairs of men, he does not for- 
 bear to hint. 
 
 " The utmost malice of the stars is past. 
 Now frequent trines the happier lights among, 
 And high-rais'd yove, from his dark prison freed, 
 Those weights took off that on his planet hung, 
 Will gloriously the new-laid works succeed." 
 
 He has elsewhere shown his attention to the planetary 
 powers ; and in the preface to his " Fables" has endeavored 
 obliquely to justify his superstition by attributing the same to 
 some of the ancients. The letter, added to this narrative, 
 leaves no doubt of his notions or practice. 
 
 So slight and so scanty is the knowledge which I have been 
 able to collect concerning the private life and domestic man- 
 ners of a man whom every English generation must mention 
 with reverence as a critic and a poet. 
 
 Dryden may be properly considered as the father of Eng- 
 lish criticism, as the writer who first taught us to determine 
 upon principles the merit of composition. Of our former 
 poets, the greatest dramatist wrote without rules, conducted 
 through life and nature by a genius that rarely misled and 
 rarely deserted him. Of the rest, those who knew the laws of 
 propriety had neglected to teach them. 
 
 Two Arts of English Poetry were written in the days of 
 
104 JDR- SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 •Elizabeth by Webb and Puttenham, from which (something 
 might be learned, and a few hints had been given by Jonson 
 and Cowley ; but Dryden's " Essay on Dramatic Poetry" was 
 the first regular and valuable treatise on the art of writing. 
 
 He who, having formed his opinions in the present age of 
 English literature, turns back to peruse this dialogue, will not 
 perhaps find much increase of knowledge, or much novelty of 
 instruction ; but he is to remember that critical principles 
 were then in the hands of a few, who had gathered them partly 
 from the ancients, and partly from the Italians and French. 
 The structure of dramatic poems was then not generally un- 
 derstood. Audiences applauded by instinct ; and poets per- 
 haps often pleased by chance. 
 
 A writer who has obtained his full purpose loses himself in 
 his own lustre. Of an opinion which is no longer doubted, 
 the evidence ceases to be examined. Of an art universally 
 practised, the first teacher is forgotten. Learning once made 
 popular is no longer learning ; it has the appearance of some- 
 thing which we have bestowed upon ourselves, as the dew ap- 
 pears to rise from the field which it refreshes. 
 ~ To judge rightly of an author, we must transport ourselves 
 to his time, and examine what were the wants of his contempo- 
 raries, and what were his means of supplying them. That 
 which is easy at one time was difficult at another. Dryden at 
 least imported his science, and gave his country what it wanted 
 before ; or rather, he imported only the materials, and manu- 
 factured them by his own skill. 
 
 The dialogue on the drama was one of his first essays of criti- 
 cism, written when he was yet a timorous candidate for reputa- 
 tion, and therefore labored with that diligence which he might 
 allow himself somewhat to remit, when his name gave sanction 
 to his positions, and his awe of the public was abated, partly 
 by custom and partly by success. It will not be easy to find, 
 in all the opulence of our language, a treatise so artfully varie- 
 gated with successive representations of opposite probabilities, 
 so enlivened with imagery, so brightened with illustrations. 
 His portraits of the English dramatists are wrought with great 
 spirit and diligence. The account of Shakespeare may stand as 
 a perpetual model of encomiastic criticism ; exact without mi- 
 nuteness, and lofty without exaggeration. The praise lavished 
 by Longinus, on the attestation of the heroes of Marathon by 
 Demosthenes, fades away before it. In a few lines is exhibited 
 a character so extensive in its comprehension, and so curious 
 in its limitations, that nothing can be added, diminished, or 
 reformed ; nor can the editors and admirers of Shakespeare, in 
 
DRYDEN. 105 
 
 all their emulation of reverence, boast of much more than ol 
 having diffused and paraphrased this epitome of excellence, of 
 having changed Dryden's gold for baser metal of lower value, 
 though of greater bulk. 
 
 In this, and in all his other essays on the same subject, the 
 criticism of Dryden is the criticism of a poet ; not a dull col- 
 lection of theorems, nor a rude detection of faults, which per- 
 haps the censor was not able to have committed ; but a gay 
 and vigorous dissertation, where delight is mingled with in- 
 struction, and where the author proves his right of judgment 
 by his power of performance. 
 
 The different manner and effect with which critical knowledge 
 may be conveyed, was perhaps never more clearly exemplified 
 than in the performances of Rymer and Dryden. It was said 
 of a dispute between two mathematicians, ' ' malim cum Scali- 
 gero errare, quam cum Clavio recte sapere ;" that " it was 
 more eligible to go wrong with one than right with the other. ' ' 
 A tendency of the same kind every mind must feel at the 
 perusal of Dryden's prefaces and Rymer's discourses. With 
 Dryden we are wandering in quest of Truth ; whom we find, if 
 we find her at all, dressed in the graces of elegance ; and, if 
 we miss her, the labor of the pursuit rewards itself ; we are 
 led only through fragrance and flowers. Rymer, without 
 taking a nearer, takes a rougher way ; every step is to be 
 made through thorns and brambles ; and Truth, if we meet 
 her, appears repulsive by her mien, and ungraceful by her 
 habit. Dryden's criticism has the majesty of a queen ; Ry- 
 mer's has the ferocity of a tyrant. 
 
 As he had studied with great diligence the art of poetry, 
 and enlarged or rectified his notions by experience perpetually 
 increasing, he had his mind stored with principles and observa- 
 tions ; he poured out his knowledge with little labor ; for of 
 labor, notwithstanding the multiplicity of his productions, 
 there is sufficient reason to suspect that he was not a lover. 
 To write con amove, with fondness for the employment, with 
 perpetual touches and retouches, with unwillingness to take 
 leave of his own idea, and an unwearied pursuit of unattain- 
 able perfection, was, I think, no part of his character. 
 
 His criticism may be considered as general or occasional. In 
 his general precepts, which depend upon the nature of things 
 and the structure of the human mind, he may doubtless be safely 
 recommended to the confidence of the reader ; but his occa- 
 sional and particular positions were sometimes interested, softie- 
 times negligent, and sometimes capricious. It is not without 
 reason that Trapp, speaking of the praises which he bestows on 
 
I06 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 Palamon and Arcite, says, " Novimus judicium Drydeni de poe- 
 mate quodam Chauceri, pulchro sane illo, et admodum laudan- 
 do, nimirum quod non modo vere epicum sit, sed Iliada etiam 
 atque ^neada aequet, imo superet. Sed novimus eodem tem- 
 pore viri illius raaximi non semper accuratissimas esse censu- 
 ras, nee ad severissimam critices normam exactas : illo judice id 
 plerumque optimum est, quod nunc prse manibus habet, et in 
 quo nunc occupatur. " 
 
 He is therefore by no means constant to himself. His de- 
 fence and desertion of dramatic rhyme is generally known. 
 Spence, in his remarks on Pope's " Odyssey," produces what 
 he thinks an unconquerable quotation from Dryden's preface 
 to the ' ' ^neid, ' ' in favor of translating an epic poem into 
 blank verse ; but he forgets that when his author attempted 
 the " Iliad," some years afterwards, he departed from his 
 own decision, and translated into rhyme. 
 
 When he has any objection to obviate or any license to de- 
 fend, he is not very scrupulous about what he asserts, nor very 
 cautious, if the present purpose be served, not to entangle him- 
 self in his own sophistries. But, when all arts are exhausted, 
 like other hunted animals, he sometimes stands at bay ; when 
 he cannot disown the grossness of one of his plays, he declares 
 that he knows not any law that prescribes morality to a comic 
 poet. 
 
 His remarks on ancient or modern writers are not always to 
 be trusted. His parallel of the versification of Ovid with that 
 of Claudian has been very justly censured by Sewel.' His 
 comparison of the first line of Virgil with the first of Statius 
 is not happier. Virgil, he says, is soft and gentle, and would 
 have thought Statius mad, if he had heard him thundering out 
 ' Quae superimposito moles geminata colosso." 
 
 Statius perhaps heats himself, as he proceeds, to exaggera- 
 tion somewhat hyperbolical ; but undoubtedly Virgil would 
 have been too hasty if he had condemned him to straw for one 
 sounding line. Dryden wanted an instance, and the first that 
 occurred was impressed into the service. 
 
 What he wishes to say, he says at hazard ; he cited Gorbu- 
 duc, which he had never seen ; gives a false account of Chap- 
 man's versification ; and discovers, in the preface to his " Fa- 
 bles," that he translated the first book of the " Iliad" without 
 knowing what was in the second. 
 
 It will be difficult to prove that Dryden ever made any 
 great advances in literature. As, having distinguished himself 
 
 ' Preface to Ovid's " Metamorphoses." 
 
DRYDEN. 107 
 
 at Westminster under the tuition of Busby, who advanced his 
 scholars to a height of knowledge very rarely attained in gram- 
 mar-schools, he resided afterwards at Cambridge, it is not to 
 be supposed that his skill in the ancient languages was de- 
 ficient, compared with that of common students ; but his 
 scholastic acquisitions seem not proportionate to his opportuni- 
 ties and abilities. He could not, like Milton or Cowley, have 
 made his name illustrious merely by his learning. He men- 
 tions but few books, and those such as lie in the beaten track 
 of regular study ; from which, if ever he departs, he is in dan- 
 ger of losing himself in unknown regions. 
 
 In his dialogue on the drama he pronounces with great 
 confidence that the Latin tragedy of " Medea" is not Ovid's 
 because it is not sufficiently interesting and pathetic. He 
 might have determined the question upon surer evidence ; for 
 it is quoted by Quintilian as the work of Seneca ; and the 
 only line which remains of Ovid's play, for one line is left us, is 
 not there to be found. There was therefore no need of the 
 gravity of conjecture, or the discussion of plot or sentiment, to 
 find what was already known upon higher authority than such 
 discussion can ever reach. 
 
 His literature, though not always free from ostentation, will 
 be commonly found either obvious, and made his own by the 
 art of dressing it ; or superficial, which by what he gives shows 
 what he wanted ; or erroneous, hastily collected, and negli- 
 gently scattered. 
 
 Yet it cannot be said that his genius is ever unprovided of 
 matter, or that his fancy languishes in penury of ideas. His 
 works abound with knowledge and sparkle with illustrations. 
 There is scarcely any science or faculty that does not supply 
 him with occasional images and lucky similitudes ; every page 
 discovers a mind very widely acquainted both with art and na- 
 ture, and in full possession of great stores of intellectual 
 wealth. Of him that knows much it is natural to suppose that 
 he has read with diligence ; yet I rather believe that the knowl- 
 edge of Dryden was gleaned from accidental inteUigence and 
 various conversation, by a quick apprehension, a judicious 
 selection, and a happy memory, a keen appetite of knowledge, 
 and a powerful digestion ; by vigilance that permitted nothmg 
 to pass without notice, and a habit of reflection that suffered 
 nothing useful to be lost. A mind like Dryden's, always curi- 
 ous, always active, to which every understanding was proud to 
 be associated, and of which every one solicited the regard, by 
 an ambitious display of himself, had a more pleasant, perhaps 
 a nearer way to knowledge than by the silent progress of soli- 
 
ro8 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON OM 
 
 tary reading. I do not suppose that he despised books, or in- 
 tentionally neglected them ; but that he was carried out by the 
 impetuosity of his genius to more vivid and speedy instruc- 
 tors ; and that his studies were rather desultory and fortuitous 
 than constant and systematical. 
 
 It must be confessed that he scarcely ever appears to want 
 book-learning but when he mentions books ; and to him may 
 be transferred the praise which he gives his master Charles : 
 
 " His conversation, wit, and parts, 
 His knowledge in the noblest useful arts, 
 Were such dead authors could not give. 
 But habitudes of those that live . 
 Who, lighting him, did greater lights receive ; 
 He drain'd from all, and all they knew. 
 His apprehensions quick, his judgment true. 
 That the most learn'd with shame confess. 
 His knowledge more, his reading only less." 
 
 Of all this, however, if the proof be demanded, I will not 
 undertake to give it ; the atoms of probability, of which my 
 opinion has been formed, lie scattered over all his works ; and 
 by him who thinks the question worth his notice, his works 
 must be perused with very close attention. 
 
 Criticism, either didactic or defensive, occupies almost all 
 his' prose, except those pages which he has devoted to his 
 patrons ; but none of his prefaces were ever thought tedious. 
 They have not the formality of a settled style, in which the 
 first half of the sentence betrays the other. The pauses are 
 never balanced, nor the periods modelled ; every word seems 
 to drop by chance, though it falls into its proper place. 
 Nothing is cold or languid ; the whole is airy, animated, and 
 vigorous ; what is little is gay ; what is great is splendid. 
 He may be thought to mention himself too frequently ; but, 
 while he forces himself upon our esteem, we cannot refuse him 
 to stand high in his own. Every thing is excused by the play 
 of images and the sprightliness of expression. Though all is 
 easy, nothing is feeble ; though all seems careless, there is 
 nothing harsh ; and though since his earlier works more than 
 a century has passed, they have nothing yet uncouth or 
 obsolete. 
 
 He who writes much will not easily escape a manner — such 
 a recurrence of particular modes as may be easily noted. Dry- 
 den is always another and the same j he does not exhibit a sec- 
 ond time the same elegances in the same form, nor appears to 
 have any art other than that of expressing with clearness what 
 he thinks with vigor. His style could not easily be imitated, ' 
 
DR YDEN. 
 
 109 
 
 cither seriously or ludicrously ; for, being always equable and 
 always varied, it has no prominent or discriminative charac- 
 ters. The beauty who is totally free from disproportion of 
 parts and features cannot be ridiculed by an overcharged 
 resemblance. 
 
 From his prose, however, Dryden derives only his acci- 
 dental and secondary praise ; the veneration with which his 
 name is pronounced by every cultivator of English literature, 
 is paid to him as he refined the language, improved the senti- 
 ments, and tuned the numbers of English poetry. 
 
 After about half a century of forced thoughts and rugged 
 metre, some advances towards nature and harmony had been 
 already made by Waller and Denham ; they had shown that 
 long discourses in rhyme grew more pleasing when they were 
 broken into couplets, and that verse consisted not only in the 
 number but the arrangement of syllables. 
 
 But though they did much, who can deny that they left 
 much to do ? Their works were not many, nor were their 
 minds of very ample comprehension. More examples of more 
 modes of composition were necessary for the establishment of 
 regularity and the introduction of propriety in word and 
 thought. 
 
 Every language of a learned nation necessarily divides itself 
 into diction, scholastic and popular, grave and familiar, elegant 
 and gross ; and from a nice distinction of these different parts 
 arises a great part of the beauty of style. But, if we except a 
 few minds, the favorites of nature, to whom their own orig- 
 inal rectitude was in the place of rules, this delicacy of selec- 
 tion was little known to our authors ; our speech lay before 
 them in a heap of confusion ; and every man took for every 
 purpose what chance might offer him. 
 
 There was therefore before the time of Dryden no poetical 
 diction, no system of words at once refined from the grossness 
 of domestic use, and free from the harshness of terms appro- 
 priated to particular arts. Words too familiar or too remote 
 defeat the purpose of a poet. From those sounds which we 
 hear on small or on coarse occasions, we do not easily receive 
 strong impressions or delightful images ; and words to which 
 we are nearly strangers, whenever they occur, draw that atten- 
 tion on themselves which they should transmit to things. 
 
 Those happy combinations of words which distinguished 
 poetry from prose had been rarely attempted : we had few ele- 
 gances or flowers of speech ; the roses had not yet been 
 plucked from the bramble, or different colors had not been 
 joined to enliven one another. 
 
I lO DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 It may be doubted whether Waller and Denham could have 
 overborne the prejudices which had long prevailed, and which 
 even then were sheltered by the protection of Cowley. The 
 new versification, as' if was called, may be considered as owing 
 its establishment to -Dryden ; from whose time it is apparent 
 that English poetry 'has had no tendency to relapse to its for- 
 mer savageness. ' 
 
 The affluence and comprehension of our language is very 
 illustriously displayed in our poetical translations of ancient 
 writers ; a worku which the French seem to relinquish in de- 
 spair, and which we were long unable to perform with dexter- 
 ity. Ben Jonson thought it necessary to copy Horace almost 
 word by word ; Feltham, his contemporary and adversary, con- 
 siders it as indispensably requisite in a translation to give line 
 for line. It is said that Sandys, whom Dryden calls the best 
 versifier of the last age, has struggled hard to comprise every 
 book of the English " Metamorphoses" in the same number of 
 verses with the original. Holiday had nothing in view but to 
 show that he understood his author, with so little regard to the 
 grandeur of his diction, or the volubility of his numbers, that 
 his metres can hardly be called verses ; they cannot be read 
 without reluctance', 'nor will the labor always be rewarded by 
 understanding them. Cowley saw that such copiers were a 
 servile race ; he asserted his liberty, and spread his wings so 
 boldly that he left his authors. It was reserved for Dryden to 
 fix the limits of poetical liberty, and give us just rules and 
 examples of translation. 
 
 When languages are formed upon different principles, it is 
 impossible that the same modes of expression should always be 
 elegant in both. While they run on together, the closest trans- 
 lation may be considered as the best ; but when they divari- 
 cate, each must take its natural course. Where correspond- 
 ence cannot be obtained, it is necessary to be content with 
 something equivalent. " Translation, therefore," says Dry- 
 den, " is not so loose as paraphrase, nor so close as meta- 
 phrase. ' ' 
 
 All polished languages have different styles ; the concise, 
 the diffuse, the lofty, and the humble. In the proper choice 
 of style consists the resemblance which Dryden principally 
 exacts from the translator. He is to exhibit his author's 
 thoughts in such a dress of diction as the author would have 
 given them had his language been English : rugged magnifi- 
 cence is not to be softened ; hyperbolical ostentation is not to 
 be repressed ; nor sententious affectation tg have its point blunt- 
 
DRYDEN. Ill 
 
 ed. A translator is to be like his author ; it is not his business 
 to excel him. 
 
 The reasonableness of these rules seems sufficient for the 
 vindication ; and the effects produced by observing them were 
 so happy that I know not whether they were ever opposed but 
 by Sir Edward Sherburne, a man whose learning was greater 
 than his powers of poetry, and who, being better qualified to 
 give the meaning than the spirit of Seneca, has introduced his 
 version of three tragedies by a defence of close translation. 
 The authority of Horace which the new translators cited in 
 defence of their practice, he has, by a judicious explanation, 
 taken fairly from them ; but reason wants not Horace to sup- 
 port it. 
 
 It seldom happens that all the necessary causes concur to 
 any great effect : will is wanting to power, or power to will, or 
 both are impeded by external obstructions. The exigencies in 
 which Dryden was condemned to pass his life are jeasonably 
 supposed to have blasted his genius, to have driven out his 
 works in a state of immaturity, and to have intercepted the 
 full-blown elegance which longer growth would have supplied. 
 
 Poverty, like other rigid powers, is sometimes too hastily 
 accused. If the excellence of Dryden's works was lessened by 
 his indigence, their number was increased ; and I know not 
 how it will be proved that if he had written less he would have 
 written better ; or that indeed he would have undergone the 
 toil of an author, if he had not been solicited by something 
 more pressing than the love of praise. 
 
 But, as is said by his " Sebastian," 
 
 "What had been, is unknown ; what is, appears." 
 
 We know that Dryden's several productions were so many suc- 
 cessive expedients for his support ; his plays were therefore 
 often borrowed ; and his poems were almost all occasional. 
 
 In an occasional performance no height of excellence can 
 be expected from any mind, however fertile in itself, and how- 
 ever stored with acquisitions. He whose work is general and 
 arbitrary has the choice of his matter, and takes that which his 
 inclination and his studies have best qualified him to display 
 and decorate. He is at liberty to delay his publication till he 
 has satisfied his friends and himself, till he has reformed his 
 first thoughts by subsequent examination, and polished away 
 those faults which the precipitance of ardent composition is 
 likely to leave behind it. Virgil is related to have poured out 
 a great number of lines in the morning, and to have passed the 
 day in reducing them to fewer. 
 
I 1 2 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 The occasional poet is circumscribed by the narrowness of 
 his subject. Whatever can happen to man has happened so 
 often that little remains for fancy or invention. We have been 
 all born ; we have most of us been married ; and so many have 
 died before us, that our deaths can supply but few materials 
 for a poet. In the fate of princes the public has an interest ; 
 and what happens to them, of good or evil, the poets have 
 always considered a business for the muse. But after so many 
 inauguratory gratulations, nuptial hymns, and funeral dirges, 
 he must be highly favored by nature, or by fortune, who sayj 
 any thing not said before. Even war and conquest, howevei 
 splendid, suggest no new images ; the triumphant chariot of i 
 victorious monarch can be decked only with those ornamentii 
 that have graced his predecessors. 
 
 Not only matter but time is wanting. The poem must not 
 be delayed till the occasion is forgotten. The lucky moments 
 of animated imagination cannot be attended ; elegances and 
 illustrations cannot be multiplied by gradual accumulation ; the 
 composition must be despatched while conversation is yet 
 busy and admiration fresh ; and haste is to be made, lest some 
 other event should lay hold upon mankind. 
 
 Occasional compositions may, however, secure to a writer 
 the praise both of learning and facility ; for they cannot be the 
 effect of long study, and must be furnished immediately from 
 the treasure of the mind. 
 
 The death of Cromwell was the first public event which 
 called forth Dryden's poetical powers. His heroic stanzas 
 have beauties and defects ; the thoughts are vigorous, and, 
 though not always proper, show a mind replete with ideas ; the 
 numbers are smooth ; and the diction, if not altogether cor- 
 rect, is elegant and easy. 
 
 Davenant was perhaps at this time his favorite author, 
 though ' ' Gondibert' ' never appears to have been popular, and 
 from Davenant he learned to please his ear with the stanza of 
 four lines alternately rhymed. 
 
 Dryden very early formed his versification ; there are in 
 this early production no traces of Donne's or Jonson's rugged- 
 ness ; but he did not so soon free his mind from the ambition 
 of forced conceits. In his verses on the Restoration he says 
 of the king's exile, 
 
 " He, toss'd by fate, 
 Could taste no sweets of youth's desired age. 
 But found his life too true a pilgrimage. ' ' 
 
 And afterwards, to show how virtue and wisdom are increased 
 by adversity, he makes this remark : 
 
DRYDEN. 113 
 
 " Well might the ancient poets then confer 
 On Night the honor'd name of counsellor. 
 Since struck with rays of prosperous fortune blind, 
 We light alone in dark afflictions find." 
 
 His praise of Monk's dexterity comprises such a cluster of 
 thoughts unallied to one another as will not elsewhere be 
 easily found : 
 
 " 'Twas Monk, whom Providence design'd to loose 
 Those real bonds false freedom did impose. 
 The blessed saints that watch' d this turning scene 
 Did from their stars with joyful wonder lean, 
 To see small clues draw vastest weights along, 
 Not in their bulk, but in their order strong. 
 Thus pencils can by one slight touch restore 
 Smiles to that changed face that wept before. 
 With ease such fond chimeras we pursue. 
 As fancy frames, for fancy to subdue : 
 But when ourselves to action we betake. 
 It shuns the mint like gold that chemists make. 
 How hard was then his task, at once to be 
 What in the body natural we see ! 
 Man's Architect distinctly did ordain 
 The charge of muscles, nerves, and of the brain, 
 Through viewless conduits spirits to dispense 
 The springs of motion from the seat of sense : 
 'Twas not the hasty product of a day 
 But the well-ripen'd fruit of wise delay. 
 He, like a patient angler, ere he strook. 
 Would let them play awhile upon the hook. 
 Our healthful food the stomach labors thus. 
 At first embracing what it straight doth crush. 
 Wise leeches will not vain receipts obtrude, 
 While growing pains pronounce the humors crude ; 
 Deaf to complaints, they wait upon the ill. 
 Till some safe crisis authorize their skill." 
 
 He had not yet learned, indeed he never learned well, to 
 forbear the improper use of mythology. After having reward- 
 ed the heathen deities for their care, 
 
 " With Alga who the sacred altar strows ? 
 To all the sea-gods Charles an ofiEering owes : 
 A bull to thee, Portunus, shall be slain ; 
 A ram to you, ye Tempests of the Main." 
 
 He tells us, in the language of religion, 
 
 " Pray'r storm'd the skies, and ravish'd Charles from thence. 
 As heav'n itself is took by violence." 
 
 And afterwards mentions one of the most awful passages of 
 Sacred History, 
 
114 ^^- SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 Other conceits there are, too curious to be quite omitted, 
 
 as, 
 
 " For by example most we sinn'd before. 
 And, glass-like, clearness mix'd with frailty bore." 
 
 How far he was yet from thinking it necessary to found his 
 sentiments on nature, appears from the extravagance of his fic- 
 tions and hyperboles : 
 
 " The winds, that never moderation knew. 
 Afraid to blow too much, too faintly blew : 
 Or, out of breath with joy, could not enlarge 
 Their straiten'd lungs. 
 It is no longer motion cheats your view ; 
 As you meet it, the land approacheth you ; 
 The land returns, and in the white it wears 
 The marks of penitence and sorrow bears." 
 
 I know not whether this fancy, however Httle be its value, was 
 not borrowed. A French poet read to Malherbe some verses, 
 in which he represents France as moving out of its place to 
 receive the king. "Though this," said Malherbe, "was in 
 my time, I do not remember it." 
 
 His poem on the ' ' Coronation' ' has a more even tenor of 
 thought. Some lines deserve to be quoted : 
 
 " You have already quench'd sedition's brand ; 
 And zeal, that burnt it, only warms the land ; 
 The jealous sects that durst not trust their cause, 
 So far from their own will as to the laws. 
 Him for their umpire and their synod take. 
 And their appeal alone to Caesar make." 
 
 Here may be found one particle of that old versification, of 
 which, I believe, in all his works, there is not another : 
 
 ' ' Nor is it duty, or our hope alone, 
 Creates that joy, but ivSS. fruition." 
 
 In the verses to the Lord Chancellor Clarendon, two years 
 afterwards, is a conceit so hopeless at the first view that few 
 would have attempted it, and so successfully labored that 
 though at last it gives the reader more perplexity than pleas- 
 ure, and seems hardly worth the study that it costs, yet it must 
 be valued as a proof of a mind at once subtle and comprehen- 
 sive : 
 
 " In open prospect nothing bounds our eye, 
 
 Until the earth seems join'd unto the sky : 
 
 So in this hemisphere our utmost view 
 
 Is only bounded by our king and you : 
 
 Our sight is limited where you are join'd, 
 
 And beyond that no farther heaven can fijad. 
 
DR YDEN. I I 5 
 
 So well your virtues do with his agree, 
 
 That though your orbs of different greatness be. 
 
 Yet both are for each other's use dispos'd, 
 
 His to inclose, and yours to be inclos'd. 
 
 Nor could another in your room have been. 
 
 Except an emptiness had come between." 
 
 The comparison of the Chancellor to the Indies leaves all 
 resemblance, too, far behind it : 
 
 " And as the Indies were not found before 
 Those rich perfumes which from the happy shore 
 The winds upon their balmy wings convey'd. 
 Whose guilty sweetness first their world betray'd ; 
 So by your counsels we are brought to view 
 A new and undiscover'd world in you." 
 
 There is another comparison, for there is little else in the 
 poem, of which, though perhaps it cannot be explained into 
 plain prosaic meaning, the mind perceives enough to be 
 delighted, and readily forgives its obscurity for its magnifi- 
 cence : 
 
 " How strangely active are the arts of peace, 
 
 Whose restless motions less than wars do cease ! 
 
 Peace is not freed from labor, but from noise ; 
 
 And war more force, but not more pains employs. 
 
 Such is the mighty swiftness of your mind. 
 
 That, like the earth's, it leaves our sense behind : 
 
 While you so smoothly turn and roll our sphere. 
 
 That rapid motion does but rest appear. 
 
 For as in nature's swiftness, with the throng 
 
 Of flying orbs while ours is borne along. 
 
 All seems at rest to the deluded eye, 
 
 Mov'd by the soul of the same harmony : 
 
 So, carried on by your unwearied care. 
 
 We rest in peace, and yet in motion share." 
 
 To this succeed four lines, which perhaps afford Dryden's 
 first attempt at those penetrating remarks on human nature, for 
 which he seems to have been peculiarly formed : 
 
 " Let envy then those crimes within you see. 
 From which the happy never must be free ; 
 Envy, that does with misery reside. 
 The joy and the revenge of ruin'd pride." 
 
 Into this poem he seems to have collected all his powers ; 
 and after this he did not often bring upon his anvil such stub- 
 born and unmalleable thoughts ; but, as a specimen of his abil- 
 ities to unite the most unsociable matter, he has concluded 
 with lines of which I think myself not obliged to tell the mean- 
 ing : 
 
Il6 DR. SAMUEL fOHNSON OAT 
 
 " Yet unimpair'd with labors, or with time. 
 Your age but seems to a new youth to climb. 
 Thus heavenly bodies do our time beget, 
 And measure change, but share no part of it : 
 And still it shall without a weight increase, 
 Like this new year, whose motions never cease. 
 For since the glorious course you have begun 
 Is led by Charles, as that is by the Sun, 
 It must both weightless and immortal prove, 
 Because the centre of it is above." 
 
 In the " Annus Mirabilis" he returned to the quatrain, 
 which from that time he totally quitted, perhaps from experi- 
 ence of its inconvenience, for he complains of its difficulty. 
 This is one of his greatest attempts. He had subjects equal to 
 his abilities, a great naval war and the fire of London. Bat- 
 tles have always been described in heroic poetry ; but a sea- 
 fight and artillery had yet something of novelty. New arts are 
 long in the world before poets describe them ; for they borrow 
 every thing from their predecessors, and commonly derive very 
 little from nature or from life. Boileau was the first French 
 writer that had ever hazarded in verse the mention of modern 
 war or the effects of gunpowder. We, who are less afraid of 
 novelty, had already possession of those dreadful images. 
 Waller had described a sea-fight. Milton had not yet trans- 
 ferred the invention of fire-arms to the rebellious angels. 
 
 This poem is written with great diligence, yet does not fully 
 answer the expectation raised by such subjects and such a 
 writer. With the stanza of Davenant he has sometimes his 
 vein of parenthesis and incidental disquisition, and stops his 
 narrative for a wise remark. 
 
 The general fault is, that he affords more sentiment than 
 description, and does not so much impress scenes upon the 
 fancy as deduce consequences and make comparisons. 
 
 The initial stanzas have rather too much resemblance to 
 the first lines of Waller's poem on the War with Spain : per- 
 haps such a beginning is natural, and could not be avoided 
 without affectation. Both Waller and Dryden might take their 
 hint from the poem on the civil war of Rome, ' ' Orbem jam 
 totum," etc. 
 
 Of the king collecting his navy, he says : 
 
 " It seems, as every ship their sovereign knows. 
 His awful summons they so soon obey : 
 So hear the scaly herds when Proteus blows. 
 And so to pasture follow through the sea." 
 
 It would not be hard to believe that Dryden had written 
 the two first lines seriously, and that some wag had added the 
 
DRYDEN. 117 
 
 two latter in burlesque. Who would expect the lines that im- 
 mediately follow, which are indeed perhaps indecently hyper- 
 bolical, but certainly in a mode totally different ? 
 
 ' ' To see this fleet upon the ocean move 
 
 Angels drew wide the curtains of the skies : 
 And Heaven, as if there wanted lights above, 
 For tapers made two glaring comets rise. ' ' 
 
 The description of the attempt at Bergen will afford a very 
 complete specimen of the descriptions in this poem : 
 
 " And now approach'd their fleet from India, fraught 
 With all the riches of the rising sun : 
 And precious sand from southern climates brought, 
 The fatal regions where the war begun. 
 
 " Like hunted castors, conscious of their store. 
 
 Their way-laid wealth to Norway's coast they bring : 
 Then first the North's cold bosom spices bore. 
 And Winter brooded on the Eastern Spring. 
 
 " By the rich scent we found our perfum'd prey. 
 
 Which, flank'd with rocks, did close in covert lie ; 
 And round about their murd'ring cannon lay, 
 At once to threaten and invite the eye. 
 
 " Fiercer than cannon, and than rocks more hard, 
 The English undertake th' unequal war. 
 Seven ships alone, by which the port is barr'd. 
 Besiege the Indies, and all Denmark dare. 
 
 " These fight like husbands, but like lovers those ; 
 
 These fain would keep, and those more fain enjoy : 
 And to such height their frantic passion grows, 
 That what both love, both hazard to destroy : 
 
 " Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball. 
 
 And now their odors arm'd against them fly : 
 Some preciously by shatter'd porcelain fall. 
 And some by aromatic splinters die : 
 
 " And, though by tempests of the prize bereft. 
 In Heaven's inclemency some ease we find ; 
 Our foes we vanquish'd by our valor left. 
 And only yielded to the seas and wind. " 
 
 In this manner is the sublime too often mingled with the 
 ridiculous. The Dutch seek a shelter for a wealthy fleet : this 
 surely needed no illustration ; yet they must fly, not like all 
 the rest of mankind on the same occasion, but " like hunted 
 castors ;" and they might with strict propriety be hunted, for 
 we winded them by our noses — their perfumes betrayed them. 
 The husband and the lover, though of more dignity than the 
 
I 1 8 DR. SAMUEL fOHNSON ON 
 
 castor, are images too domestic to mingle properly with the 
 horrors of war. The two quatrains that follow are worthy of 
 the author. 
 
 The account of the different sensations with which the two 
 fleets retired, when the night parted them, is one of the fairest 
 flowers of English poetry : 
 
 " The night comes on, we eager to pursue 
 
 The combat still, and they asham'd to leave ; 
 Till the last streaks of dying day withdrew, 
 And doubtful moonlight did our rage deceive. 
 
 " In th' English fleet each ship resounds with joy, 
 And loud applause of their great leader's fame : 
 In fiery dreams the Dutch they still destroy, 
 And, slumbering, smile at the imagin'd flame. 
 
 " Not so the Holland fleet, who, tir'd and done, 
 Stretch'd on their decks, like weary oxen lie ; 
 Faint sweats all down their mighty members run 
 (Vast bulks, which little souls but ill supply). 
 
 " In dreams they fearful precipices tread, 
 
 Or, shipwreck'd, labor to some distant shore : 
 Or, in dark churches, walk among the dead ; 
 They wake with horror, and dare sleep no more." 
 
 It is a general rule in poetry that all appropriated terms of 
 art should be sunk in general expressions, because poetry is 
 to speak an universal language. This rule is still stronger with 
 regard to arts not liberal or confineid to few, and therefore far- 
 removed from common knowledge ; and of this kind, cer- 
 tainly, is technical navigation. Yet Dryden was of opinion 
 that a sea-fight ought to be described in the nautical language ; 
 and certainly, ' ' says he, ' ' as those who in a logical disputa- 
 tion keep to general terms, would hide a fallacy, so those who 
 do it in poetical description would veil their ignorance." 
 
 Let us then appeal to experience ; for by experience at last 
 we learn as well what will please as what will profit. In the 
 battle his terms seem to have been blown away ; but he deals 
 them liberally in the dock : 
 
 " So here some pick out bullets from the side, 
 
 Some drive old oakum thro' each seam and rift : 
 Their left hand does the calking-iron guide, 
 The rattling mallet with the right they lift. 
 
 " With boiling pitch another near at hand 
 
 (From friendly Sweden brought) the seams instops ; 
 Which, well laid o'er, the salt-sea waves withstand-. 
 And shake them from the rising beak in drops. 
 
DR YDMAT. I I Q 
 
 " Some the gall'd ropes with dauby marling bind, 
 Or sear-cloth masts with strong tarpauling coats : 
 To try new shrouds one mounts into the wind, 
 And one below their ease or stiffness notes ' ' 
 
 I suppose there is not one term which every reader does 
 not wish away. 
 
 His digression to the original and progress of navigation, 
 with his prospect of the advancement which it shall receive from 
 the Royal Society, then newly instituted, may be considered as 
 an example seldom equalled of seasonable excursion and artful 
 return. 
 
 One line, however, leaves me discontented ; he says that 
 by the help of the philosophers, 
 
 " Instructed ships shall sail to quick commerce, 
 By which remotest regions are allied." 
 
 Which he is constrained to explain in a note, " by a more exact 
 measure of longitude." It had better become Dryden's learn- 
 ing and genius to have labored science into poetry, and have 
 shown, by explaining longitude, that verse did net refuse the 
 ideas of philosophy. 
 
 His description of the fire is painted by resolute medita- 
 tion, out of a mind better formed to reason than to feel. The 
 conflagration of a city, with all its tumults of concomitant dis- 
 tress, is one of the most dreadful spectacles which this world 
 can offer to human eyes ; yet it seems to raise little emotion in 
 the breast of the poet ; he watches the flame coolly from street 
 to street, with now a reflection and now a simile, till at last he 
 meets the king, for whom he makes a speech, rather tedious in 
 a time so busy ; and then follows again the progress of the fire. 
 
 There are, however, in this part some passages that deserve 
 attention ; as in the beginning : 
 
 " The diligence of trades and noiseful gain. 
 And luxury, more late, asleep were laid ! 
 All was the Night's, and in her silent reign 
 
 No sound the rest of Nature did invade 
 In this deep quiet — " 
 
 The expression, "All was the Night's," is taken from 
 Seneca, who remarks on Virgil's line, 
 
 " Omnia noctis erant, placida composta quiete" 
 
 that he might have concluded better, 
 
 " Omnia noctis erant." 
 
 The following quatrain ie vigorous and animated : 
 
I20 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 " The ghosts of traitors from the bridge descend 
 With bold fanatic spectres to rejoice ; 
 About the fire into a dance they bend, 
 
 And sing their sabbath notes with feeble voice." 
 
 His prediction of the improvements which shall be made in 
 the new city is elegant and poetical, and with an event which 
 poets cannot always boast, has been happily verified. The 
 poem concludes with a simile that might have better been omit- 
 ted. 
 
 Dryden, when he wrote this poem, seems not yet fully to 
 have formed his versification, or settled his system of propriety. 
 
 From this time he addicted himself almost wholly to the 
 stage, ' ' to which, ' ' says he, ' ' my genius never much inclined 
 me," merely as the most profitable market for poetry. By 
 writing tragedies in rhyme he continued to improve his diction 
 and his numbers. According to the opinion of Harte, who 
 had studied his works with great attention, he settled his prin- 
 ciples of versification in 1676, when he produced the play of 
 " Aurung Zebe ;" and, according to his own account of the 
 short time in which he wrote ' ' Tyrannic Love' ' and ' ' The 
 State of Innocence," he soon obtained the full eifect of dili- 
 gence, and added facility to exactness. 
 
 Rhyme has been so long banished from the theatre, that we 
 know not its effects upon the passions of an audience ; but it 
 has this convenience, that sentences stand more dependent 
 on each other, and striking passages are therefore easily 
 selected and retained. Thus the description of Night in 
 ' ' The Indian Emperor, ' ' and the rise and fall of empire in 
 ' ' The Conquest of Granada, ' ' are more frequently repeated 
 than any lines in " All for Love" or " Don Sebastian." 
 
 To search his plays for vigorous sallies and sententious ele- 
 gances, or to fix the dates of any little pieces which he wrote 
 by chance or by solicitation, were labor too tedious and minute. 
 
 His dramatic labors did not so wholly absorb his thoughts 
 but that he promulgated the laws of translation in a preface to 
 the English Epistles of Ovid ; one of which he translated 
 himself, and another in conjunction with the Earl of Mul- 
 grave. 
 
 " Absalom an d Achitoph el " is a work so well known that 
 a particular crititism is superfluous. If it be considered as a 
 poem political and controversial, it will be found to comprise 
 all the excellences of which the subject is susceptible ; acri- 
 mony of censure, elegance of praise, artful delineation of char- 
 acters, variety and vigor of sentiment, happy turns of lan- 
 guage, and pleasing harmony of numbers ; and all these raised 
 
DR YD£N. 1 2 I 
 
 to such a height as can scarcely be found in any other English 
 composition. 
 
 It is not, however, without faults ; some lines are inelegant 
 or improper, and too many are irreligiously licentious. The 
 original structure of the poem was defective ; allegories drawn 
 to great length will always break ; Charles could not run con- 
 tinually parallel with David. 
 
 The subject had likewise another inconvenience ; it admit- 
 ted little imagery or description ; and a long poem of mere 
 sentiments easily becomes tedious ; though all the parts are 
 forcible, and every line kindles new rapture, the reader, if not 
 relieved by the interposition of something that soothes the 
 fancy, grows weary of admiration and defers the rest. 
 
 As an approach to historical truth was necessary, the ac- 
 tion and catastrophe were not in the poet's power ; there is 
 therefore an unpleasing disproportion between the beginning 
 and the end. We are alarmed by a faction formed of many 
 sects, various in their principles, but agreeing in their purpose 
 of mischief ; formidable for their numbers, and strong by their 
 supports ; while the king's friends are few and weak. The 
 chiefs on either part are set forth to view ; but, when expecta- 
 tion is at the height, the king makec a speech, and 
 
 " Henceforth a series of new times began." 
 
 Who can forbear to think of an enchanted castle, with a 
 wide moat and lofty battlements, walls of marble and gates of 
 brass, which vanishes at once into air when the destined 
 knight blows his horn before it ? 
 
 In the second part, written by Tate, there is a long inser- 
 tion, which, for its poignancy of satire, exceeds any part of the 
 former. Personal resentment, though no laudable motive to 
 satire, can add great force to general principles. Self-love is a 
 busy prompter. 
 
 ' ' The Medal, ' ' written upon the same principles with 
 " Absalom and Achitophel," but upon a narrower plan, gives 
 less pleasure, though it discovers equal abilities in the writer. 
 The superstructure cannot extend beyond the foundation ; a 
 single character or incident cannot furnish as many ideas as a 
 series of events or multiptlicity of agents. This poem, there- 
 fore, since time has left it to itself, is not much read, nor per- 
 haps generally understood ; yet it abounds with touches both of 
 humorous and serious satire. The picture of a man whose 
 propensions to mischief are such that his best actions are but 
 inability of wickedness, is very skilfully delineated and strongly 
 colored : 
 
123 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 " Power was his aim ; but, thrown from that pretence, ) 
 The wretch turn'd loyal in his own defence, ;- 
 
 And malice reconcil'd him to his prince. ; 
 
 Him, in the anguish of his soul, he serv'd ; 
 Rewarded faster still than he deserv'd : 
 Behold him now exalted into trust ; 
 His counsels oft convenient, seldom just ; 
 E'en in the most sincere advice he gave, 
 He had a grudging still to be a knave. 
 The frauds, he learnt in his fanatic years, 
 Made him uneasy in his lawful gears. 
 At least as little honest as he could. 
 And, like white witches, mischievously good. 
 To this first bias, longingly, he leans : 
 And rather would be great by wicked means." 
 
 The " Threnodia," which, by a term I am afraid neither 
 authorized nor analogical, he calls " Augustalis, " is not among 
 his happiest productions. Its iirst and obvious defect is the 
 irregularity of its metre, to which the ears of that age, however, 
 were accustomed. What is worse, it has neither tenderness 
 nor dignity ; it is neither magnificent nor pathetic. He seems 
 to look round him for images which he cannot find, and what 
 he has he distorts by endeavoring to enlarge them. " He is," 
 he says, "petrified with grief;" but the marble sometimes 
 relents, and trickles in a joke : 
 
 " The sons of art all med'cines tried. 
 And every noble remedy applied : 
 
 With emulation each essay'd 
 
 His utmost skill ; nay, more, they pray'd : 
 Was never losing game with better conduct play'd." 
 
 He had been a little inclined to merriment before, upon the 
 prayers of a nation for their dying sovereign : nor was he seri- 
 ous enough to keep heathen fables out of his religion : 
 
 " With him the innumerable crowd of arm'd prayers 
 
 Knock'd at the gates of Heaven, and knock'd aloud ; 
 
 The first well-meaning rude petitioners 
 All for his life assail'd the throne. 
 
 All would have brib'd the skies by offering up their own. 
 
 So great a throng not Heaven itself could bar ; 
 
 'Twas almost borne by force as in the giants' war. 
 
 The pray'rs, at least, for his reprieve, were heard ; 
 
 His death, like Hezekiah's, was deferr'd." 
 
 There is throughout the composition a desire of splendor 
 without wealth. In the conclusion he seems too much pleased 
 with the prospect of the new reign to have lamented his old 
 master with much sincerity. 
 
 He did not miscarry in this attempt for want of skill either 
 
DRYDEN. 123 
 
 in lyric or elegiac poetry. His poem on the death of Mrs. Kil- 
 ligrew is undoubtedly the noblest ode that our language ever 
 has produced. The first part flows with a torrent of enthusi- 
 asm. Fervet immensusque ruit. All the stanzas indeed are 
 not equal. An imperial crown cannot be one continued dia- 
 mond : the gems must be held together by some less valuable 
 matter. 
 
 In his first " Ode for Cecilia's Day," which is lost in the 
 splendor of the second, there are passages which would have 
 dignified any other poet. The first stanza is vigorous and ele- 
 gant, though the word diapason is too technical, and the rhymes 
 are too remote from one another. 
 
 " From harmony, from heavenly harmony, 
 
 This universal frame began ; 
 When Nature underneath a heap of jarring atoms lay, 
 
 And could not heave her head, 
 The tuneful voice was heard from high, 
 
 Arise, ye more than dead. 
 Then cold and hot, and moist and dry. 
 In order to their stations leap. 
 
 And music's power obey. 
 From harmony, from heavenly harmony. 
 
 This universal frame began : 
 
 From harmony to harmony. 
 Through all the compass of the notes it ran. 
 
 The diapason closing full in man." 
 
 The conclusion is likewise striking ; but it includes an 
 image so awful in itself that it can owe little to poetry : and I 
 could wish the antithesis of music untuning had found some 
 other place. 
 
 "As from the power of sacred lays 
 The spheres began to move, 
 And sung the great Creator's praise 
 
 To all the bless 'd above : 
 So, when the last and dreadful hour 
 This crumbling pageant shall devour 
 The trumpet shall be heard on high. 
 The dead shall live, the living die, 
 And music shall untune the sky." 
 
 Of his skill in elegy he has given a specimen in his " Eleo- 
 nora." of which the following lines discover their author : 
 
 " Though all these rare endowments of the mind 
 Were in a narrow space of lite confin'd, 
 The figure was with full perfection crown'd, 
 Though not so large an orb. as truly round : 
 As when in glory, through the public place. 
 The spoils of conquer'd nations were to pass. 
 
124- DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 And but one day for triumph was allow'd, 
 
 The consul was constrain'd his pomp to crowd ; 
 
 And so the swift procession hurried on. 
 
 That all, though not distinctly, might be shown : 
 
 So, in the straiten'd bounds of life confin'd. 
 
 She gave but glimpses of her glorious mind ; 
 
 And multitudes of virtues pass'd along. 
 
 Each pressing foremost in the mighty throng. 
 
 Ambitious to be seen, and then make room 
 
 For greater multitudes that were to come. 
 
 Yet unemploy'd no minute slipp'd away ; 
 
 Moments were precious in so short a stay. 
 
 The haste of Heaven to have her was so great. 
 
 That some were single acts, though each complete ; 
 
 And every act stood ready to repeat." 
 
 This piece, however, is not virithout its faults ; there is so 
 much hkeness in the initial comparison that there is no illustra- 
 tion. As a king would be lamented, Eleonora was lamented : 
 
 " As. when some great and gracious monarch dies 
 Soft whispers, first, and mournful murmurs, rise 
 Among the sad attendants ; then the sound 
 Soon gathers voice, and spreads the news around. 
 Through town and country, till the dreadful blast 
 Is blown to distant colonies at last. 
 Who then, perhaps, were offering vows in vain 
 For his long life, and for his happy reign : 
 So slowly, by degrees, unwilling Fame 
 Did matchless Eleonora's fate proclaim, 
 Till public as the loss the news became." 
 
 This is little better than to say in praise of a sHOrb that it 
 is as green as a tree ; or of a brook, that it waters a garden, as 
 a river waters a country. 
 
 Dryden confesses that he did not know the lady whom he 
 celebrates : the praise being therefore inevitably general, fixes 
 no impression upon the reader, nor excites any tendency to 
 love, nor much desire of imitation. Knowledge of the subject 
 is to the poet what durable materials are to the architect. 
 
 The ' ' Religio Laici, ' ' which borrows its title from the 
 " Religio Medici" of Browne, is almost the only work of Dry- 
 den which can be considered as a voluntary effusion ; in this, 
 therefore, it might be hoped that the full effulgence of his 
 genius would be found. But unhappily the subject is rather 
 argumentative than poetical ; he intended only a specimen of 
 metrical disputation : 
 
 ' And this unpolish'd rugged verse I chose. 
 As fittest for discourse, and nearest prose." 
 
 This, however, is a composition of great excellence in its 
 kind, in which the familiar is very properly diversified with the 
 
DRY DEN. 125 
 
 solemn, and the grave with the humorous ; in which metre 
 has neither weakened the force nor clouded the perspicuity of 
 argument ; nor will it be easy to find another example equally 
 happy of this middle kind of writing, which, though prosaic in 
 some parts, rises to high poetry in others, and neither towers to 
 the skies nor creeps along the ground. 
 
 Of the same kind, or not far distant from it, is " The Hind 
 and Panther," the longest of all Dryden's original poems ; an 
 allegory intended to comprise and to decide the controversy 
 between the Romanists and Protestants. The scheme of the 
 work is injudicious and incommodious ; for what can be more 
 absurd than that one beast should counsel another to rest her 
 faith upon a pope and council ? He seems well enough skilled 
 in the usual topics of argument, endeavors to show the neces- 
 sity of an infallible judge, and reproaches the reformers with 
 want of unity ; but is weak enough to ask, why, since we see 
 without knowing how, we may not have an infallible judge 
 without knowing where ? 
 
 The Hind at one time is afraid to drink at the common 
 brook, because she may be worried ; but, walking home with 
 the Panther, talks by the way of the Nicene fathers, and at last 
 declares herself to be of the Catholic Church. 
 
 This absurdity was very properly ridiculed in the ' ' City 
 Mouse and Country Mouse" of Montague and Prior; and 
 in the detection and censure of the incongruity of the fic- 
 tion chiefly consists the value of their performance, which, 
 whatever reputation it might obtain by the help of temporary 
 passions, seems, to readers almost a century distant, not very 
 forcible or animated. 
 
 Pope, whose judgment was perhaps a little bribed by the 
 subject, used to mention this poem as the most correct speci- 
 men of Dryden's versification. It was indeed written when 
 he had completely formed his manner, and may be supposed 
 to exhibit, negligence excepted, his deliberate and ultimate 
 scheme of metre. 
 
 We may therefore reasonably infer that he did not approve 
 the perpetual uniformity which confines the sense to couplets, 
 since he has broken his lines in the initial paragraph. 
 
 " A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchang'd, 
 Fed on the lawns, and in the forest rang'd : 
 Without unspotted, innocent within. 
 She fear'd no danger, for she knew no sin. 
 Yet had she oft been chas'd with horns and hounds. 
 And Scythian shafts, and many-winged wounds 
 Aim'd at her heart ; was often forc'd to fiy, 
 And doom'd to death though fated not to die." 
 
126 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 These lines are lofty, elegant, and musical, notwithstanding 
 the interruption of the pause, of which the effect is rather in- 
 crease of pleasure by variety than offence by ruggedness. 
 
 To the first part it was his intention, he says, ' ' to give the 
 majestic turn of heroic poesy ;" and perhaps he might have 
 executed his design not unsuccessfully, had not an opportunity 
 of satire, which he cannot forbear, fallen sometimes in his way. 
 The character of a Presbyterian, whose emblem is the wolf, is 
 not very heroically majestic ; 
 
 " More haughty than the rest, the wolfish race 
 Appear with belly gaunt and famish'd face ; 
 Never was so deform 'd a beast of grace. 
 His ragged tale betwixt his legs he wears. 
 Close clapp'd for shame ; but his rough crest he rears, 
 And pricks up his predestinating ears. ' ' 
 
 His general character of the other sorts of beasts that never 
 go to church, though sprightly and keen, has, however, not 
 much of heroic poesy : 
 
 " These are the chief ; to number o'er the rest. 
 And stand like Adam naming every beast, 
 Were weary work ; nor will the Muse describe 
 A slimy-born and sun-begotten tribe, 
 Who, far from steeples and their sacred sound, 
 In fields their sullen conventicles found. 
 These gross, half-animated lumps I leave ; 
 Nor can I think what thoughts they can conceive ; 
 But, if they think at all, 'tis sure no higher 
 Than matter, put in motion, may aspire : 
 Souls that can scarce ferment their mass of clay, 
 So drossy, so divisible are they, 
 As would but serve pure bodies for allay ; 
 Such souls as shards produce, such beetle things 
 As only buzz to Heaven with evening wings ; 
 Strike in the dark, offending but by chance : 
 Such are the blindfold blows of ignorance. 
 They know no being, and but hate a name ; 
 To them the Hind and Panther are the same." 
 
 One more instance, and that taken from the narrative part, 
 where style was more in his choice, will show how steadily he 
 kept his resolution of heroic dignity : 
 
 " For when the herd, suffic'd, did late repair 
 To ferny heaths and to their forest lair, 
 She made a mannerly excuse to stay. 
 Proffering the Hind to wait her half the way ; 
 That, since the sky was clear an hour of talk 
 Might help her to beguile the tedious walk. 
 With much good-will the motion was embrac'd. 
 To chat §.ivbile on their adventures past : 
 
DRYDEN. 127 
 
 Nor had the grateful Hind so soon forgot 
 
 Her friend and fellow-sufferer in the plot. 
 
 Yet, wondering how of late she grew estrang'd, 
 
 Her forehead cloudy and her count'nance chang'd, 
 
 She thought this hour th' occasion would present 
 
 To learn her secret cause of discontent, 
 
 Which well she hop'd might be with ease redress'd, ) 
 
 Considering her a well-bred civil beast, |- 
 
 And more a gentlewoman than the rest. ) 
 
 After some common talk what rumors ran. 
 
 The lady of the spotted muff began." 
 
 The second and third parts he professes to have reduced to 
 diction more famihar and more suitable to dispute and conver- 
 sation ; the difference is not, however, very easily perceived ; 
 the first has familiar, and the two others have sonorous, lines. 
 The original incongruity runs through the whole ; the king is 
 now Csesar and now the lion ; and the name Pan is given to 
 the Supreme Being. 
 
 But when this constitutional absurdity is forgiven, the poem 
 must be confessed to be written with smoothness of metre, a 
 wide extent of knowledge, and an abundant multiplicity of 
 images ; the controversy is embellished with pointed sentences, 
 diversified by illustrations, and enlivened by sallies of invec- 
 tive. Some of the facts to which allusions are made are now 
 become obscure, and perhaps there may be many satirical pas- 
 sages little understood. 
 
 As it was by its nature a work of defiance, a composition 
 which would naturally be examined with the utmost acrimony 
 of criticism, it was probably labored with uncommon atten- 
 tion, and there are, indeed, few negligences in the subordinate 
 parts. The original impropriety, and the subsequent unpopu- 
 larity of the subject, added to the ridiculousness of its first ele- 
 ments, has sunk it into neglect ; but it may be usefully studied 
 as an example of poetical ratiocination, in which the argument 
 suffers little from the metre. 
 
 In the poem " On the Birth of the Prince of Wales," noth- 
 ing is very remarkable but the exorbitant adulation and that 
 insensibility of the precipice on which tht king was then stand- 
 ing, which the laureate apparently shared with the rest of the 
 courtiers. A few months cured him of controversy, dismissed 
 him from court, and made him again a playwright and trans- 
 lator. 
 
 Of Juvenal there had been a translation by Stapylton, and 
 another by Holiday ; neither of them is very poetical. Stapyl- 
 ton is more smooth ; and Holiday's is more esteemed for the 
 learning of his notes. A new version was proposed to the 
 
128 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 poets of that time, and undertaken by them in conjunction. 
 The main design was conducted by Dryden, whose reputation 
 was such that no man was unwilling to serve the muses under 
 him. 
 
 The general character of this translation will be given 
 when it is said to preserve the wit, but to want the dignity, of 
 the original. The peculiarity of Juvenal is a mixture of gayety 
 and stateliness, of pointed sentences, and declamatory gran- 
 deur. His points have not been neglected ; but his grandeur 
 none of the band seemed to consider as necessary to be imi- 
 tated, except Creech, who undertook the thirteenth satire. It 
 is therefore, perhaps, possible to give a better representation of 
 that great satirist, even in those parts which Dryden himself has 
 translated, some passages excepted, which will never be ex- 
 celled. 
 
 With Juvenal was published Persius, translated wholly by 
 Dryden. This work, though, like all other productions of Dry- 
 den, it may have shining parts, seems to have been written 
 merely for wages, in an uniform mediocrity, without any eager 
 endeavor after excellence or laborious effort of the mind. 
 
 There wanders an opinion among the readers of poetry 
 that one of these satires is an exercise of the school. Dryden 
 says that he once translated it at school ; but not that he pre- 
 served or published the juvenile performance. 
 
 Not long afterwards he undertook perhaps the most ardu- 
 ous work of its kind, a translation of Virgil, for which he had 
 shown how well he was qualified by his version of the Pollio, 
 and two episodes, one of Nisus and Euryalus, the other of 
 Mezentius and Lausus. 
 
 In the comparison of Homer and Virgil, the discriminative 
 excellence of Homer is elevation and comprehension of 
 thought, and that of Virgil is grace and splendor of diction. 
 The beauties of Homer are therefore difficult to be lost, and 
 those of Virgil difficult to be retained. The massy trunk of 
 sentiment is safe by its solidity, but the blossoms of elocution 
 easily drop away. The author, having the choice of his own 
 images, selects those which he can best adorn ; the translator 
 must, at all hazards, follow his original, and express thoughts 
 which perhaps he would not have chosen. When to this pri- 
 mary difficulty is added the inconvenience of a language so 
 much inferior in harmony to the Latin, it cannot be expected 
 that they who read the " Georgics" and the " ^neid" should 
 be much delighted with any version. 
 
 All these obstacles Dryden saw, and all these he determined 
 to encounter, The expectation of his work was undoubtedly 
 
DRYDEN. I2g 
 
 great , the nation considered its honor as interested in the 
 event. One gave him the different editions of his author, an- 
 other helped him in the subordinate parts. The arguments of 
 the several books were given him by Addison. 
 
 The hopes of the public were not disappointed. He pro- 
 duced, says Pope, " the most noble and spirited translation 
 that I know in any language. ' ' It certainly excelled whatevef 
 had appeared in English, and appears to have satisfied his 
 friends, and for the most part to have silenced his enemies. 
 Milbourne, indeed, a clergyman, attacked it ; but his outrages 
 seem to be the ebullitions of a mind agitated by a stronger 
 resentment than bad poetry can excite, and previously resolved 
 not to be pleased. 
 
 His criticism extends only to the Preface, Pastorals, and 
 Georgics j and, as he professes to give his antagonist an oppor- 
 tunity of reprisal, he has added his own version of the first and 
 fourth Pastorals, and the first Georgic. The world has 
 forgotten his book ; but since his attempt has given him a 
 place in literary history, I will preserve a specimen of his criti- 
 cism by inserting his remarks on the invocation before the first 
 Georgic ; and of his poetry, by annexing his own version. 
 
 Ver. I. 
 " ' What makes a plenteous harvest, when to turn 
 The fruitful soil, and when to sow the corn.' 
 
 It's unlucky, they say, to stumble at the threshold ; but what has 
 a plenteous harvest to do here ? Virgil would not pretend to 
 prescribe rules for that which depends not on the husbandman's 
 care, but the disposition of Heaven altogether. Indeed, the 
 plenteous crop depends somewhat on the good method of tillage ; 
 and where the land's ill-manur'd, the corn, without a miracle, 
 can be but indifferent : but the harvest may he good, which is its 
 properest epithet, tho' the husbandman's skill were never so 
 indifferent. The next sentence is too literal, and when to plough 
 had been Virgil's meaning, and intelligible to everybody ; 
 and when to sow the corn is a needless addition. 
 
 Ver. 3. 
 " ' The care of sheep, of oxen, and of kine, 
 
 And when to geld the lambs, and shear the swine,' 
 
 would as well have fallen under the cura bourn qui cultus ha- 
 bendo sit pecori, as Mr. D.'s deduction of particulars. 
 
 Ver. 5. 
 " ' The birth and genius of the frugal bee 
 I sing, Macenas, and I sing to thee,' 
 
130 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 But where did experientia ever signify birth and gemus? or 
 what ground was there for such a figure in this place ? How 
 much more manly is Mr. Ogylby's version ! 
 
 " ' What makes rich grounds, in what celestial signs 
 'Tis good to plough, and marry elms with vines ; 
 What best fits cattle, what with sheep agrees. 
 And several arts improving frugal bees ; 
 I sing, Maecenas.' 
 
 Which four lines, tho' faulty enough, are yet much more to the 
 purpose than Mr. D.'s six. 
 
 Ver. 22. 
 " ' From fields and mountains to my song repair,' 
 
 for patrium linquens nemus, saltusque Lyctsi — very well ex- 
 plained ! 
 
 Ver. 23, 24. 
 
 " ' Inventor Pallas, of the fattening oil, 
 
 Thou founder of the plough, and ploughman's toil.' 
 
 Written as if these had been Pallas' s invention. The plough- 
 man's toil's impertinent. 
 
 Ver. 25. 
 ' ' ' The shroud-like cypress. ' 
 
 Why shroud-like 1 Is a cypress, pulled up by the roots, which 
 the sculpture in the last Eclogue fills Silvanus's hand with, so 
 very like a shroud 1 Or did not Mr. D. think of that kind of 
 cypress us'd often for scarves and hatbands at funerals formerly, 
 or for widows' veils, etc. ? If so, 'twas a deep, good thought. 
 
 Ver. 26. 
 
 " ' That wear 
 
 The rural honors, and increase the year.' 
 
 What's meant by increasing the year ? Did the gods or god- 
 desses add more months, or days, or hours to it ? Or how can 
 arva tueri signify to wear rural honors ? Is this to translate 
 or abuse an author? The next couplet is borrowed from 
 Ogylby, I suppose, because less to the purpose than ordinary. 
 
 Ver. 33. 
 " ' The patron of the world, and Rome's peculiar guard.' 
 
 Idle, and none of Virgil's, no more than the sense of the pre- 
 cedent couplet ; so, again, he interpolates Virgil with that and the 
 round circle of the year to guide powerful of blessings, which thou 
 strew' st around ; a ridiculous Latinism, and an impertinent 
 addition j indeed the whole period is but one piece of absurdity 
 and nonsense, as those who lay it with the original must find. 
 
DRY DEN. 131 
 
 Ver. 42, 43. 
 " ' And Neptune shall resigfn the fasces of the sea.' 
 
 Was he consul or dictator there ? 
 
 " ' And watery virgins for thy bed shall strive.' 
 
 Both absurd interpolations. 
 
 Ver. 47, 48. 
 " ' Where in the void of heaven a place is free, 
 Ah, happy D n, were that place for thee ! ' 
 
 But where is that void? Or, what does our translator mean by 
 it ? He knows what Ovyi says God did to prevent such a void 
 in heaven ; perhaps this was then forgotten ; but Virgil talks 
 more sensibly. 
 
 Ver. 49. 
 " ' The scorpion ready to receive thy laws.' 
 
 No, he would not then have gotten out of his way so fast. 
 
 Ver. 56. 
 " ' Though Proserpine affects her silent seat.' 
 
 What made her then so angry with Ascalaphus for preventing 
 her return ? She was now mus'd to Patience under the deter- 
 minations of Fate, rather than /(?«(/ of her residence. 
 
 Ver. 61, £2, 63. 
 " ' Pity the poet's and the ploughman's cares, 
 Interest thy greatness in our mean affairs, 
 And use thyself betimes to hear our prayers. ' 
 
 Which is such a •9ix&'iche.& perversion of Virgil's noble thought as 
 Vicars would have blush 'd at : but Mr. Ogylby makes us some 
 amends by his better lines : 
 
 " ' O wheresoe'er thou art, from thence incline. 
 And grant assistance to my bold design ; 
 Pity, with me, poor husbandmen's affairs. 
 And now, as if translated, hear our prayers. ' 
 
 This is sense, and to the purpose : the other, poor mistaken 
 stuff." 
 
 Such were the strictures of Milbourne, who found few abet- 
 tors, and of whom it may be reasonably imagined that many 
 who favored his design were ashamed of his insolence. 
 
 When admiration had subsided, the translation was more 
 coolly examined, and found, like all others, to be sometimes 
 erroneous and sometimes licentious. Those who could find 
 faults thought they could avoid them ; and Dr. Brady attempt- 
 
132 DS. SAMUEL yOHNSODT 01^ 
 
 ed in blank verse a translation of the " ^neid," which, when 
 dragged into the world, did not live long enough to cry. I 
 have never seen it ; but that such a version there is, or has 
 been, perhaps some old catalogue informed me. 
 
 With not much better success Trapp, when his Tragedy 
 and his Prelections had given him reputation, attempted 
 another blank version of the ''^neid ;" to which, notwith- 
 standing the slight regard with which it was treated, he had 
 afterwards perseverance enough to add the " Eclogues" and 
 ' ' Georgics. ' ' His book may continue in existence as long as 
 it is the clandestine refuge of school-boys. 
 
 Since the English ear has been aqcustomed to the melliflu- 
 ence of Pope's numbers, and the diction of poetry has become 
 more splendid, new attempts have been made to translate Vir- 
 gil ; and all his works have been attempted by men better 
 qualified to contend with Dryden. I will not engage myself in 
 an invidious comparison, by opposing one passage to another ; 
 a work of which there would be no end, and which might be 
 often offensive without use. 
 
 It is not by comparing line with line that the merit of great 
 works is to be estimated, but by their general effects and ulti- 
 mate result. It is easy to note a weak line, and write one 
 more vigorous in its place ; to find a happiness of expression 
 in the original, and transplant it by force into the version ; but 
 what is given to the parts may be subducted from the whole, 
 and the reader may be weary, though the critic may commend. 
 Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight ; 
 by their power of attracting and detaining the attention. That 
 book is good in vain which the reader throws away He only 
 is the master who keeps the mind in pleasing captivity ; whose 
 pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasure 
 are perused again ; and whose conclusion is perceived with an 
 eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day. 
 
 By his proportion of this predomination I will consent that 
 Dryden should bj tried ; of this which, in opposition to rea- 
 son, makes ArijUj the darling and the pride of Italy ; of this 
 which, in defii.ici of criticism, continues Shakespeare the sov- 
 ereign of the drama. 
 
 His last work was his " Fables," in which he gave us the 
 first example of a mode of writing which the Italians call 
 refaccimento, a renovation of ancient writers by modernizing 
 their language. Thus the old poem of " Boiardo" has been 
 new-dressed by Domenichi and Berni. The works of Chaucer, 
 upon which this kind of rejuvenescence has been bestowed by 
 D:yden, require little criticism. The tale of the Cock seems 
 
hardly worth revival ; and the story of " Palamon and 
 Arcite, " containing an action unsuitable to the times in which 
 it is placed, can hardly be suffered to pass without censure of 
 the hyperbolical commendation which Dryden has given it in 
 the general Preface, and in a poetical Dedication, a piece 
 where his original fondness for remote conceits seems to have 
 revived. 
 
 Of the three pieces borrowed from Boccace, ' ' Sigismunda' ' 
 may be defended by the celebrity of the story. " Theodore 
 and Honoria," though it contains not much moral, yet 
 afforded opportunities of striking description. And ' ' Cy- 
 mon" was formerly a tale of such reputation that at the revival 
 of letters it was translated into Latin by one of the Beroalds. 
 
 Whatever subjects employed his pen, he was still improving 
 our measures and embellishing our language. 
 
 In this volume are interspersed some short original poems, 
 which, with his prologues, epilogues, and songs, may be com- 
 prised in Congreve's remark, that even those, if he had written 
 nothing else, would have entitled him to the praise of excel- 
 lence in his kind. 
 
 One composition must, however, be distinguished. The 
 " Ode for St. Cecilia's Day," perhaps the last effort of his 
 poetry, has been always considered as exhibiting the highest 
 flight of fancy, and the exactest nicety of art. This is allowed 
 to stand without a rival. If indeed there is any excellence be- 
 yond it, in some other of Dryden's works that excellence must 
 be found. Compared with the ' ' Ode on Killigrew, ' ' it may be 
 pronounced perhaps superior on the whole, but without any 
 single part equal to the first stanza of the other. 
 
 It is said to have cost Dryden a fortnight's labor ; but it 
 does not want its negligences ; some of the lines are without 
 correspondent rhymes ; a defect which I never detected but 
 after an acquaintance of many years, and which the enthusiasm 
 of the writer might hinder him from perceiving. 
 
 His last stanza has less emotion than the former ; but it is 
 not less elegant in the diction. The conclusion is vicious ; the 
 music of ' ' Timotheus, ' ' which raised a mortal to the skies, had 
 only a metaphorical power ; that of " Cecilia," which drew an 
 angel down, had a real effect : the crown, therefore, could not 
 reasonably be divided. 
 
 In a general survey of Dryden's labors, he appears to ha,ve 
 a mind very comprehensive by nature, and much enriched with 
 acquired knowledge. His compositions are the effects of a 
 vigorous genius operating upon large materials. 
 
 The power that predominated in his intellectual operations 
 
134 OR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 was rather strong reason than quick sensibility. Upon all oc- 
 casions that Tvere presented he studied rather than felt, and 
 produced sentiments not such as nature enforces, but medita- 
 tion supplies. With the simple and elemental passions, as they 
 spring separate in the mind, he seems not much acquainted : 
 and seldom describes them but as they are complicated by the 
 various relations of society and confused in the tumults and 
 agitations of life. 
 
 What he says of Love may contribute to the explanation of 
 his character : 
 
 " Love various minds does variously inspire : 
 It stirs in gentle bosoms gentle fire. 
 Like that of incense on the altar laid ; 
 But raging flames tempestuous souls invade : 
 A fire which every windy passion blows, 
 With pride it mounts, or with revenge it glows." 
 
 Dryden's was not one of the gentle bosoms : Love, as it sub- 
 sists in itself, with no tendency but to the person loved, and 
 wishing only for correspondent kindness ; such Love as shuts 
 out all other interest, the Love of the Golden Age, was too 
 soft and subtle to put his faculties in motion. He hardly con- 
 ceived it but in its turbulent effervescence with some other 
 desires ; when it was inflamed by rivalry or obstructed by 
 difficulties ; when it invigorated ambition or exasperated re- 
 venge. 
 
 He is, therefore, with all his variety of excellence, not often 
 pathetic ; and had so little sensibility of the power of effusions 
 purely natural, that he did not esteem them in others : simpli- 
 city gave him no pleasure ; and for the first part of his life he 
 looked on Otway with contempt, though at last, indeed very 
 late, he confessed that in his play there was Nature, which is 
 the chief beauty. 
 
 We do not always know our own motives. I am not cer- 
 tain whether it was not rather the difficulty which he found in 
 exhibiting the genuine operations of the heart, than a servile 
 submission to an injudicious audience that filled his plays 
 with false magnificence. It was necessary to fix attention ; 
 and the mind can be captivated only by recollection or by curi- 
 osity ; by reviving natural sentiments, or impressing new appear- 
 ances of things ; sentences were readier at his call than images ; 
 he could more easily fill the ear with splendid novelty than 
 awaken those ideas that slumber in the heart. 
 
 The favorite exercise of his mind was ratiocination ; and 
 that argument might not be too soon at an end, he delighted to 
 talk of liberty and necessity, destiny and contingence ; these he 
 
DRYDEN. 135 
 
 discusses in the language of the school, with so much pro- 
 fundity that the terms which he uses are not always under- 
 stood. It is indeed learning, but learning out of place. 
 
 When once he had engaged himself in disputation thoughts 
 flowed in on either side : he was now no longer at a loss ; he 
 had always objections and solutions at command ; " verbaque 
 provisam rem" — gave him matter for his verse, and he finds 
 without difficulty verse for his matter. 
 
 In comedy, for which he professes himself not naturally 
 qualified, the mirth which he excites will perhaps not be found 
 so much to arise from any original humor, or peculiarity of 
 character nicely distinguished and diligently pursued, as from 
 incidents and circumstances, artifices and surprises ; from jests 
 of action rather than of sentiment. What he had of humorous 
 or passionate, he seems to have had not from nature, but from 
 other poets ; if not always as a plagiary, at least as an imitator. 
 
 Next to argument his delight was in wild and daring sallies 
 of sentiment, in the irregular and eccentric violence of wit. 
 He delighted to tread upon the brink of meaning, where night 
 and darkness begin to mingle ; to approach the precipice of 
 absurdity, and hover over the abyss of unideal vacancy. This 
 inclination sometimes produced nonsense, which he knew ; as, 
 
 " Move swiftly, Sun, and fly a lover's pace. 
 Leave weeks and months behind thee in thy race, 
 
 Amamel flies 
 To guard thee from the demons of the air ; 
 My flaming sword above them to display. 
 All keen, and ground upon the edge of day." 
 
 And sometimes it issued in absurdities, of which perhaps he 
 was not conscious : 
 
 "Then we upon our orb's last verge shall go, 
 And see the ocean leaning on the sky. 
 From thence our rolling neighbors we shall know. 
 And en the lunar world securely pry." 
 
 These lines have no meaning ; but may we not say, in imi- 
 tation of Cowley on another book, 
 
 " 'Tis so like sense, 'twill serve the turn as well " ? 
 
 This endeavor after the grand and the new produced many 
 sentiments either great or bulky, and many images either just 
 or splendid : 
 
 " I am as free as Nature first made man. 
 Ere the base laws of servitude began. 
 When wild in woods the noble savage ran. 
 
136 DR. SAMUEL yoMNSOM ON- 
 
 " — "Tis but because the living death ne'er knew, 
 They fear to prove it as a thing that's new : 
 Let me th' experiment before you try, 
 I'll show you first how easy 'tis to die. 
 
 " — There with a forest of their darts he strove, 
 And stood like Capaneus defying Jove, 
 With his broad sword the boldest beating down, 
 While Fate grew pale lest he should win the town, 
 And turn'd the iron leaves of his dark book 
 To make new dooms, or mend what it mistof k. 
 
 " — I beg no pity for this mouldering clay ; 
 For if you give it burial, there it takes 
 Possession of your earth : 
 If burnt, and scatter'd in the air, the winds 
 That strew my dust diffuse my royalty. 
 And spread me o'er your clime ; for where one atom 
 Of mine shall light, know there Sebastian reigns. ' ' 
 
 Of these quotations the two first may be allowed to be 
 great, the two latter only tumid. 
 
 Of such selection there is no end. I will add only a few 
 more passages : of which the first, though it may not perhaps 
 be quite clear in prose, is not too obscure fol poetry, as the 
 meaning that it has is noble : 
 
 " No, there is a necessity in fate, 
 Why still the brave bold man is fortunate. 
 He keeps his object ever full in sight ; 
 And that assurance holds him firm and right. 
 True, 'tis a narrow way that leads to bliss, ) 
 
 But right before there is no precipice ; >■ 
 
 Fear makes men look aside, and so their footing miss. ' ' ) 
 
 Of the images which the two following citations afford, the 
 first is elegant, the second magnificent ; whether either be just, 
 let the reader judge : 
 
 ' ' What precious drops are these. 
 Which silently each other's track pursue. 
 Bright as young diamonds in their infant dew ! 
 
 " Resign your castle 
 
 — Enter, brave Sir : for, when you speak the word. 
 The gates shall open of their own accord ; 
 The genius of the place its Lord shall meet. 
 And bow its towery forehead at your feet. ' ' 
 
 These bursts of extravagance Dryden calls the Delilahs of 
 the Theatre ; and owns that many noisy lines of ' ' Maximin 
 and Almanzor' ' call out for vengeance upon him : ' ' but I 
 knew, ' ' says he, ' ' that they were bad enough to please, even 
 when I wrote them." There is surely reason to suspect that 
 
DRVDE^r. 137 
 
 he pleased himself as well as his audience ; and that these, like 
 the harlots of other men, had his love, though not his approba- 
 tion. 
 
 He had sometimes faults of a less generous and splendid 
 kind. He makes, like almost all other poets, very frequent use 
 of mythology, and sometimes connects religion and fable too 
 closely without distinction. 
 
 He descends to display his knowledge with pedantic osten- 
 tation ; as when, in translating Virgil, he says, tack to the lar- 
 board — and veer starboard ; and talks in another work of virtue 
 spooning before the wind. His vanity now and then betrays his 
 ignorance : 
 
 " They Nature's king through Nature's optics view'd ; 
 Revers'd, they view'd him lessen'd to their eyes." 
 
 He had heard of reversing a telescope, and unluckily re- 
 verses the object. 
 
 He is sometimes unexpectedly mean. When he describes 
 the Supreme Being as moved by prayer to stop the fire of Lon- 
 don, what is his expression ? 
 
 " A hollow crystal pyramid he takes. 
 
 In firmamental waters dipp'd above. 
 Of this a broad extinguisher he makes, 
 And hoods the flames that to their quarry strove." 
 
 When he describes the last day, and the decisive tribunal, 
 he intermingles this image : 
 
 ' ' When rattling bones together fly. 
 From the four quarters of the sky. ' ' 
 
 It was indeed never in his power to resist the temptation of 
 a jest. In his " Elegy on Cromwell :" 
 
 " No sooner was the Frenchman's cause embrac'd, 
 Than the light Monsieur the grave Don outweigh'd ; 
 His fortune turn'd the scale " 
 
 He had a vanity, unworthy of his abilities, to show, as may 
 be suspected, the rank of the company with whom he lived, by 
 the use of French words, which had then crept into conversa- 
 tion : such as fraicheur for coclness, fougue for turbulence, and 
 a few more, none of which the language has incorporated or re- 
 tained. They continue only where they stood first, perpetual 
 "warnings to future innovators. 
 
 These are his faults of affectation ; his faults of negligence 
 are beyond recital. Such is the unevenness of his compo- 
 sitions, that ten lines are seldom found together without some- 
 
138 DR. SAMUML yOHNSOM ON 
 
 thing of which the reader is ashamed. Dryden was no rigid 
 judge of his own pages ; he seldom struggled after supreme ex- 
 cellence, but snatched in haste what was within his reach ; and 
 when he could content others, was himself contented. He did 
 not keep present to his mind an idea of pure perfection ; nor 
 compare his works, such as they were, with what they might 
 be made. He knew to whom he should be opposed. He had 
 more music than Waller, more vigor than Denham, and more 
 nature than Cowley ; and from his contemporaries he was in 
 no danger. Standing therefore in the highest place, he had no 
 care to rise by contending with himself, but, while there was 
 no name above his own, was willing to enjoy fame on the 
 easiest terms. 
 
 He was no lover of labor. What he thought sufficient he 
 did not stop to make better ; and allowed himself to leave 
 many parts unfinished, in confidence that the good lines would 
 overbalance the bad. What he had once written he dismissed 
 from his thoughts ; and I believe there is no example to be 
 found of any correction or improvement made by him after 
 publication. The hastiness of his productions might be the 
 effect of necessity ; but his subsequent neglect could hardly 
 have any other cause than impatience of study. 
 
 What can be said of his versification will be little more 
 than a dilatation of the praise given it by Pope : 
 
 " Waller was smooth ; but Dryden taught to join 
 The varying verse, the full-resounding line, 
 The long majestic march, and energy divine. ' ' 
 
 Some improvements had been already made in English 
 numbers ; but the full force of our language was not yet felt ; 
 the verse that was smooth was commonly feeble. If Cowley 
 had sometimes a finished line, he had it by chance. Dryden 
 knew how to choose the flowing and the sonorous words ; to 
 vary the pauses and adjust the accents ; to diversify the 
 cadence, and yet preserve the smoothness of his metre. 
 
 Of triplets and Alexandrines, though he did not introduce 
 the use, he established it. The triplet has long subsisted 
 among us. Dryden seems not to have traced it higher than to 
 Chapman's Homer ; but it is to be found in Phaer's Virgil, 
 written in the reign of Mary ; and in Hall's " Satires," pub- 
 lished five years before the death of Elizabeth. 
 
 The Alexandrine was, I believe, first used by Spenser, for 
 the sake of closing his stanza with a fuller sound. We had a 
 longer measure of fourteen syllables, into which the ".iEneid " 
 was translated by Phaer, and other works of the ancients by 
 
DR YDEN. 
 
 ^39 
 
 Other writers, of which Chapman's "Iliad" was, I believe, 
 the last. 
 
 The two first lines of Phaer's third "^neid " will exem- 
 plify this measure : 
 
 " When Asia's state was overthrown, and Priam's kingdom stout 
 All guiltless, by the power of gods above was rooted out." 
 
 As these lines had their break, or ccesura, always at the eighth 
 syllable, it was thought, in time, commodious to divide them : 
 and quatrains of lines, alternately, consisting of eight and six 
 syllables, make the most soft and pleasing of our lyric meas- 
 ures : as, 
 
 " Relentless time, destroying power, 
 Which stone and brass obey ; 
 Who giv'st to ev'ry flying hour 
 To work some new decay." 
 
 In the Alexandrine, when its power was once felt, some 
 poems, as Drayton's " Polyolbion," were wholly written ; and 
 sometimes the measures of twelve and fourteen syllables were 
 interchanged with one another. Cowley was the first that in- 
 serted the Alexandrine at pleasure among the heroic lines of 
 ten syllables, and from him Dryden professes to have adopted it. 
 
 The triplet and Alexandrine are not universally approved. 
 Swift always censured them, and wrote some lines to ridicule 
 them. In examining their propriety, it is to be considered 
 that the essence of verse is regularity, and its ornament is 
 variety. To write verse is to dispose syllables and sounds 
 harmonically by some known and settled rule ; a rule, however, 
 lax enough to substitute similitude for identity, to admit 
 change without breach of order, and to relieve the ear without 
 disappointing it. Thus a Latin hexameter is formed from 
 dactyls and spondees differently combined ; the English heroic 
 admits of acute or grave syllables variously disposed. The 
 Latin never deviates into seven feet, or exceeds the number of 
 seventeen syllables ; but the English Alexandrine breaks the 
 lawful bounds, and surprises the reader with two syllables more 
 than he expected. 
 
 The effect of the triplet is the same ; the ear has been ac- 
 customed to expect a new rhyme in every couplet, but is on a 
 sudden surprised with three rhymes together, to which the read- 
 er could not accommodate his voice, did he not obtain notice of 
 the change from the braces of the margins. Surely there is 
 something unskilful in the necessity of such mechanical direc- 
 tion. 
 
 Considering the metrical art simply as a science, and conse- 
 
I^O DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 quently excluding all casualty, we must allow that triplets and 
 Alexandrines, inserted by caprice, are interruptions of that 
 constancy to which science aspires. And though the variety 
 which they produce may very justly be desired, yet, to make 
 poetry exact, there ought to be some stated mode of admitting 
 them. 
 
 But till some such regulation can be formed, I wish them 
 still to be retained in their present state. They are sometimes 
 convenient to the poet. Fenton was of opinion that Dryden 
 was too liberal and Pope too sparing in their use. 
 
 The rhymes of Dryden are commonly just, and he valued 
 himself for his readiness in finding them ; but he is sometimes 
 open to objection. 
 
 It is the common practice of our poets to end the second 
 line with a weak or grave syllable : 
 
 " Together o'er the Alps methinks we fly, 
 Fill'd with ideas of fair Italy." 
 
 Dryden sometimes puts the weak rhyme in the first : 
 
 " Laugh, all the powers that favor tyranny. 
 And all the standing army of the sky. ' ' 
 
 Sometimes he concludes a period or paragraph with the 
 first line of a couplet, which, though the French seem to do it 
 without irregularity, always displeases in English poetry. 
 
 The Alexandrine, though much his favorite, is not always 
 very diligently fabricated by him. It invariably requires a 
 break at the sixth syllable ; a rule which the modern French 
 poets never violate, but which Dryden sometimes neglected : 
 
 " And with paternal thunder vindicates his throne." 
 
 Of Dryden's works it was said by Pope that " he could 
 select from them better specimens of every mode of poetry 
 than any other English writer could supply." Perhaps no 
 nation ever produced a writer that enriched his language with 
 such a variety of models. To him we owe the improvement, 
 perhaps the completion, of our metre, the refinement of our 
 language, and much of the correctness of our sentiments. By 
 him we were taught sapere et fan, to think naturally and ex- 
 press forcibly. Though Davies had reasoned in rhyme before 
 him, it may be perhaps maintained that he was the first who 
 joined argument with poetry. He showed us the true bounds 
 of a translator's liberty. What was said of Rome adorned by 
 Augustus may be applied hy an easy metaphor to English 
 
DRYDEN. 141 
 
 poetry embellished by Dryden, lateritiam invenit, marmorcam 
 reliquit. He found it brick, and he left it marble. 
 
 The invocation before the " Georgics" is here inserted 
 from Mr. Milbourne's version, that, according to his own pro- 
 posal, his verses may be compared with those which he cen- 
 sures : 
 
 " What makes the richest tilth, beneath what signs 
 To plough, and when to match your elms and vines ; 
 What care with flocks, and what with herds agrees, 
 And all the management of frugal bees ; 
 I sing, Msecenas ! Ye immensely clear. 
 Vast orbs of light, which guide the rolling year ! 
 Bacchus, and mother Ceres, if by you 
 We fatt'ning corn for hungry man pursue ; 
 If, taught by you, we first the cluster prest. 
 And thin cold streams with sprightly juice refresht ; 
 Ye fawns, the present numens of the field. 
 Wood-nymphs and fawns, your kind assistance yield, 
 Your gifts I sing : and thou, at whose fear'd stroke 
 From rending earth the fiery courser broke. 
 Great Neptune, O assist my artful song ! 
 And thou to whom the woods and groves belong, 
 Whose snowy heifers on her flow'ry plains 
 In mighty herds the Caean Isle maintains ! 
 Pan, happy shepherd, if thy cares divine. 
 E'er to improve thy Meenalus incline, 
 Leave thy Lycaean wood and native grove. 
 And with thy lucky smiles our work approve ; 
 Be Pallas too, sweet oil's inventor, kind ; . 
 And he who first the crooked plough design'd, 
 Sylvanus, god of all the woods, appear, 
 Whose hands a new-drawn tender cypress bear ! 
 Ye gods and goddesses, who e'er with love 
 Would guard our pastures, and our fields improve : 
 Ye, who new plants from unknown lands supply, 
 And with condensing clouds obscure the sky. 
 And drop them softly thence in fruitful showers ; 
 Assist my enterprise, ye gentle powers ! 
 
 And thou, great Caesar ! though we know not yet 
 Among what gods thou'lt fix thy lofty seat : 
 Whether thou'lt be the kind tutelar god 
 Of thy own Rome, or with thy awful nod 
 Guide the vast world, while thy great hand shall bear ) 
 The fruits and seasons of the turning year, > 
 
 And thy bright brows thy mother's myrtles wear ; ) 
 Whether thou'lt all the boundless ocean sway, 
 And seamen only to thyself shall pray ; 
 Thule, the fairest island, kneel to thee, 
 And, that thou may'st her son by marriage be, 
 Tethys will for the happy purchase yield 
 To make a dowry of her wat'ry field : 
 Whether thou'lt add to heaven a brighter sign, 
 
142 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 And o'er the summer months serenely shine ; 
 Where between Cancer and Erigone, 
 There yet remains a spacious room for thee ; 
 Where the hot Scorpion too- his arm declines, 
 And more to thee than half his arch resigns ; 
 Whate'er thou'lt be ; for sure the realms below 
 No just pretence to thy command can show : 
 No such ambition sways thy vast desires, 
 Though Greece her own Elysian fields admires. 
 And now, at last, contented Proserpine, 
 Can all her mother's earnest prayers decline, 
 Whate'er thou'lt be, O guide our gentle course ; 
 And with thy smiles our bold attempts enforce ; 
 With me th' unknowing rustics' wants relieve. 
 And, though on earth, our sacred vows receive." 
 
 Mr. Dryden, having received from Rymer his " Remarks on 
 the Tragedies of the last Age," wrote observations on the 
 blank leaves ; which, having been in the possession of Mr. 
 Garrick, are by his favor communicated to the public, that no 
 particle of Dryden may be lost. 
 
 "^ " That we may less wonder why pity and terror are not 
 now the only springs on which our tragedies move, and that 
 Shakespeare may be more excused, Rapin confesses that the 
 French tragedies now all run on the tendre ; and gives the rea- 
 son, because love is the passion which most predominates in 
 our souls, and that therefore the passions represented become 
 insipid, unless they are conformable to the thoughts of the 
 audience. But it is to be concluded that this passion works not 
 now amongst the French so strongly as the other two did amongst 
 the ancients. Amongst us, who have a stronger genius for 
 writing, the operations from the writing are much stronger ; 
 for the raising of Shakespeare's passions is more from the excel- 
 lency of the words and thoughts than the justness of the occa- 
 sion ; and if he has been able to pick single occasions, he has 
 never founded the whole reasonably ; yet, by the genius of 
 poetry in writing, he has succeeded. 
 
 " Rapin attributes more to the dictio, that is, to the words 
 and discourse of a tragedy, than Aristotle has done, who places 
 them in the last rank of beauties ; perhaps only last in order 
 because they are the last product of the design, of the dispo- 
 sition or connection of its parts j of the characters, of the man- 
 ners of those characters, and of the thoughts proceeding from 
 those manners. Rapin's words are remarkable : ' 'Tis not the 
 admirable intrigue, the surprising events, and extraordinary 
 incidents that make the beauty of a tragedy : 'tis the dis- 
 courses, when they are natural and passionate : so are Shake- 
 speare's.' 
 
DRYDEN. 143 
 
 " The parts of a poem, tragic or heroic, are, 
 
 " I. The fable itself. 
 
 "2. The order or manner of its contrivance, in relation of 
 the parts to the whole. 
 
 "3. The manners or decency of the characters, in speak- 
 ing or acting what is proper for them, and proper to be shown 
 by the poet. 
 
 " 4. The thoughts which express the manners. 
 
 "5. The words which express those thoughts. 
 
 " In the last of these, Homer excels Virgil ; Virgil all the 
 other ancient poets ; and Shakespeare all modern poets. 
 
 For the second of these, the order : the meaning is, that 
 a fable ought to have a beginning, middle, and an end, all just 
 and natural ; so that that part, e.g., which is the middle could 
 not naturally be the beginning or end, and so of the rest : all 
 depend on one another, like the links of a curious chain. If 
 terror and pity are only to be raised, certainly this author fol- 
 lows Aristotle's rules, and Sophocles' and Euripides' exam- 
 ple ; but joy may be raised too, and that doubly, either by 
 seeing a wicked man punished or a good man at last fortu- 
 nate ; or perhaps indignation, to see wickedness prosperous and 
 goodness depressed : both these may be profitable to the end 
 of a tragedy, reformation of manners ; but the last improperly, 
 only as it begets pity in the audience ; though Aristotle, I con- 
 fess, places tragedies of this kind in the second form. 
 
 " He who undertakes to answer this excellent critique of 
 Mr. Rymer, in behalf of our English poets against the Greek, 
 ought to do it in this manner : either by yielding to him the 
 greatest part of what he contends for, which consists in this, 
 that the fJLv'^oi, i.e., the design and conduct of it, is more con- 
 ducing in the Greeks to those ends of tragedy which Aristotle 
 and he propose, namely, to cause terror and pity ; yet the 
 granting this does not set the Greeks above the English poets. 
 
 " But the answerer ought to prove two things : First. That 
 the fable is not the greatest masterpiece of a tragedy, though it 
 be the foundation of it. . 
 
 " Secondly. That other ends as suitable to the nature of 
 tragedy may be found in the English, which were not in the 
 Greek. 
 
 ' ' Aristotle places the fable first ; not quoad dignitatem, sed 
 quoad fundamentum : for a fable never so movingly contrived 
 to those ends of his, pity and terror, will operate nothing on 
 our affections, except the characters, manners, thoughts, and 
 words are suitable. 
 
 ' ' So that it remains for Mr. Rymer to prove, that in all 
 
144 ^^- SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 those, or the greatest part of them, we are inferior to Sopho- 
 cles and Euripides ; and this he has offered at, in some meas- 
 ure ; but, I think, a little partially to the ancients. 
 
 " For the fable itself, 'tis in the English more adorned with 
 episodes, and larger than in the Greek poets ^ consequently- 
 more diverting. For, if the action be but one, and that plain, 
 without any counterturn of design or episode, i.e.., underplot, 
 how can it be so pleasing as the English, which have both un- 
 derplot and a turned design, which keeps the audience in expec- 
 tation of the catastrophe ? whereas in the Greek poets we see 
 through the whole design at first. 
 
 ' ' For the characters, they are neither so many nor so various 
 in Sophocles and Euripides as in Shakespeare and Fletcher : 
 only they are more adapted to those ends of tragedy which 
 Aristotle commends to us, pity and terror. 
 
 ' ' The manners flow from the characters, and consequently 
 must partake of their advantages and disadvantages. 
 
 ' ' The thoughts and words, which are the fourth and fifth 
 beauties of tragedy, are certainly more noble and more poetical 
 in the English than in the Greek, which must be proved by 
 comparing them somewhat more equitably than Mr. Rymer has 
 done. 
 
 " After all, we need not yield that the English way is less 
 conducing to move pity and terror, because they often show 
 virtue oppressed and vice punished : where they do not both, 
 or either, they are not to be defended. 
 
 ' ' And if we should grant that the Greeks performed this ■ 
 better, perhaps it may admit of dispute whether pity and ter- 
 ror are either the prime or at least the only ends of tragedy. 
 
 " 'Tis not enough that Aristotle had said so ; for Aristotle 
 drew his models of tragedy from Sophocles and Euripides ; 
 and if he had seen ours might have changed his mind. And ' 
 chiefly we have to say (what I hinted on pity and terror, in 
 the last paragraph save one), that the punishment of vice 
 and reward of virtue are the most adequate ends of trag-» 
 edy, because most conducing to good example of life. Now, 
 pity is not so easily raised for a criminal (and the ancient 
 tragedy always represents its chief person such) as it is for an 
 innocent man ; and the suffering of innocence and punishment 
 of the offender is of the nature of English tragedy : contrarily, 
 in the Greek, innocence is unhappy often, and the offender es- 
 capes. Then we are not touched with the sufferings of any 
 sort of men so much as of lovers ; and this was almost un- 
 known to the ancients : so that they neither administered 
 poetical justice, of which Mr. Rymer boasts, so well as we ; 
 
DRYDEhr. 
 
 145 
 
 neither knew they the best commonplace of pity, which is 
 love. 
 
 " He therefore unjustly blames us for not building on what 
 the ancients left us ; for it seems, upon consideration of the 
 premises, that we have wholly finished what they began. 
 
 " My judgment on this piece is this : that it is extremely 
 learned, but that the author of it is better read in the Greek 
 than in the EngUsh poets ; that all writers ought to study this 
 critique, as the best account I have ever seen of the ancients ; 
 that the model of tragedy he has here given is excellent and 
 extremely correct ; but that it is not the only model of all trag- 
 edy, because it is too much circumscribed in plot, characters, 
 etc. ; and, lastly, that we may be taught here justly to admire 
 and imitate the ancients, without giving them the preference 
 with this author, in prejudice to our own country. 
 
 "Want of method in this excellent treatise makes the 
 thoughts of the author sometimes obscure. 
 
 ' ' His meaning, that pity and terror are to be moved, is, 
 that they are to be moved as the means conducing to the ends 
 of tragedy, which are pleasure and instruction. 
 
 ' ' And these two ends may be thus distinguished. The 
 chief end of the poet is to please ; for his immediate reputation 
 depends on it. 
 
 " The great end of the poem is to instruct, which is per- 
 formed by making pleasure the vehicle of that instruction ; for 
 poesy is an art, and all arts are made to profit. — Rapin. 
 
 " The pity, which the poet is to labor for, is for the crim- 
 inal, not for those or him whom he has murdered, or who 
 have been the occasion of the tragedy. The terror is likewise 
 in the punishment of the same criminal, who, if he be repre- 
 sented too great an offender, will not be pitied ; if altogether 
 innocent, his punishment will be unjust. 
 
 " Another obscurity is, where he says Sophocles perfected 
 tragedy by introducing the third actor ; that is, he meant three 
 kinds of action : one company singing or speaking ; another 
 playing on the music ; a third dancing. 
 
 " To make a true judgment in this competition betwixt the 
 Greek poets and the English, in tragedy : 
 
 " Consider, first, how Aristotle has defined a tragedy. 
 Secondly, what he assigns the end of it to be. Thirdly, 
 what he thinks the beauties of it. Fourthly, the means to 
 attain the end proposed. 
 
 " Compare the Greek and English tragic poets justly, and 
 without partiality, according to those rules. 
 
 "Then, secondly, consider whether Aristotle has made a 
 
146 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 just definition of tragedy ; of its parts, of its ends, and of its 
 beauties ; and whether he, having not seen any others but 
 those of Sophocles, Euripides, etc. , had or truly could deter- 
 mine what all the excellences of tragedy are, and wherein they 
 consist. 
 
 ' ' Next, show in what ancient tragedy was deficient ; for ex- 
 ample, in the narrowness of its plots and fewness of persons ; 
 and try whether that be not a fault in the Greek poets ; and 
 whether their excellency was so great, when the variety was visi- 
 bly so little ; or whether what they did was not very easy to do. 
 
 " Then make a judgment on what the English have added 
 to their beauties ; as, for example, not only more plot, but 
 also new passions ; as, namely, that of love, scarcely touched 
 on by the ancients, except in this one example of Phaedra, 
 cited by Mr. Rymer ; and in that how short they were of 
 Fletcher ! 
 
 " Prove also that love, being an heroic passion, is fit for 
 tragedy, which cannot be denied, because of the example al- 
 leged of Phaedra ; and how far Shakespeare has outdone them 
 in friendship, etc. 
 
 " To return to the beginning of this inquiry : consider if 
 pity and terror be enough for tragedy to move ; and I believe, 
 upon a true definition of tragedy, it will be found that its work 
 extends farther, and that it is to reform manners, by a delight- 
 ful representation of human life in great persons, by way of 
 dialogue. If this be true, then not only pity and terror are to 
 be moved, as the only means to bring us to virtue, but gener- 
 ally love to virtue and hatred to vice, by showing the rewards 
 of one and punishments of the other ; at least, by rendering 
 virtue always amiable, though it be shown unfortunate ; and 
 vice detestable, though it be shown triumphant. 
 
 " If, then, the encouragement of virtue and discouragement 
 of vice be the proper ends of poetry in tragedy, pity and ter- 
 ror, though good means, are not the only. For all the pas- 
 sions, in their turns, are to be set in a ferment ; as joy, anger, 
 love, fear are to be used as the poet's commonplaces ; and a 
 general concernment for the principal actors is to be raised by 
 making them appear such in their characters, their words, and 
 actions, as will interest the audience in their fortunes. 
 
 ' ' And if, after all, in a larger sense, pity comprehends this 
 concernment for the good, and terror includes detestation for 
 the bad, then let us consider whether the English have not an- 
 swered this end of tragedy as well as the ancients, or perhaps 
 better. 
 
 " And here Mr. Rymer' s objections against these plays ar? 
 
DRY DEN. 147 
 
 to be impartially weighed, that we may see whether they are of 
 weight enough to turn the balance against our countrymen. 
 
 "It is evident those plays which he arraigns have moved 
 both those passions in a high degree upon the stage. 
 
 To give the glory of this away from the poet, and to place 
 it upon the actors, seems unjust. 
 
 " One reason is, because whatever actors they have found 
 the event has been the same ; that is, the same passions have 
 been always moved ; which shows that there is something of 
 force and merit in the plays themselves, conducing to the de- 
 sign of raising these two passions : and suppose them ever to 
 have been excellently acted, yet action only adds grace, vigor, 
 and more life upon the stage ; but cannot give it wholly where 
 it is not first. But, secondly, I dare appeal to those who have 
 never seen them acted, if they have not found these two pas- 
 sions moved within them ; and if the general voice will carry 
 it, Mr. Rymer's prejudice will take off his single testimony. 
 
 " This, being matter of fact, is reasonably to be established 
 by this appeal ; as, if one man says it is night when the rest of 
 the world, conclude it to be day, there needs no farther argu- 
 ment against him that it is so. 
 
 "If he urge that the general taste is depraved, his argu- 
 ments to prove this can at best but evince that our poets took 
 not the best way to raise those passions ; but experience proves 
 against him that those means which they have used have 
 been successful, and have produced them. 
 
 " And one reason of that success is, in my opinion, this : 
 that Shakespeare and Fletcher have written to the genius of the 
 age and nation in which they lived ; for though nature, as he 
 objects, is the same in all places, and reason too the same, 
 yet the climate, the age, the disposition of the people to whom 
 a poet writes may be so different that what pleased the 
 Greeks would not satisfy an English audience. 
 
 ' ' And if they proceed upon a foundation of truer reason to 
 please the Athenians than Shakespeare and Fletcher to please 
 the English, it only shows that the Athenians were a more 
 judicious people ; but the poet's business is certainly to please 
 the audience. 
 
 " Whether our English audience have been pleased hitherto 
 with acorns, as he calls it, or with bread, is the next question ; 
 that is, whether the means which Shakespeare and Fletcher have 
 used, in their plays, to raise those passions before-named, be 
 better applied to the ends by the Greek poets than by them. 
 And perhaps we shall not grant him this wholly : let it be 
 yielded that a writer is not to run down with the stream, or to 
 
148 DR. SAMUEL JOHN SON ON 
 
 please the people by their usual methods, but rather to reform 
 their judgments, it still remains to prove that our theatre needs 
 this total reformation. 
 
 " The faults which he has found in their design are rather 
 wittily aggravated in many places than reasonably urged ; and 
 as much may be returned on the Greeks by one who were as 
 witty as himself. 
 
 " They destroy not, if they are granted, the foundation of 
 the fabric ; only take away from the beauty of the symmetry ; 
 for example, the faults in the character of the King, in ' King 
 and No-king,' are not, as he calls them, such as render him 
 detestable, but only imperfections which accompany human 
 nature, and are for the most part excused by the violence of 
 his love ; so that they destroy not our pity or concernment for 
 him : this answer may be applied to most of his objections of 
 that kind. 
 
 ' ' And Rolla committing many murders, when he is answer- 
 able but for one, is too severely arraigned by him ; for it adds 
 to our horror and detestation of the criminal ; and poetic jus- 
 tice is not neglected neither ; for we stab him in our minds for 
 every offence which he commits ; and the point, which the 
 poet is to gain on the audience, is not so much in the death of 
 an offender as the raising a horror of his crimes. 
 
 " That the criminal should neither be wholly guilty nor 
 wholly innocent, but so participating of both as to move both 
 pity and terror, is certainly a good rule, but not perpetually to 
 be observed ; for that were to make all tragedies too much 
 alike ; which objection he foresaw, but has not fully answered. 
 
 " To conclude therefore : if the plays of the ancients are 
 more correctly plotted, ours are more beautifully written. 
 And if we can raise passions as high on worse foundations, it 
 shows our genius in tragedy is greater ; for in all other parts of 
 it the English have manifestly excelled them. ' ' " 
 
 The original of the following letter is preserved in the library 
 at Lambeth, and was kindly imparted to the public by the Rev- 
 erend Dr. Vyse. 
 
 Copy of an original letter from John Dryden, Esq., to his 
 sons in Italy, from a MS. in the Lambeth Library, marked 
 No. 933, p. 56. 
 {Superscribed) 
 
 " Al illustrissimo Sigre. 
 
 " Carlo Dryden Camariere 
 
 " d'Honore A.S.S. 
 
 ' In Roma. 
 " Franca per Mantoua. 
 
DRYDEN. 149 
 
 " Sept. the 3d, our style. 
 " Dear Sons, 
 
 " Being now at Sir William Bowyer's in the country, I can- 
 not write at large, because I find myself somewhat indisposed 
 with a cold, and am thick of hearing, rather worse than I was 
 in town. I am glad to find, by your letter of July 26th, your 
 style, that you are both in health ; but wonder you should 
 think me so negligent as to forget to give you an account of the 
 ship in which your parcel is to come. I have written to you 
 two or three letters concerning it, which I have sent by safe 
 hands, as I told you, and doubt not but you have them before 
 this can arrive to you. Being out of town, I have forgotten the 
 ship's name, which your mother will inquire, and put it into 
 her letter, which is joined with mine. But the master's name 
 I remember : he is called Mr. Ralph Thorp ; the ship is bound 
 to Leghorn, consigned to Mr. Peter and Mr. Thomas Ball, 
 merchants. I am of your opinion, that by Tonson's means 
 almost all our letters have miscarried for this last year. But, 
 however, he has missed of his design in the dedication, though 
 he had prepared the book for it ; for in every figure of .(Eneas 
 he has caused him to be drawn like King William, with a 
 hooked nose. After my return to town I intend to alter a 
 play of Sir Robert Howard's, written long since, and lately put 
 into my hands ; it is called, 'The Conquest of China by the 
 Tartars.' It will cost me six weeks' study, with the probable 
 benefit of a hundred pounds. In the mean time I am writing 
 a song for St. Cecilia's Feast, who, you know, is the patroness 
 of music. This is troublesome, and no way beneficial ; but I 
 could not deny the stewards of the feast, who came in a body 
 to me to desire that kindness, one of them being Mr. Bridgeman, 
 whose parents are your mother's friends. I hope to send you 
 thirty guineas between Michaelmas and Christmas, of which I 
 will give you an account when I come to town. I remember 
 the counsel you give me in your letter ; but dissembling, though 
 lawful in some cases, is not my talent ; yet, for your sake, I 
 will struggle with the plain openness of my nature, and keep 
 in my just resentments against that degenerate order. In the 
 mean time, I flatter not myself with any manner of hopes, but do 
 my duty, and suffer for God's sake ; being assured, before- 
 hand, never to be rewarded, though the times should alter. 
 Towards the latter end of this month, September, Charles will 
 begin to recover his perfect health, according to his nativity, 
 which, casting it myself, I am sure is true, and all things 
 hitherto have happened accordingly to the very time that I 
 predicted them : I hope at the same time to recover more 
 
150 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON DRYDEN. 
 
 health, according to my age. Remember me to poor Harry, 
 whose prayers I earnestly desire. My Virgil succeeds in the 
 world beyond its desert or my expectation. You know the 
 profits might have been more ; but neither my conscience nor 
 my honor would suffer me to take them; but I never can 
 repent of my constancy, since I am thoroughly persuaded of 
 the justice of the cause for which I suffer. It has pleased God 
 to raise up many friends to me amongst my enemies, though they 
 who ought to have been my friends are negligent of me. I am 
 called to dinner, and cannot go on with this letter, which I 
 desire you to excuse ; and am, 
 
 "Your most affectionate father, 
 
 " John Dryden." 
 
DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON SWIFT. 
 
 An account of Dr. Swift has been already collected, with 
 great diligence and acuteness, by Dr. Hawkesworth, according 
 to a scheme which I laid before him in the intimacy of our 
 friendship. I cannot therefore be expected to say much of a 
 life, concerning which I had long since communicated my 
 thoughts to a man capable of dignifying his narrations with so 
 much elegance of language and force of sentiment. 
 
 Jonathan Swift was, according to an accciunt said to be 
 written by himself, the son of Jonathan Swift, an attorney, and 
 was born at Dublin on St. Andrew's Day, 1667. According to 
 his own report, as delivered by Pope to Spence, he was born 
 at Leicester, the son of a clergyman, who was minister of a 
 parish in Herefordshire. During his life the place of his birth 
 was undetermined. He was contented to be called an Irish- 
 man by the Irish ; but would occasionally call himself an Eng- 
 lishman. The question may, without much regret, be left in 
 the obscurity in which he delighted to involve it. 
 
 Whatever was his birth, his education was Irish. He was 
 sent at the age of six to the school at Kilkenny, and in his 
 fifteenth year (1682) was admitted into the University of Dublin. 
 
 In his academical studies he was either not diligent or not 
 happy. It must disappoint every reader's expectation, that, 
 when at the usual time he claimed the bachelorship of arts, he 
 was found by the examiners too conspicuously deficient for 
 regular admission ; and obtained his degree at last by special 
 favor — a term used in that university to denote want of merit. 
 
 Of this disgrace it may be easily supposed that he was much 
 ashamed, and shame had its proper effect in producing ref- 
 ormation. He resolved from that time to study eight hours 
 a day, and continued his industry for seven years, with what 
 improvement is sufficiently known. This part of his story 
 well deserves to be remembered ; it may afford useful admoni- 
 tion and powerful encouragement to many men whose abilities 
 have been made for a time useless by their passions or 
 pleasures,' and who, having lost one part of life in idleness, are 
 tempted to throw away the remainder in despair. 
 
 In this course of daily application he continued three years 
 longer at Dublin ; and in this time, if the observation and 
 memory of an old companion may be trusted, he drew the first 
 "sketch of his ' ' Tale of a Tub. 
 
152 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 When he was about one-and-twenty (1688), being by the 
 death of Godwin Swift, his uncle, who had supported him, left 
 without subsistence, he went to consult his mother, who then 
 lived at Leicester, about the future course of his life, and, by 
 her direction, solicited the advice and patronage of Sir William 
 Temple, who had married one of Mrs. Swift's relations, and 
 whose father. Sir John Temple, master of the rolls in Ireland, 
 had lived in great familiarity of friendship with Godwin Swift, 
 by whom Jonathan had been to that time maintained. 
 
 Temple received with sufficient kindness the nephew of his 
 father's friend, with whom he was, when they conversed 
 together, so much pleased, that he detained him two years in 
 his house. Here he became known to King William, who 
 sometimes visited Temple when he was disabled by the gout, 
 and, being attended by Swift in the garden, showed him how 
 to cut asparagus in the Dutch way. 
 
 King William's notions were all military ; and he expressed 
 his kindness to Swift by offering to make him a captain of 
 horse. 
 
 When Temple removed to Moor Park he took Swift with 
 him ; and when he was consulted by the Earl of Portland 
 about the expedience of complying with a bill then pendinj; for 
 making parliaments triennial, against which King AVilliam was 
 strongly prejudiced, after having in vain tried to show the earl 
 that the proposal involved nothing dangerous to royal power, 
 he sent Swift for the same purpose to the king. Swift, who 
 probably was proud of his employment, and went with all the 
 confidence of a young man, found his arguments, and his art 
 of displaying them, made totally ineffectual by the predetermi- 
 nation of the king ; and used to mention this disappointment as 
 his first antidote against vanity. 
 
 Before he left Ireland he contracted a disorder, as he 
 thought, by eating too much fruit. The origin of diseases is 
 commonly obscure. Almost every boy eats as much fruit as 
 he can get, without any great inconvenience. The disease of 
 Swift was giddiness with deafness, which attacked him from 
 time to time, began very early, pursued him through life, and 
 at last sent him to the grave deprived of reason. 
 
 Being much oppressed at Moor Park by this grievous 
 malady, he was advised to try his native air, and went to 
 Ireland, but, finding no benefit, returned to Sir William, at 
 whose house he continued his studies, and is known to have 
 read, among other books, "Cyprian" and " Irenaeus." He 
 thought exercise of great necessity, and used to run half a mile 
 up and down a hill every two hours. 
 
SWIFT. 
 
 153 
 
 It is easy to imagine that the mode in which his first degree 
 was conferred left him no great fondness for the University of 
 Dublin, and therefore he resolved to become a master of arts 
 at Oxford. In the testimonial which he produced the words 
 of disgrace were omitted ; and he took his master's degree 
 (J'lly S> 1692) with such reception and regard as fully con- 
 tented him. 
 
 While he lived with Temple he used to pay his mother at 
 Leicester a yearly visit. He travelled on foot, unless some 
 violence of weather drove him into a wagon ; and at night he 
 would go to a penny lodging, where he purchased cleaii sheets 
 for sixpence. This practice Lord Orrery imputes to his innate 
 love of grossness and vulgarity : some may ascribe it to his 
 desire of surveying human life through all its varieties ; and 
 others, perhaps with equal probability, to a passion which 
 seems to have been deeply fixed in his heart, the love of a shilling. 
 
 In time he began to think that his attendance at Moor Park 
 deserved some other recompense than the pleasure, however 
 mingled with improvement, of Temple's conversation, and 
 grew so impatient that (1694) he went away in discontent. 
 
 Temple, conscious of having given reason for complaint, is 
 said to have made him deputy master of the rolls in Ireland, 
 which, according to his kinsman's account, was an office which 
 he knew him not able to discharge. Swift therefore resolved 
 to enter into the church, in which he had at first no higher 
 hopes than of the chaplainship to the Factory at Lisbon ; but, 
 being recommended to Lord Capel, he obtained the prebend of 
 Kilroot, in Connor, of about a hundred pounds a year. 
 
 But the infirmities of Temple made a companion like Swift 
 so necessary that he invited him back, with a promise to pro- 
 cure him English preferment in exchange for the prebend, 
 which he desired him to resign. With this request Swift 
 quickly complied, having perhaps equally repented their 
 separation, and they lived on together with mutual satis- 
 faction ; and in the four years that passed between his 
 return and Temple's death, it is probable that he wrote the 
 " Tale of a Tub" and the " Battle of the Books." 
 
 Swift began early to think, or to hope, that he was a poet, 
 and wrote Pindaric odes to Temple, to the king, and to the 
 Athenian Society, a knot of obscure men who published a 
 periodical pamphlet of answers to questions, sent, or supposed 
 to be sent, by letters. I have been told that Dryden, having 
 perused these verses, said, " Cousin Swift, you will never be a 
 poet ;" and that this denunciation was the motive of Swift's 
 perpetual malevolence to Dryden. 
 
154 ^^- S'^^UEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 In 1699 Temple died, and left a legacy with his manuscripts 
 to Swift, for whom he had obtained, from King William, a 
 promise of the first prebend that should be vacant at West- 
 minster or Canterbury. 
 
 That this promise might not be forgotten. Swift dedicated to 
 the king the posthumous works with which he was intrusted ; 
 but neither the dedication nor tenderness for the man whom 
 he once had treated with confidence and fondness revived in 
 King William the remembrance of his promise. Swift awhile 
 attended the court, but soon found his solicitations hopeless. 
 
 He was then invited by the Earl of Berkeley to accompany 
 him into Ireland as a private secretary ; but, after having done 
 the business till their arrival at Dublin, he then found that one 
 Bush had persuaded the earl that a clergyman was not a proper 
 secretary, and had obtained the office for himself. In a man 
 like Swift such circumvention and inconstancy must have 
 excited violent indignation. 
 
 But he had yet more to suffer. Lord Berkeley had the dis- 
 posal of the deanery of Derry, and Swift expected to obtain it ; 
 but, by the secretary's influence, supposed to have been 
 secured by a bribe, it was bestowed on somebody else ; and 
 Swift was dismissed with the livings of Laracor and Rathbeggin, 
 in the diocese -oOIeath, which together did not equal half the 
 value of the deanery. 
 
 ^At Laracor he increased the parochial duty by reading 
 prayers on '^Wednesdays and Fridays, and performed all the 
 offices of his profession with great decency and exactness. 
 
 Soon after his settlement at Laracor he invited to Ireland 
 the unfortunate Stella, a young woman whose name was John- 
 son, the daughter of the steward of Sir William Temple, who, 
 in consideration of her father's virtues, left her a thousand 
 pounds. With her came Mrs. Dingley, whose whole fortune 
 was twenty-seven pounds a year for her life. With these ladies 
 he passed his hours of relaxation, and to them he opened his 
 bosom ; but they never resided in the same house, nor did he 
 see either without a witness. They lived at the parsonage 
 when Swift was away, and when he returned removed to a 
 lodging, or to the house of a neighboring clergyman. 
 
 Swift was not one of those minds which amaze the world 
 with early pregnancy ; his first work, except his few poetical 
 essays, was the " Dissensions in Athens and Rome," published 
 (1701) in his thirty-fourth year. After its appearance, paying 
 a visit to some bishop, he heard mention made of the new 
 pamphlet that Burnet had written, replete with political knowl- 
 edge. When he seemed to doubt Burnet's right to the work, 
 
SWIFT. 155 
 
 he was told by the bishop that he was " a young man ;" and 
 still persisting to doubt, that he was ' ' a very positive young 
 man." 
 
 Three years afterwards (1704) was published " The Tale of 
 a Tub :" of this book charity may be persuaded to think that 
 it might be written by a man of a peculiar character without ill 
 intention ; but it is certainly of dangerous example. That 
 Swift was its author, though it be universally believed, was 
 never owned by himself, nor very well proved by any evidence ; 
 but no other claimant can be produced, and he did not deny it 
 when Archbishop Sharpe and the Duchess of Somerset, by 
 showing it to the queen, debarred him from a bishopric. 
 
 When this wild work first raised the attention of the public, 
 Sacheverell, meeting Smalridge, tried to flatter him by seem- 
 ing to think him the author ; but Smalridge answered with in- 
 dignation, " Not all that you and I have in the world, nor all 
 that ever we shall have, should hire me to write the ' Tale of 
 a Tub.' " 
 
 The digressions relating to Wotton and Bentley must be 
 confessed to discover want of knowledge or want of integrity ; 
 he did not understand the two controversies, or he willingly 
 misrepresented them. But wit can stand its ground against 
 truth only a little while. The honors due to learning have 
 been justly distributed by the decision of posterity. 
 
 " The Battle of the Books" is so like the " Combat des 
 Livres," which the same question concerning the ancients and 
 modems had produced in France, that the improbability of 
 such a coincidence of thoughts without communication is not, 
 in my opinion, balanced by the anonymous protestation pre- 
 fixed, in which all knowledge of the French book is peremp- 
 torily disowned. 
 
 For some time after. Swift was probably employed in soli- 
 tary study, gaining the qualifications requisite for future 
 eminence. How often he visited England, and with what dili- 
 gence he attended his parishes, I know not. It was not till 
 about four years afterwards that he became a professed author ; 
 and then one year (1708) produced " The Sentiments of a 
 Church-of-England Man ;" the ridicule of Astrology under 
 the name of " Bickerstaff ;" the " Argument against abohshing 
 Christianity ;" and the Defence of the " Sacramental Test." 
 
 " The Sentiments of a Church-of-England Man" is written 
 with great coolness, moderation, ease, and perspicuity. The 
 "Argument against abolishing Christianity" is a very happy 
 and judicious irony. One passage in it deserves to be 
 selected ; 
 
156 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 ' ' If Christianity were once abolished, how could the free- 
 thinkers, the strong reasoners, and the men of profound learn- 
 ing be able to find another subject so calculated, in all points, 
 whereon to display their abilities ? What wonderful produc- 
 tions of wit should we be deprived of from those, whose genius, 
 by continual practice, hath been wholly turned upon raillery 
 and invectives against religion, and would therefore never be 
 able to shine, or distinguish themselves, upon any other sub- 
 ject ? We are daily complaining of the great decline of wit 
 among us, and would take away the greatest, perhaps the only, 
 topic we have left. Who would ever have suspected Asgill for 
 a wit, or Toland for a philosopher, if the inexhaustible stock 
 of Christianity had not been at hand to provide them with 
 materials ? What other subject, through all art or nature, 
 could have produced Tindal for a profound author, or fur- 
 nished him with readers ? It is the wise choice of the subject 
 that alone adorns and distinguishes the writer. For had a 
 hundred such pens as these been employed on the side of 
 religion, they would have immediately sunk into silence and 
 oblivion." 
 
 The reasonableness of a Test is not hard to be proved ; 
 but perhaps it must be allowed that the proper test has not 
 been chosen. 
 
 The attention paid to the papers published under the name 
 of " Bickerstaff " induced Steele, when he projected "The 
 Tatler, " to assume an appellation which had already gained 
 possession of the reader's notice. 
 
 In the year following he wrote a ' ' Project for the Advance- 
 ment of Religion, ' ' addressed to Lady Berkeley ; by whose 
 kindness it is not unlikely that he was advanced to his 
 benefices. To this project, which is formed with great purity 
 of intention, and displayed with sprightliness and elegance, it 
 can only be objected, that, like many projects, it is, if not 
 generally impracticable, yet evidently hopeless, as it supposes 
 more zeal, concord, and perseverance than a view of mankind 
 gives reason for expecting. 
 
 He wrote likewise this year ' ' A Vindication of Bicker- 
 staff," and an explanation of " An Ancient Prophecy," part 
 written after the facts, and the rest never completed, but well 
 planned to excite amazement. 
 
 Soon after began the busy and important part of Swift's 
 life. He was employed (17 10) by the Primate of Ireland to 
 solicit the queen for a remission of the first-fruits and twen • 
 tieth parts to the Irish clergy. With this purpose he had 
 recourse to Mr. Harley, to whom he was mentioned as a man 
 
SWIFT. 
 
 157 
 
 neglected and oppressed by the last ministry, because he had 
 refused to co-operate with some of their schemes. What he had 
 refused has never been told ; what he had suffered was, I sup- 
 pose, the exclusion from a bishopric by the remonstrances of 
 Sharpe, whom he describes as " the harmless tool of others' 
 hate, ' ' and whom he represents as afterwards ' ' suing for par- 
 don. ' ' 
 
 Harley's designs and situation were such as made him glad 
 of an auxiliary so well qualified for his service ; he therefore 
 soon admitted him to familiarity, whether ever to confidence 
 sonie have made a doubt ; but it would have been difficult to 
 excite his zeal without persuading him that he was trusted, and 
 not very easy to delude him by false persuasions. 
 
 He was certainly admitted to those meetings in which the 
 first hints and original plan of action are supposed to have been 
 fornied ; and was one of the sixteen ministers, or agents of the 
 ministry, who met weekly at each other's houses, and were 
 united by the name of ' ' Brothers. ' ' 
 
 Being not immediately considered as an obdurate Tory, he 
 conversed indiscriminately with all the wits, and was yet the 
 friend of Steele; who, in "The Tatler," which began in 
 April," 1709, confesses the advantage of his conversation, and 
 mentions something contributed by him to his paper. But he 
 was now immerging into political controversy ; for the year 
 1 7 10 produced " The Examiner," of which Swift wrote thirty- 
 three papers. In argument he may be allowed to have the 
 advantage ; for where a wide system of conduct and the whole 
 of a public character is laid open to inquiry, the accuser, hav- 
 ing the choice of facts, must be very unskilful if he does not 
 prevail ; but, with regard to wit, I am afraid none of Swift's 
 papers will be found equal to those by which Addison opposed 
 him. 
 
 He wrote in the year 1711a" Letter to the October Club," 
 a number of Tory gentlemen sent from the country to Parlia- 
 ment, who formed themselves into a club, to the number of 
 about a hundred, and met to animate the zeal and raise the 
 expectations of each other. They thought, with great reason, 
 that the ministers were losing opportunities ; that sufficient use 
 was not made of the ardor of the nation ; they called loudly 
 for more changes and stronger efforts, and demanded the 
 punishment of part and the dismission of the rest of those 
 whom they considered as public robbers. 
 
 Their eagerness was not gratified by the queen or by Har- 
 ley. The queen was probably slow because she was afraid ; 
 and Harley was slow because he was doubtful. ; he was a Tory 
 
158 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 only by necessity or for convenience, and, when he had 
 power in his hands, had no settled purpose for which he should 
 employ it ; forced to gratify to a certain degree the Tories who 
 supported him, but unwilling to make his reconcilement to the 
 Whigs utterly desperate, he corresponded at once with the two 
 expectants of the crown, and kept, as has been observed, the 
 succession undetermined. Not knowing what to do, he did 
 nothing ; and, with the fate of a double dealer, at last he lost 
 his power, but kept his enemies. 
 
 Swift seems to have concurred in opinion with the " Octo- 
 ber Club ;" but it was not in his power to quicken the tardi- 
 ness of Harley, whom he stimulated as much as he could, but 
 with little effect. He that knows not whither to go is in no 
 haste to move. Harley, who was perhaps not quick by nature, 
 became yet more slow by irresolution, and was content to 
 hear that dilatoriness lamented as natural which he applauded 
 in himself as politic. 
 
 Without the Tories, however, nothing could be done ; and, 
 as they were not to be gratified, they must be appeased ; and 
 the conduct of the minister, if it could not be vindicated, was 
 to be plausibly excused. 
 
 Early in the next year he published a ' ' Proposal for cor- 
 recting, improving, and ascertaining the English Tongue," in 
 a letter to the Earl of Oxford, written without much knowl- 
 edge of the general nature of language, and without any accu- 
 rate inquiry into the history of other tongues. The certainty 
 and stability which, contrary to all experience, he thinks at- 
 tainable, he proposes to secure by instituting an academy, the 
 decrees of which every man would have been willing and 
 many would have been proud to disobey, and which, being 
 renewed by successive elections, would in a short time have 
 differed from itself. 
 
 Swift now attained the zenith of his political importance , 
 he published (17 12) the " Conduct of the Allies," ten days be- 
 fore the Parliament assembled. The purpose was to persuade 
 the nation to a peace ; and never had any writer more success. 
 The people, who had been amused with bonfires and triumphal 
 processions, and looked with idolatry on the general and his 
 friends, who, as they thought, had made England the arbitress 
 of nations, were confounded between shame and rage when 
 they found that " mines had been exhausted and millions 
 destroyed ' ' to secure the Dutch or aggrandize the emperor, 
 without any advantage to ourselves ; that we had been bribing 
 OLir neighbors to fight their own quarrel ; and that amongst 
 pur engniies we might number our allies. 
 
SWIFT. 1 59 
 
 That is now no longer doubted, of which the nation was 
 then first informed, that the war was unnecessarily protracted 
 to fill the pockets of Marlborough ; and that it would have been 
 continued without end if he could have continued his annual 
 plunder. But Swift, I suppose, did not yet know what he has 
 since written, that a commission was drawn, which would have 
 appointed him general for life, had it not become ineffectual 
 by the resolution of Lord Cowper, who refused the seal. 
 
 " Whatever is received," say the schools, "is received in 
 proportion to the recipient." The power of a political treatise 
 depends much upon the disposition of the people ; the nation 
 was then combustible, and a spark set it on fire. It is boasted 
 that between November and January, eleven thousand were 
 sold ; a great number at that time, when we were yet not a 
 nation of readers. To its propagation certainly no agency of 
 power or influence was wanting. It furnished arguments for 
 conversation, speeches for debate, and materials for parlia- 
 mentary resolutions. 
 
 Yet, surely, whoever surveys this wonder-working pamphlet 
 with cool perusal, will confess that its efficacy was supplied by 
 the passions of its readers ; that it operates by the mere weight 
 of facts, with very little assistance from the hand that produced 
 them. 
 
 This year (1712) he published his " Reflections on the Bar- 
 rier Treaty," which carries on the design of his " Conduct of 
 the Allies," and shows how Uttle regard in that negotiation 
 had been shown to the interest of England, and how much of 
 the conquered country had been demanded by the Dutch. 
 
 This was followed by " Remarks on the Bishop of Sarum's 
 Introduction to his third Volume of the History of the Refor- 
 mation ;" a pamphlet which Burnet published as an alarm, to 
 warn the nation of the approach of popery. Swift, who seems 
 to have disliked the bishop with something more than political 
 aversion, treats him like one whom he is glad of an opportunity 
 to insult. 
 
 Swift, being now the declared favorite and supposed confi- 
 dant of the Tory ministry, was treated by all that depended on 
 the court with the respect which dependents know how to pay. 
 He soon began to feel part of the misery of greatness : he that 
 could say that he knew him considered himself as having for- 
 tune in his power. Commissions, solicitations, remonstrances, 
 crowded about him ; he was expected to do every man's busi- 
 ness, to procure employment for one, and to retain it for an- 
 other. In assisting those who addressed him, he represents 
 himself as sufficiently diligent ; and desires to have others be- 
 
l6o DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 lieve, what he probably believed himself, that by his interposi- 
 tion many Whigs of merit, and among them Addison and Con- 
 greve, were continued in their places. But every man of 
 known influence has so many petitions which he cannot grant, 
 that he must necessarily offend more than he gratifies, as the 
 preference given to one affords all the rest reason for com- 
 plaint. ' ' When I give away a place, ' ' said Louis XIV. ' ' I 
 make an hundred discontented, and one ungrateful. 
 
 Much has been said of the equality and independence 
 which he preserved in his conversation with the ministers, of 
 the frankness of his remonstrances, and the familiarity of his 
 friendship. In accounts of this kind a few single incidents are 
 set against the general tenor of behavior. No man, however, 
 can pay a more servile tribute to the great than by suffering 
 his liberty in their presence to aggrandize him in his own 
 esteem. Between different ranks of the community there is 
 necessarily some distance ; he who is called by his superior to 
 pass the interval may properly accept the invitation ; but 
 petulance and obtrusion are rarely produced by magnanimity ; 
 nor have often any nobler cause than the pride of importance 
 and the malice of inferiority. He who knows himself neces- 
 sary may set, while that necessity lasts, a high value upon him- 
 self ; as, in a lower condition, a servant eminently skilful may 
 be saucy ; but he is saucy only because he is servile. Swift 
 appears to have preserved the kindness of the great when they 
 wanted him no longer ; and therefore it must be allowed that 
 the childish freedom, to which he seems enough inclined, was 
 overpowered by his better qualities. 
 
 His disinterestedness has been likewise mentioned ; a strain 
 of heroism, which would have been in his condition romantic 
 and superfluous. Ecclesiastical benefices, when they become 
 vacant, must be given away ; and the friends of power may, if 
 (there be no inherent disqualification, reasonably expect them. 
 Swift accepted (1713) the deanery of St. Patrick, the best pre- 
 ferment that his friends could venture to give him. That min- 
 istry was in a great degree supported by the clergy, who were 
 not yet reconciled to the author of the " Tale of a Tub," and 
 would not without much discontent and indignation have 
 borne to see him installed in an English cathedral. 
 
 He refused, indeed, fifty pounds from Lord Oxford ; but he 
 accepted afterwards a draft of a thousand upon the Exche- 
 quer, which was intercepted by the queen's death, and which 
 he resigned, as he says himself, ' ' multa gemens, with many a 
 groan. ' ' 
 
 In the midst of his power and his politic? he kept a journal 
 
SWIFT. l6l 
 
 of his visits, his walks, his interviews with ministers, and quar- 
 rels with his servant, and transmitted it to Mrs. Johnson and 
 Mrs. Dingley, to whom he knew that whatever befell him was 
 interesting, and no accounts could be too minute. Whether 
 these diurnal trifles were properly exposed to eyes which had 
 never received any pleasure from the presence of the dean, 
 may be reasonably doubted : they have, however, some odd 
 attraction ; the reader, finding frequent mention of names 
 which he has been used to consider as important, goes on in 
 hope of information ; and, as there is nothing to fatigue atten- 
 tion, if he is disappointed he can hardly complain. It is easy 
 to perceive, from every page, that though ambition pressed 
 Swift into a life of bustle, the wish for a life of ease was always 
 returning. 
 
 He went to take possession of his deanery as soon as he 
 had obtained it ; but he was not suffered to stay in Ireland 
 more than a fortnight before he was recalled to England, that 
 he might reconcile Lord Oxford and Lord Bolingbroke, who 
 began to look on one another with malevolence, which every 
 day increased, and which Bolingbroke appeared to retain in his 
 last years. 
 
 Swift contrived an interview, from which they both depart- 
 ed discontented ; he procured a second, which only convinced 
 him that the feud was irreconcilable ; he told them his opin- 
 ion, that all was lost. This denunciation was contradicted by 
 Oxford ; but Bolingbroke whispered that he was right. 
 
 Before this violent dissension had shattered the ministry, 
 Swift had published, in the beginning of the year (1714), " The 
 Public Spirit of the Whigs, " in answer to "The Crisis," a 
 pamphlet for which Steele was expelled from the House of 
 Commons. Swift was now so far alienated from Steele as to 
 think him no longer entitled to decency, and therefore treats 
 him sometimes with contempt and sometimes with abhorrence. 
 
 In this pamphlet the Scotch were mentioned in terms so 
 provoking to that irritable nation that, resolving " not to be 
 offended with impunity," the Scotch lords, in a body, de- 
 manded an audience of the queen, and solicited reparation. 
 A proclamation was issued, in which three hundred pounds 
 were offered for the discovery of the author. From this storm 
 he was, as he relates, " secured by a sleight ;" of what kind, 
 or by whose prudence, is not known ; and such was the in- 
 crease of his reputation, that the Scottish " nation applied 
 again that he would be their friend. ' ' 
 
 He was become so formidable to the Whigs, that his fami- 
 liarity with the ministers was clamored at in Parliament, partic- 
 
1 62 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 ularly by two men, afterwards of great note, Aislabie and Wal- 
 pole. 
 
 But, by the disunion of his great friends, his importance 
 and designs were now at an end ; and seeing his services at 
 last useless, he retired about June (17 14) into Berkshire, where, 
 in the house of a friend, he wrote, what was then suppressed, 
 but has since appeared under the title of " Free Thoughts on 
 the present State of Affairs. ' ' 
 
 While he was waiting in this retirement for events which 
 time or chance might bring to pass, the death of the queen 
 broke down at once the whole system of Tory politics ; and 
 nothing remained but to withdraw from the implacability of 
 triumphant Whiggism, and shelter himself in urienvied obscurity. 
 
 The accounts of his reception in Ireland, given by Lord 
 Orrery and Dr. Delany, are so different that the credit of the 
 writers, both undoubtedly veracious, cannot be saved, but by 
 supposing, what I think is true, that they speak of different 
 times. When Delany says that he was received with respect, 
 he means for the first fortnight, when he came to take legal 
 possession ; and when Lord Orrery tells that he was pelted by 
 the populace, he is to be understood of the time when, after 
 the queen's death, he became a settled resident. 
 
 The Archbishop of Dublin gave him at first some disturb- 
 ance in the exercise of his jurisdiction ; but it was soon discov- 
 ered that, between prudence and integrity, he was seldom in 
 the wrong ; and that, when he was right, his spirit did not 
 easily yield to opposition. 
 
 Having so lately quitted the tumults of a party and the in- 
 trigues of a court, they still kept his thoughts in agitation, as 
 the sea fluctuates awhile when the storm has ceased. He 
 therefore filled his hours with some historical attempts relating 
 to the " Change of the Ministers" and " The Conduct of the 
 Ministry." He likewise is said to have written a " History of 
 the Four last Years of Queen Anne, ' ' which he began in her 
 lifetime, and afterwards labored with great attention, but never 
 published. It was after his death in the hands of Lord Orrery 
 and Dr. King. A book under that title was published, with 
 Swift's name, by Dr. Lucas ; of which I can only say, that it 
 seemed by no means to correspond with the notions that I had 
 formed of it, from a conversation which I once heard between 
 the Earl of Orrery and old Mr. Lewis. 
 
 Swift now, much against his will, commenced Irishman for 
 life, and was to contrive how he might be best accommodated 
 in a country where he considered himself as in a state of exile. 
 It seems that his first recourse was to piety. The thoughts of 
 
SWIFT. 163 
 
 death rushed upon him, at this time, with such incessant im- 
 portunity, that they took possession of his mind, when he first 
 waked, for many years together. 
 
 He opened his house by a public table two days a week, 
 and found his entertainments gradually frequented by more 
 and more visitants of learning among the men and of elegance 
 among the women. Mrs. Johnson had left the country, and 
 lived in lodgings not far from the deanery. On his public 
 days she regulated the table, but appeared at it as a mere guest, 
 like other ladies. 
 
 On other days he often dined, at a stated price, with Mr. 
 Worral, a clergyman of his cathedral, whose house was recom- 
 mended by the peculiar neatness and pleasantry of his wife. 
 To this frugal mode of living, he was first disposed by care to 
 pay some debts which he had contracted, and he continued it 
 for the pleasure of accumulating money. His avarice, how- 
 ever, was not suffered to obstruct the claims of his dignity ; he 
 was served in plate, and used to say that he was the poorest 
 gentleman in Ireland that ate upon plate, and the richest that 
 lived without a coach. 
 
 How he spent the rest of his time, and how he employed 
 his hours of study, has been inquired with hopeless curiosity. 
 For who can give an account of another's studies ? Swift was 
 not likely to admit any to his privacies, or to impart a minute 
 account of his business or his leisure. 
 
 Soon after (1716), in his forty-ninth year, he was privately 
 married to Mrs. Johnson, by Dr. Ashe, Bishop of Clogher, as 
 Dr. Madden told me, in the garden. The marriage made no 
 change in their mode of life ; they lived in different houses, as 
 before ; nor did she ever lodge in the deanery but when Swift 
 was seized with a fit of giddiness. " It would be difficult," 
 says Lord Orrery, " to prove that they were ever afterwards 
 together without a third person. ' ' 
 
 The Dean of St. Patrick's lived in a private manner, known 
 and regarded only by his friends ; till, about the year 1720, 
 he, by a pamphlet, recommended to the Irish the use, and con- 
 sequently the improvement, of their manufacture. For a man 
 to use the productions of his own labor is surely a natural right, ' 
 and to like best what he makes himself is a natural passion. 
 But to excite this passion, and enforce this right, appeared so 
 criminal to those who had an interest in the English trade, that 
 the printer was imprisoned ; and, as Hawkesworth justly ob- 
 serves, the attention of the public being by this outrageous 
 resentment turned upon the proposal, the author was by conse- 
 quence made popular. 
 
164 -O^- SAMUEL yOHNSON ON 
 
 In 1723 died Mrs. Van Homrigh, a woman made unhappy 
 by her admiration of wit, &nd ignominiously distinguished by 
 the name of Vanessa, whose conduct has been already suffi- 
 ciently discussed, and whose history is too well known to be 
 minutely repeated. She was a young woman fond of litera- 
 ture, whom Decanus, the dean, called Cadenus by transposition 
 of the letters, took pleasure in directing and instructing ; till, 
 from being proud of his praise, she grew fond of his person. 
 Swift was then about forty-seven, at an age when vanity is 
 strongly excited by the amorous attention of a young woman. 
 If it be said that Swift should have checked a passion which he 
 never meant to gratify, recourse must be had to that extenua- 
 tion which he so much despised, "Men are but men;" per- 
 haps, however, he did not at first know his own mind, and, as 
 he represents himself, was undetermined. For his admission 
 of her courtship, and his indulgence of her hopes after his 
 marriage to Stella, no other honest plea can be found than that 
 he delayed a disagreeable discovery from time to time, dread- 
 ing the immediate bursts of distress, and watching for a favora- 
 ble moment. She thought herself neglected, and died of dis- 
 appointment ; having ordered by her will the poem to be pub- 
 lished in which Cadenus had proclaimed her excellence and 
 confessed his love. The effect of the publication upon the 
 dean and Stella is thus related by Delany : 
 
 ' ' I have good reason to believe that they both were greatly 
 shocked and distressed (though it may be differently) upon this 
 occasion. The dean, made a tour to the south of Ireland, for 
 about two months, at this time, to dissipate his thoughts, and 
 give place to obloquy. And Stella retired (upon the earnest 
 invitation of the owner) to the house of a cheerful, generous, 
 good-natured friend of the dean's, whom she always much 
 loved and honored. There my informer often saw her ; and, I 
 have reason to believe, used his utmost endeavors to relieve, 
 support, and amuse her, in this sad situation. 
 
 "One little incident he told me of on that occasion, I 
 think I shall never forget. As her friend was an hospitable, 
 open-hearted man, well-beloved and largely acquainted, it hap- 
 pened one day that some gentlemen dropped into dinner, who 
 were strangers to Stella's situation ; and as the poem of 
 ' Cadenus and Vanessa' was then the general topic of conver- 
 sation, one of them said, ' Surely that Vanessa must be an ex- 
 traordinary woman, that could inspire the dean to write so 
 finely upon her. ' Mrs. Johnson smiled, and answered, ' That 
 she. thought that point not quite so clear ; for it was well known 
 Ihc dean could write finely upon a broomstick.' " 
 
SWIFT. 165 
 
 The great acquisition of esteem and influence was made by 
 the " Drapier's Letters" in 1724. One Wood, of Wolver- 
 hampton, in Staffordshire, a man enterprising and rapacious, 
 had, as is said, by a present to the Duchess of Munster, ob- 
 tained a patent empowering him to coin one hundred and 
 eighty thousand pounds of halfpence and farthings for the 
 kingdom of Ireland, in which there was a very inconvenient 
 and embarrassing scarcity of copper coin ; so that it was possi- 
 ble to run in debt upon the credit of a piece of money ; for the 
 cook or keeper of an ale-house could not refuse to supply a 
 man that had silver in his hand, and the buyer would not leave 
 his money without change. 
 
 The project was therefore plausible. The scarcity, which 
 was already great, Wood took care to make greater, by 
 agents who gathered up the old halfpence ; and was about to 
 turn his brass into gold, by pouring the treasures of his new 
 mint upon Ireland ; when Swift, finding that the metal was 
 debased to an enormous degree, wrote letters, under the name 
 of M. B. Drapier, to show the folly of receiving, and the mis- 
 chief that must ensue by giving, gold and silver for coin worth 
 perhaps not a third part of its nominal value. 
 
 The nation was alarmed ; the new coin was universally 
 refused ; but the governors of Ireland considered resistance to 
 the king's patent as highly criminal ; and one Whitshed, then 
 Chief Justice, who had tried the printer of the former pam- 
 phlet, and sent out the jury nine times, till by clamor and 
 menaces they were frighted into a special verdict, now pre- 
 sented the Drapier, but could not prevail on the grand jury to 
 find the bill. 
 
 Lord Carteret and the privy council published a proclama- 
 tion, offering three hundred pounds for discovering the author 
 of the Fourth Letter. Swift had concealed himself from his 
 printers, and trusted only his butler, who transcribed the 
 paper. The man, immediately after the appearance of the 
 proclamation, strolled from the house, and stayed out all night 
 and part of the next day. There was reason enough to fear 
 that he had betrayed his master for the reward ; but he came 
 home, and the dean ordered him to put off his livery, and leave 
 the house ; " for," said he, "I know that my life is in your 
 power, and I will not bear, out of fear, either your insolence or 
 negligence." The man excused his fault with great submis- 
 sion, and begged that he might be confined in the house while 
 it was in his power to endanger his master ; but the dean reso- 
 lutely turned him out, without taking farther notice of him, till 
 the term of the information had expired, and then received him 
 
166 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 again. Soon afterwards he ordered him and the rest of his 
 servants into his presence, without telling his' intentions, and 
 bade them take notice that their fellow-servant was no longer 
 llobert the butler ; but that his integrity had made him Mr. 
 Blakeney, verger of St. Patrick's ; an officer whose income was 
 between thirty and forty pounds a year : yet he still continued 
 for some years to serve his old master as his butler. 
 
 Swift was known from this time by the appellation of 
 ' ' The Dean. ' ' He was honored by the populace as the cham- 
 pion, patron, and instructor of Ireland ; and gained such 
 power as, considered both in its extent and duration, scarcely 
 any man has ever enjoyed without greater wealth or higher 
 station. 
 
 He was from this important year the oracle of the traders 
 and the idol of the rabble, and by consequence was feared and 
 courted by all to whom the kindness of the traders or the pop- 
 ulace was necessary. The Drapier was a sign ; the Drapier 
 was a health ; and which way soever the eye or the ear was 
 turned, some tokens were found of the nation's gratitude to 
 the Drapier. 
 
 The benefit was indeed great ; he had rescued Ireland from 
 a very oppressive and predatory invasion ; and the popularity 
 which he had gained he was diligent to keep, by appearing for- 
 ward and zealous on every occasion where the public interest 
 was supposed to be involved.' Nor did he much scruple to 
 boast his influence ; for when, upon some attempts to regulate 
 the coin, Archbishop Boulter, then one of the justices, accused 
 him of exasperating the people, he exculpated himself by say- 
 ing, " If I had lifted up my finger, they would have torn you 
 to pieces." 
 
 But the pleasure of popularity was soon interrupted by 
 domestic misery. Mrs. Johnson, whose conversation was to 
 him the great softener of the ills of life, began in the year of the 
 Drapier' s triumph to decline ; and two years afterwards was so 
 wasted with sickness that her recovery was considered as 
 hopeless. 
 
 Swift was then in England, and had been invited by Lord 
 Bolingbroke to pass the winter with him in France, but this 
 call of calamity hastened him to Ireland, where perhaps his 
 presence contributed to restore her to imperfect and tottering 
 health. 
 
 He was now so much at ease, that (1727) he returned to 
 England ; where he collected three volumes of Miscellanies 
 in conjunction with Pope, who prefixed a querulous and apolo- 
 getical Preface. 
 
SlVlJfT. 
 
 167 
 
 This important year sent likewise into the world " Gulli- 
 ver's Travels," a production so new and strange that it filled 
 the reader with a mingled emotion of merriment and amaze- 
 ment. It was received with such avidity that the price of the 
 first edition was raised before the second could be made ; it 
 was read by the high and the low, the learned and illiterate. 
 Criticism was for a while lost in wonder ; no rules of judgment 
 were applied to a book written in open defiance of truth and 
 regularity. But when distinctions came to be made, the part 
 which gave the least pleasure was that which describes the fly- 
 ing island, and that which gave most disgust must be the his- 
 tory of the Houyhnhnms. 
 
 While Swift was enjoying the reputation of his new work, 
 the news of the king's death arrived ; and he kissed the hands 
 of the new king and queen three days after their accession. 
 
 By the queen, when she was princess, he had been treated 
 with some distinction, and was well received by her in her 
 exaltation ; but whether she gave hopes which she never took 
 care to satisfy, or he formed expectations which she never 
 meant to raise, the event was, that he always afterwards 
 thought on her with malevolence, and particularly charged her 
 with breaking her promise of some medals which she engaged 
 to send him. 
 
 I know not whether she had not, in her turn, some reason 
 for complaint. A letter was sent her, not so much entreating, 
 as requiring, her patronage of Mrs. Barber, an ingenious Irish- 
 woman, who was then begging subscriptions for her poems. 
 To this letter was subscribed the name of Swift, and it has all 
 the appearances of his diction and sentiments ; but it was not 
 written in his hand, and had some little improprieties. When 
 he was charged with this letter, he laid hold of the inaccura- 
 cies, and urged the improbability of the accusation, but never 
 denied it ; he shuffles between cowardice and veracity, and 
 talks big when he says nothing. ) 
 
 He seems desirous enough of recommencing courtier, and 
 endeavored to gain the kindness of Mrs. Howard, remember- 
 ing what Mrs. Masham had performed in former times ; but 
 his flatteries were, like those of other wits, unsuccessful ; the 
 lady either wanted power, or had no ambition of poetical im- 
 mortality. 
 
 He was seized, not long afterwards, by a fit of giddiness, and 
 again heard of the sickness and danger of Mrs. Johnson. He 
 then left the house of Pope, as it seems, with very little ceremo- 
 ny, finding " that two sick friends cannot live together ;" and 
 did not write to him till he found himself at Chester. 
 
l68 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 He returned to a home of sorrow : poor Stella was sinking 
 into the grave, and, after a languishing decay of about two 
 months, died in her forty-fourth year, on January 28, 1728. 
 How much he wished her life, his papers show ; nor can it be 
 doubted that he dreaded the death of her whom he loved most, 
 aggravated by the consciousness that himself had hastened it. 
 
 Beauty and the power of pleasing, the greatest external ad- 
 vantages that woman can desire or possess, were fatal to the 
 unfortunate Stella. The man whom she had the misfortune to 
 love was, as Delany observes, fond of singularity, and desirous 
 to make a mode of happiness for himself, different from the 
 general course of things and order of Providence. From the 
 time of her arrival in Ireland he seems resolved to keep her in 
 his power, and therefore hindered a match sufficiently advan- 
 tageous, by accumulating unreasonable demands, and prescrib- 
 ing conditions that could not be performed. While she was at 
 her own disposal he did not consider his possession as secure ; 
 resentment, ambition, or caprice might separate them ; he was 
 therefore resolved to make " assurance doubly sure," and to 
 appropriate her by a private marriage, to which he had annexed 
 the expectation of all the pleasures of perfect friendship with- 
 out the uneasiness of conjugal restraint. But with this state 
 poor Stella was not satisfied ; she never was treated as a wife, 
 and to the world she had the appearance of a mistress. She 
 lived sullenly on, in hope that in time he would own and 
 receive her ; but the time did not come till the change of his 
 manners and deprivation of his mind made her tell him, when he 
 offered to acknowledge her, that ' ' it was too late. ' ' She then 
 gave up herself to sorrowful resentment, and died under the 
 tyranny of him by whom she was in the highest degree loved 
 and honored. 
 
 What were her claims to this eccentric tenderness, by which 
 the laws of nature were violated to retain her, curiosity will 
 inquire ; but how shall it be gratified ? Swift was a lover ; his 
 testimony may be suspected. Delany and the Irish saw with 
 Swift's eyes, and therefore add little confirmation. That she 
 was virtuous, beautiful, and elegant, in a very high degree, 
 such admiration from such a lover makes it very probable ; but 
 she had not much literature, for she could not spell her own 
 language ; and of her wit, so loudly vaunted, the smart sayings 
 which Swift himself has collected afford no splendid specimen. 
 
 The reader of Swift's " Letter to a Lady on her Marriage," 
 may be allowed to doubt whether his opinion of female excel- 
 lence ought implicitly to be admitted ; for, if his general 
 thoughts on women were such as he exhibits, a very little sense 
 
SWiPT. 
 
 169 
 
 in a lady would enrapture and a very little virtue would aston- 
 ish him. Stella's supremacy, therefore, was perhaps only 
 local' ; she was great because her associates were little. 
 
 In some Remarks lately published on the Life of 
 Swift, his marriage is mentioned as fabulous or doubtful ; 
 but, alas ! poor Stella, as Dr. Madden told me, related her 
 melancholy story to Dr. Sheridan, when he attended her as a 
 clergyman to prepare her for death ; and Delany mentions it 
 not with doubt, but only with regret. Swift never mentioned 
 her without a sigh. The rest of his life was spent in Ireland, 
 in a country to which not even power almost despotic, nor flat- 
 tery almost idolatrous, could reconcile him. He sometimes 
 wished to visit England, but always found some reason of de- 
 lay. He tells Pope, in the decline of life, that he hopes once 
 more to see him ; ' ' but if not, ' ' says he, ' ' we must part, as all 
 human beings have parted. ' ' 
 
 After the death of Stella, his benevolence was contracted 
 and his severity exasperated ; he drove his acquaintance from 
 his table, and wondered why he was deserted. But he contin- 
 ued his attention to the public, and wrote, from time to time, 
 such directions, admonitions, or censures as the exigency of 
 affairs, in his opinion, made proper ; and nothing fell from his 
 pen in vain. 
 
 In a short poem on the Presbyterians, whom he always < 
 regarded with detestation, he bestowed one stricture upon 
 Bettesworth, a lawyer eminent for his insolence to the clergy, 
 which, from very considerable reputation, brought him into 
 immediate and universal contempt. Bettesworth, enraged at 
 his disgrace and loss, went to Swift and demanded whether he 
 was the author of that poem ? " Mr. Bettesworth," answered 
 he, "I was in my youth acquainted with great lawyers, who, 
 knowing my disposition to satire, advised me, that if any scoun- 
 drel or blockhead whom I had lampooned should ask, ' Are 
 you the author of this paper ? ' I should tell him that I was not 
 the author ; and therefore I tell you, Mr. Bettesworth, that I 
 am not the author of these lines. " 
 
 Bettesworth was so little satisfied with this account that he 
 publicly professed his resolution of a violent and corporal 
 revenge ; but the inhabitants of St. Patrick's district embodied 
 themselves in the dean's defence. Bettesworth declared in 
 Parliament that Swift had deprived him of twelve hundred 
 pounds a year. 
 
 Swift was popular awhile by another mode of beneficence. 
 He set aside some hundreds to be lent in small sums to the 
 poor, from five shillings, I think, to five pounds. He took no 
 
170 £Hi. SAMUEL yoHNSON ON 
 
 interest, and only required that, at repayment, a small fee 
 should lae given to the accountant ; but he required that the 
 day of promised payment should be exactly kept. A severe 
 and punctilious temper is ill qualified for transactions with the 
 poor ; the day was often broken, and the loan was not repaid. 
 This might have been easily foreseen ; but for this Swift had 
 made no provision of patience or pity. He ordered his debt- 
 ors to be sued. A severe creditor has no popular character ; 
 what then was likely to be said of him who employs the catch- 
 poll under the appearance of charity ? The clamor against him 
 was loud, and the resentment of the populace outrageous ; he 
 was therefore forced to drop his scheme, and own the folly of 
 expecting punctuality from the poor. 
 
 His asperity continually increasing, condemned him to sol- 
 itude ; and his resentment of solitude sharpened his asperity. 
 He was not, however, totally deserted ; some men of learninge 
 and some women of elegance often visited him ; and he wrot- 
 from time to time either verse or prose : of his verses he will 
 ingly gave copies, and is supposed to have felt no discontent 
 when he saw them printed. His favorite maxim was, ' ' Vive la 
 bagatelle :" he thought trifles a necessary part of life, and per- 
 haps found them necessary to himself, jt seems impossible to 
 him to be idle, and his disorders made it difficult or dangerous to 
 be long seriously studious or laboriously diligent. The love of 
 ease is always gaining upon age, and he had one temptation to 
 petty amusements peculiar to himself ; whatever he did he was 
 sure to hear applauded ; and such was his predominance over all 
 that approached, that all their applauses were probably sincere. 
 He that is much flattered soon learns to flatter himself ; we are 
 commonly taught our duty by fear or shame, and how can they 
 act upon the man who hears nothing but his own praises ? 
 
 As his years increased, his fits of giddiness and deafness 
 grew more frequent, and his deafness made conversation diffi- 
 cult : they grew likewise more severe, till, in 1736, as he was 
 writing a poem called ' ' The Legion Club, ' ' he was seized with 
 a fit so painful and so long continued, that he never after 
 thotight it proper to attempt any work of thought or labor. 
 
 He was always careful of his money, and was therefore no 
 liberal entertainer ; but was less frugal of his wine than of his 
 meat. When his friends of either sex came to him in expecta- 
 tion of a dinner^ his custom was to give every one a shilling, 
 that they might please themselves with their provision. At 
 last his avarice grew too powerful for his kindness ; he would 
 refuse a bottle of wine, and in Ireland no maii visits where he 
 cannot drink. 
 
SWIFT. 
 
 171. 
 
 Having thus excluded conversation and desisted from 
 study, he had neither business nor amusement ; for having by 
 some ridiculous resolution or mad vow determined never to 
 wear spectacles, he could make little use of books in his later 
 years ; his ideas, therefore, being neither renovated by dis- 
 course nor increased by reading, wore gradually away, and left 
 his mind vacant to the vexations of the hour, till at last his 
 anger was heightened into madness. 
 
 He, however, permitted one book to be published, which had 
 been the production of former years, " Polite Conversation, " 
 which appeared in 1738. " The Directions for Servants" was 
 printed soon after his death. These two performances show a 
 mind incessantly attentive, and, when it was not employed 
 upon great things, busy with minute occurrences. It is ap- 
 parent that he must have had the habit of noting whatever he 
 observed; for such a number of particulars could never have! 
 been assembled by the power of recollection. 
 
 He grew more violent, and his mental powers declined till 
 (1741) it was found necessary that legal guardians should bej 
 appointed of his person and fortune. He now lost distinction."; 
 His madness was compounded of rage and fatuity. The last 
 face that he knew was that of Mrs. Whiteway ; and her he 
 ceased to know in a little time. His meat was brought him 
 cut into mouthfuls ; but he would never touch it while the ser- 
 vant stayed, and at last, after it had stood perhaps an hour, 
 would eat it walking ; for he continued his old habit, and was 
 on his feet ten hours a day. 
 
 Next year (1742) he had an inflammation in his left eye, 
 which swelled it to the size of an egg, with boils in other 
 parts : he was kept long waking with the pain, and was not 
 easily restrained by five attendants from tearing out his eye. 
 
 The tumor at last subsided ; and a short interval of reason 
 ensuing, in which he knew his physician and his family, gave 
 hopes of his recovery ; but in a few days he sunk into a lethar- 
 gic stupidity, motionless, heedless, and speechless. But it is 
 said that, after a year of total silence, when his housekeeper, 
 on the 30th of November, told him that the usual bonfires and 
 illuminations were preparing to celebrate his birthday, he an- 
 swered, " It is all folly ; they had better let it alone." 
 
 It is remembered that he afterwards spoke now and then, 
 or gave some intimation of a meaning ; but at last sunk into 
 perfect silence, which continued till about the end of October, 
 1744, when, in his seventy-eighth year, he expired without a 
 struggle. 
 
 When Swift is considered as an author, it is just to estimate 
 
1/2 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 nis powers by their effects. In the reign of Queen Anne he 
 turned the stream of popularity against the Whigs, and must be 
 confessed to have dictated for a time the political opinions of 
 the English nation. In the succeeding reign he delivered Ire- 
 land from plunder and oppression ; and showed that wit. con- 
 federated with truth, had such force as authority was unable to 
 resist. He said truly of himself, that Ireland " was his 
 debtor." It was from the time when he first began to patron- 
 ize the Irish that they may date their riches and prosperity. 
 He taught them first to know their own interest, their weight, 
 and their strength, and gave them spirit to assert that equality, 
 with their fellow-subjects, to which they have ever since been 
 making vigorous advances, and to claim those rights which they 
 have at last established. Nor can they be charged with in- 
 gratitude to their benefactor ; for they reverenced him as a 
 guardian and obeyed him as a dictator. 
 
 In his works he has given very different specimens both of 
 sentiments and expression. His " Tale of a Tub" has little 
 resemblance to his other pieces. It exhibits a vehemence and 
 rapidity of mind, a copiousness of images, and vivacity of dic- 
 tion such as he afterwards never possessed or never exerted. 
 It is of a mode so distinct and peculiar that it must be consid- 
 ered by itself ; what is true of that is not true of any thing 
 else which he has written. 
 
 In his other works is found an equable tenor of easy lan- 
 guage, which rather trickles than flows. His delight was in 
 simplicity. That he has in his works no metaphor, as has been 
 said, is not true ; but his few metaphors seem to be received 
 rather by necessity than choice. He studied purity ; and 
 though perhaps all his strictures are not exact, yet it is not 
 often that solecisms can be found ; and whoever depends on 
 his authority may generally conclude himself safe. His sen- 
 tences are never too much dilated or contracted ; and it will not 
 be easy to find any embarrassment in the complication of his 
 clauses, ajiy inconsequence in his connections, or abruptness 
 in his transitions. 
 
 His style was well suited to his thoughts, which are never 
 subtilized by nice disquisitions, decorated by sparkling conceits, 
 elevated by ambitious sentences, or variegated by far-sought 
 learning. He pays no court to the passions ; he excites neither ' 
 surprise nor admiration ; he always understands himself, and 
 his reader always understands him ; the peruser of Swift wants 
 little previous knowledge ; it will be sufficient that he is ac- 
 quainted with common words and common things ; he is 
 neither required to mount elevations nor to explore profundi- 
 
SWIFT. 1 73 
 
 ties ; his passage is always on a level, along solid ground, with- 
 out asperities, without obstruction. 
 
 This easy and safe conveyance of meaning it was Swift's 
 desire to attain, and for having attained he deserves praise. 
 For purposes merely didactic, when something is to be told 
 that was not known before, it is the best mode ; but against 
 that inattention by which known truths are suffered to lie neg- 
 lected it makes no provision ; it instructs, but does not per- 
 suade. 
 
 By his political education he was associated with the 
 Whigs ; but he deserted them when they deserted their princi- 
 ples, yet without running into the contrary extreme : he con- 
 tinued throughout his life to retain the disposition which he 
 assigns to the ' ' Church-of-England Man, ' ' of thinking com- 
 monly with the Whigs of the state and with the Tories of the 
 church. 
 
 He was a churchman rationally zealous ; he desired the 
 prosperity and maintained the honor of the clergy ; of the 
 dissenters he did not wish to infringe the toleration, but he op- 
 posed their encroachments. 
 
 To his duty as dean he was very attentive. He managed 
 the revenues of his church with exact economy ; and it is said 
 by Delany that more money was, under his direction, laid out 
 in repairs than had ever been in the same time since its first 
 erection. Of his choir he was eminently careful, and, though 
 he neither loved nor understood music, took care that all the 
 singers were well qualified, admitting none without the testi- 
 mony of skilful judges. 
 
 In his church he restored the practice of weekly commun- 
 ion, and distributed the sacramental elements in the most 
 solemn and devout manner with his own hand. He came to 
 church every morning, preached commonly in his turn, and 
 attended the evening anthem, that it might not be negligently 
 performed. 
 
 He read the service " rather with a strong, nervous voice, 
 than in a graceful manner ; his voice was sharp and high- 
 toned, rather than harmonious. ' ' 
 
 He entered upon the clerical state with hope to excel in 
 preaching ; but complained that, from the time of his political 
 controversies, ' ' he could only preach pamphlets. ' ' This cen- 
 sure of himself, if judgment be made from those sermons which 
 have been printed, was unreasonably severe. 
 
 The suspicions of his irreligion proceeded in a great meas- 
 ure from his dread of hypocrisy ; instead of wishing to seem 
 better, he delighted in seeming worse than he was. He went 
 
1-74 ■^■*- SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 in London to early prayers, lest he should be seen at church : 
 Ae read prayers to his servants every morning with such dex- 
 terous secrecy that Dr. Delany was six months in his house 
 before he knew it. He was not only careful to hide the good 
 which he did, but willingly incurred the suspicion of evil which 
 he did not. He forgot what himself had formerly asserted, 
 that hypocrisy is less mischievous than open impiety. Dr. De- 
 lany, with all his zeal for his honor, has justly condemned this 
 part of his character. 
 
 The person of Swift had not many recommendations. He 
 had a kind of muddy complexion, which, though he washed 
 himself with oriental scrupulosity, did not look clear. He had 
 a countenance sour and severe, which he seldom softened by 
 any appearance of gayety. He stubbornly resisted any ten- 
 dency to laughter. 
 
 To his domestics he was naturally rough ; and a man of 
 rigorous temper, with that vigilance of minute attention which 
 his works discover, must have been a master that few could 
 bear. That he was disposed to do his servants good on im- 
 portant occasions is no great mitigation ; benefaction can be 
 but rare, and tyrannic peevishness is perpetual. He did not 
 spare the servants of others. Once when he dined alone with 
 the Earl of Orrery, he said of one that waited in the room, 
 " That man has, since we sat to the table, committed fifteen 
 faults." What the faults were, Lord Orrery, from whom I 
 heard the story, had not been attentive enough to discover. 
 My number may perhaps not be exact. 
 
 In his economy he practised a peculiar and offensive parsi- 
 mony, without disguise or apology. The practice of saving 
 being once necessary, became habitual, and grew first ridicu- 
 lous, and at last detestable. But his avarice, though it might 
 exclude pleasure, was never suffered to encroach upon his vir- 
 tue. He was frugal by inclination, but liberal by principle ; 
 and if the purpose to which he destined his little accumula- 
 tions be remembered, with his distribution of occasional 
 charity, it will perhaps appear that he only liked one mode of 
 expense better than another, and saved merely that he might 
 have something to give. He did not grow rich by injuring his 
 successors, but left both Laracor and the deanery more valua- 
 ble than he found them. With all this talk of his covetousness 
 and generosity, it should be remembered that he was never 
 rich. The revenue of his deanery was not much more than 
 seven hundred a year. 
 
 His beneficence was not graced with tenderness or 
 civility ; he relieved without pity and assisted without kind- 
 
SWIFT. 
 
 175 
 
 ness ; so that those who were fed by him could hardly love 
 him. 
 
 He made a rule to himself to give but one piece at a time, 
 and therefore always stored his pocket with coins of different 
 value. 
 
 Whatever he did, he seemed willing to do in a manner 
 peculiar to himself, without sufficiently considering that singu- 
 larity, as it implies a contempt of the general practice, is a kind 
 of defiance which justly provokes the hostility of ridicule ; he, 
 therefore, who indulges peculiar habits is worse than others, if 
 he be not better. 
 
 Of his humor, a story told by Pope may afford a specimen. 
 
 " Dr. Swift has an odd blunt way that is mistaken by 
 strangers for ill-nature. 'Tis so odd that there's no describ- 
 ing it but by facts. I'll tell you one that first comes into my 
 head. One evening Gay and I went to see him : you know 
 how intimately we were all acquainted. On our coming in, 
 ' Heyday, gentlemen (says the doctor), what's the meaning of 
 this visit ? How came you to leave the great lords that you 
 are so fond of, to come hither to see a poor dean ? ' — ' Because 
 we would rather see you than any of them.' — 'Ay, any one 
 that did not know so well as I do might believe you. But since 
 you are come, I must get some supper for you, I suppose. ' — 
 ' No, doctor, we have supped already. ' — ' Supped already ! 
 that's impossible ! why 'tis not eight o'clock yet. — That's very 
 strange ; but if you had not supped, I must have got some- 
 thing for you. Let me see, what should I have had ? A 
 couple of lobsters ; ay, that would have done very well ; two 
 shiUings — tarts, a shilling ; but you will drink a glass of wine 
 with me, though you supped so much before your usual time 
 only to spare my pocket ? ' — ' No, we had rather talk with you 
 than drink with you.' — ' But if you had supped with me, as in 
 all reason you ought to have done, you must then have drank 
 with me. A bottle of wine, two shiUings — two and two is 
 four, and one is five ; just two and sixpence apiece. There, 
 Pope, there's half-a-crown for you, and there's another for 
 you, sir ; for I won't save any thing by you I am determined.' 
 — This was all said and done with his usual seriousness on 
 such occasions : and in spite of every thing we could say to 
 the contrary, he actually obliged us to take the money." 
 
 In the intercourse of familiar life he indulged his dispo- 
 sition to petulance and sarcasm, and thought himself injured if 
 the licentiousness of his raillery, the freedom of his censures, 
 or the petulance of his frolics was resented or repressed. 
 
 He predominated over his companions with very high 
 
176 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 ascendancy, and probably would bear none over whom he 
 could not predominate. To give him advice was, in the style 
 of his friend Delany, ' to venture to speak to him." This 
 customary superiority soon grew too delicate for truth ; and 
 Swift, with all his penetration, allowed himself to be delighted 
 with low flattery. 
 
 On all common occasions he habitually affects a style of 
 arrogance, and dictates rather than persuades. This authori- 
 tative and magisterial language he expected to be received as 
 his peculiar mode of jocularity ; but he apparently flattered his 
 own arrogance by an assumed imperiousness, in which he was 
 ironical only to the resentful, and to the submissive suffici- 
 ently serious. 
 
 He told stories with great felicity, and delighted in doing 
 what he knew himself to do well ; he was therefore captivated 
 by the respectful silence of a steady listener, and told the same 
 tales too often. 
 
 He did not, however, claim the right of talking alone, for 
 it was his rule, when he had spoken a minute, to give room by 
 a pause for any other speaker. Of time, on all occasions, he 
 was an exact computer, and knew the minutes required to every 
 common operation. 
 
 It may be justly supposed that there was in his conversation 
 what appears so frequently in his letters, an affectation of 
 familiarity with the great, and ambition of momentary equality 
 sought and enjoyed by the neglect of those ceremonies which 
 custom has established as the barriers between one order of 
 society and another. This transgression of regularity was by 
 himself and his admirers termed greatness of soul. But a great 
 mind disdains to hold any thing by courtesy, and therefore 
 never usurps what a lawful claimant may take away. He that 
 encroaches on another's dignity puts himself in his power ; he 
 is either repelled with helpless indignity or endured by clemency 
 and condescension. 
 
 Of Swift's general habits of thinking, if his letters can be 
 supposed to afford any evidence, he was not a man to be either 
 loved or envied. He seems to have wasted life in discontent, 
 by the rage of neglected pride and the languishment of unsatis- 
 fied desire. He is querulous and fastidious, arrogant and 
 malignant ; he scarcely speaks of himself but with indignant 
 lamentations, or of others but with insolent superiority when 
 he is gay, and with angry contempt when he is gloomy. From 
 the letters that passed between him and Pope it might be 
 inferred that they, with Arbuthnot and Gay, had engrossed all 
 the understanding and virtue of mankind ; that their merits 
 filled the world, or that there was no hope of more, They 
 
SWIFT. 
 
 177 
 
 show the age involved in darkness, and shade the picture with 
 sullen emulation. 
 
 When the queen's death drove him into Ireland, he might 
 be allowed to regret for a time the interception of his views, 
 the extinction of his hopes, and his ejection from gay scenes, 
 important employment, and splendid friendships ; but when 
 time had enabled reason to prevail over vexation, the com- 
 plaints which at first were natural became ridiculous because 
 they were useless. But querulousness was now grown habitual, 
 and he cried out when he probably had ceased to feel. His 
 reiterated wailings persuaded Bolingbroke that he was really 
 willing to quit his deanery for an English parish ; and Boling- 
 broke procured an exchange, which was rejected ; and Swift 
 still retained the pleasure of complaining. 
 
 The greatest difficulty that occurs in analyzing his char- 
 acter is to discover by what depravity of intellect he took 
 delight in evolving ideas from which almost every other mind 
 shrinks with disgust. The ideas of pleasure, even when crim- 
 inal, niay solicit the imagination ; but what has disease, 
 deformity, and filth, upon which the thoughts can be allured to 
 dwell ? Delany is willing to think that Swift's mind was not 
 much tainted with this gross corruption before his long visit to 
 Pope. He does not consider how he degrades his hero by 
 making him at fifty-nine the pupil of turpitude, and liable to 
 the malignant influence of an ascendant mind. But the truth is 
 that Gulliver had described his Yahoos before the visit ; and 
 he that had formed those images had nothing filthy to learn. 
 
 I have here given the character of Swift as he exhibits him- 
 self to my perception ; but now let another be heard who knew 
 him better. Dr. Delany, after long acquaintance, describes 
 him to Lord Orrery in these terms : 
 
 " My Lord, when you consider Swift's singular, peculiar, 
 and most variegated vein of wit, always intended rightly, 
 although not always so rightly directed ; delightful in many in- 
 stances, and salutary even where it is most offensive ; when 
 you consider his strict truth, his fortitude in resisting oppres- 
 sion and arbitrary power ; his fidelity in friendship ; his sincere 
 love and zeal for religion ; his uprightness in making right reso- 
 lutions, and his steadiness in adhering to them ; his care of his 
 church, its choir, its economy, and its income ; his attention 
 to all those that preached in his cathedral, in order to their 
 amendment in pronunciation and style ; as also his remarkable 
 attention to the interest of his successors, preferably to his 
 own present emoluments ; his invincible patriotism, even to a 
 country which he did not love ; his very various, well-devised, 
 well-judged, and extensive charities, throughout his life ; and 
 
1 78 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON SWIPT. 
 
 his whole fortune (to say nothing of his wife's), conveyed to the 
 same Christian purposes at his death ; charities, from which he 
 could enjoy no honor, advantage, or satisfaction of any kind 
 in this world : when you consider his ironical and humorous as 
 well as his serious schemes for the promotion of true religion 
 and virtue ; his success in soliciting for the first-fruits and 
 twentieths, to the unspeakable benefit of the established church 
 of Ireland : and his felicity (to rate it no higher) in giving 
 occasion to the building of fifty new churches in London — 
 
 ' ' All this considered, the character of his life will appear 
 like that of his writings : they will both bear to be recon- 
 sidered and re-examined with the utmost attention, and always 
 discover new beauties and excellences upon every examination. 
 
 " They will bear to be considered as the sun in which the 
 brightness will hide the blemishes ; and whenever petulant ig- 
 norance, pride, malice, malignity, or envy interposes to cloud 
 or sully his fame, I take upon me to pronounce that the eclipse 
 will not last long. 
 
 ' ' To conclude — No man ever deserved better of any country 
 than Swift did of his ; a steady, persevering, inflexible friend ; 
 a wise, a watchful, and a faithful counsellor, under many 
 severe trials and bitter persecutions, to the manifest hazard 
 both of his liberty and fortune. 
 
 ' ' He lived a blessing, he died a benefactor, and his name 
 will ever live an honor, to Ireland. ' ' 
 
 In the poetical works of Dr. Swift there is not much upon 
 which the critic can exercise his powers. They are often 
 humorous, almost always light, and have the qualities which 
 recommend such compositions, easiness and gayety. They are, 
 for the most part, what their author intended. The diction is 
 correct, the numbers are smooth, and the rhymes exact. 
 There seldom occurs a hard-labored expression or a redundant 
 epithet ; all his verses exemplify his own definition of a good 
 style, they consist of ' ' proper words in proper places. ' ' 
 
 To divide this collection into classes, and show how some 
 pieces are gross and some are trifling, would be to tell the 
 reader what he knows already, and to find faults of which the 
 author could not be ignorant, who certainly wrote often not to 
 his judgment, but his humor. 
 
 It was said, in a preface to one of the Irish editions, that 
 Swift had never been known to take a single thought from 
 any writer, ancient or modern. This is not literally true ; but 
 perhaps no writer can easily be found that has borrowed so 
 little, or that in all his excellences and all his defects has so 
 well maintained his claim to be considered as original. 
 
DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON ADDISON. 
 
 Joseph Addison was born on the ist of May, 1672, at 
 Milston, of which his father, Lancelot Addison, was then rec- 
 tor, near Ambrosebury in Wiltshire, and appearing weak and 
 unlikely to live, he was christened the same day. After the 
 usual domestic education, which from the character of his 
 father may be reasonably supposed to have given him strong 
 impressions of piety, he was committed to the care of Mr. 
 Naish, at Ambrosebury, and afterwards of Mr. Taylor, at 
 Salisbury. 
 
 Not to name the school or the masters of men illustrious 
 for literature is a kind of historical fraud, by which honest 
 fame is injuriously diminished ; I would therefore trace him 
 through the whole process of his education. In 1683, in the 
 beginning of his twelfth year, his father being made Dean of 
 Lichfield, naturally carried his family to his new residence, 
 and, I believe, placed him for some time, probably not long, 
 under Mr. Shaw, then master of the school at Lichfield, father 
 of the late Dr. Peter Shaw. Of this interval his biographers 
 have given no account, and I know it only from a story of a 
 barring-out^ told me when I was a boy, by Andrew Corbet, of 
 Shropshire, who had heard it from Mr. Pigot, his uncle. 
 
 The practice of barring-out was a savage license practised 
 in many schools at the end of the last century, by which the 
 boys, when the periodical vacation drew near, growing petulant 
 at the approach of liberty, some days before the time of regular 
 recess took possession of the school, of which they barred the 
 doors, and bade their master defiance from the windows. It is 
 not easy to suppose that on such occasions the master would 
 do more than laugh ; yet if tradition may be credited, he often 
 struggled hard to force or surprise the garrison. The master, 
 when Pigot was a school-boy, was barred-out at Lichfield ; and 
 the whole operation, as he said, was planned and conducted 
 by Addison. 
 
 To judge better of the probability of this story, I have in- 
 quired when he was sent to the Chartreux ; but, as he was not 
 one of those who enjoyed the founder's benefaction, there is 
 no account preserved of his admission. At the school of the 
 Chartreux, to which he was removed either from that of Salis- 
 bury or Lichfield, he pursued his juvenile studies under the 
 care of Dr. Ellis, and contracted that intimacy with Sir Rich- 
 
l8o DR. SAMUEL yOHNSOff ON 
 
 ard Steele which their joint labors have so effectually re- 
 corded. 
 
 Of this memorable friendship the greater praise must be 
 given to Stteele. It' is not hard to love those from whom noth- 
 ing can be feared ; and Addison never considered Steele as a 
 rival, but Steele lived, as he confesses, under an habitual sub- 
 jection to the predominating genius of Addison, whom he al- 
 ways mentioned with reverence and treated with obsequious- 
 ness. 
 
 Addison, who knew his own dignity, could not always for- 
 bear to show it, by playing a little upon his admirer ; but he 
 was in no danger of retort : his jests were endured without 
 resistance or resentment. 
 
 But the sneer of jocularity was not the worst. Steele, 
 whose imprudence of generosity, or vanity of profusion, kept 
 him always incurably necessitous, upon some pressing exi- 
 gence, in an evil hour, borrowed a hundred pounds of his 
 friend, probably without much purpose of repayment ; but 
 Addison, who seems to have had other notions of a hundred 
 pounds, grew impatient of delay and reclaimed his loan by an 
 execution. Steele felt with great sensibility the obduracy of his 
 creditor, but with emotions of sorrow rather than of anger. 
 
 In 1687 he was entered into Queen's College, in Oxford, 
 where, in 1689, the accidental perusal of some Latin verses 
 gained him the patronage of Dr. Lancaster, afterwards provost 
 of Queen's College, by whose recommendation he was elected 
 into Magdalen College as a Demy, a term by which that society 
 denominates those which are elsewhere called Scholars — young 
 men who partake of the founder's benefaction, and succeed in 
 their order to vacant fellowships. 
 
 Here he continued to cultivate poetry and criticism, and 
 grew first eminent by his Latin compositions, which are indeed 
 entitled to particular praise. He has not confined himself to 
 the imitation of any ancient author, but has formed his style 
 from the general language, such as a diligent perusal of the 
 productions of different ages happened to supply. 
 
 His Latin compositions seem to have had much of his fond- 
 ness, for he collected a second volume of the ' ' Musae Angli- 
 canae," perhaps for a convenient receptacle, in which all his 
 Latin pieces are inserted, and where his poem on the Peace 
 has the first place. He afterwards presented the collection to 
 Boileau, who, from that time, " conceived," says Tickell, " an 
 opinion of tlie English genius for poetry. ' ' Nothing is better 
 known of Boileau than that he had an injudicious and peevish 
 contempt of modern Latin and therefore his profession of 
 
ADDISON. 1 81 
 
 regard was probably the effect of his civility rather than appro- 
 bation. 
 
 Three of his Latin poems are upon subjects on which per- 
 haps he would not have ventured to have written in his own 
 language, "The Battle of the Pigmies and Cranes," "The 
 Barometer, ' ' and ' ' A Bowling-green. ' ' When the matter is 
 low or scanty, a dead language, in which nothing is mean be- 
 cause nothing is familiar, affords great conveniences, and, by 
 the sonorous magnificence of Roman syllables, the writer con- 
 ceals penury of thought and want of novelty often from the 
 reader, and often from himself. 
 
 In his twenty-second year he first showed his power of Eng- 
 lish poetry by some verses addressed to Dryden ; and soon 
 afterwards published a translation of the greater part of the 
 Fourth Georgic, upon Bees ; after which, says Dryden, " my 
 latter swarm is hardly worth the hiving. ' ' 
 
 About the same time he composed the arguments prefixed 
 to the several books of Dryden's Virgil ; and produced an 
 essay on the " Georgics, " juvenile, superficial, and uninstruc- 
 tive, without much either of the scholar's learning or the 
 critic's penetration. 
 
 His next paper of verses contained a character of the 
 principal English poets, inscribed to Henry Sacheverell, who 
 was then, if not a poet, a writer of verses, as is shown by his 
 version of a small part of Virgil's " Georgics," published in 
 the Miscellanies ; and a Latin encomium on Queen Mary, in 
 the " Musae Anglicanse." These verses exhibit all the fond- 
 ness of friendship ; but on one side or the other friendship 
 was afterwards too weak for the malignity of faction. 
 
 In this poem is a very confident and discriminative character 
 of Spenser, whose work he had then never read. So little 
 sometimes is criticism the effect of judgment. It is necessary 
 to inform the reader that about this time he was introduced by 
 Congreve to Montague, then Chancellor of the Exchequer : 
 Addison was then learning the trade of a courtier, and sub- 
 joined Montague as a poetical name to those of Cowley and of 
 Dryden. 
 
 By th§ influence of Mr. Montague, concurring, according 1 
 to Tickell, with his natural modesty, he was diverted from his 
 original design of entering into holy orders. Montague 
 alleged the corruption of men who engaged in civil employ- 
 ments without liberal education ; and declared that, though 
 he was represented as an enemy to the church, he would never 
 do it any injury but by withholding Addison from it. 
 
 Soon after (in 1695) he wrote a poem to King William, 
 
l82 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 with a rhyming introduction addressed to Lord Somers. King 
 William had no regard to elegance or literature ; his study was 
 only war ; yet by a choice of ministers, whose disposition was 
 very different from his own, he procured, without intention, a 
 very liberal patronage to poetry. Addison was caressed both 
 by Somers and Montague. 
 
 In 1697 appeared his Latin verses on the peace of 
 Ryswick, which he dedicated to Montague, and which was 
 afterwards called by Smith " the best Latin poem since the 
 '^neid. ' ' ' Praise must not be too rigorously examined ; but 
 the performance cannot be denied to be vigorous and elegant. 
 
 Having yet no public employment, he obtained (in 1699) a 
 pension of three hundred pounds a year, that he might be en- 
 abled to travel. He stayed a year at Blois, probably to learn 
 the French language ; and then proceeded in his journey to 
 Italy, which he surveyed with the eyes of a poet. 
 
 While he was travelling at leisure, he was far from being 
 idle ; for he not only collected his observations on the country, 
 but found time to write his Dialogues on Medals, and four 
 acts of "Cato." Such at least is the relation of Tickell. 
 Perhaps he only collected his materials and formed his plan. 
 
 Whatever were his other employments in Italy, he there 
 wrote the letter to Lord Halifax which is justly considered as 
 the most elegant, if not the most sublime, of his poetical pro- 
 ductions. But in about two years he found it necessary to has- 
 ten home ; being, as Swift informs us, distressed by indigence, 
 and compelled to become the tutor of a travelling squire, because 
 his pension was not remitted. 
 
 At his return he published his Travels, with a dedication to 
 Lord Somers. As his stay in foreign countries was short, his 
 observations are such as might be supplied by a hasty view, 
 and consist chiefly in comparisons of the present face of the 
 country with the descriptions left us by the Roman poets, from 
 whom he made preparatory collections, though he might have 
 spared the trouble, had he known that such collections had 
 been made twice before by Italian authors. 
 
 The most amusing passage of his book is his account of the 
 minute republic of San Marino ; of many parts it is not a very 
 severe censure to say that they might have been written at 
 home. His elegance of language, and variegation of prose and 
 verse, however, gains upon the reader ; and the book, though 
 awhile neglected, became in time so much the favorite of the 
 public that before it was reprinted it rose to five times its 
 price. 
 
 When he returned to England (in 1702) with a meanness of 
 
ADDTSOt^. 1 83 
 
 appearance which gave testimony of the difficulties to which 
 he had been reduced, he found his old patrons out of power, and 
 was therefore, for a time, at full leisure for the cultivation of 
 his mind : and a mind so cultivated gives reason to believe 
 that little time was lost. 
 
 But he remained not long neglected or useless. The vic- 
 tory at Blenheim (1704) spread triumph and confidence over 
 the nation ; and Lord Godolphin lamenting to Lord Halifax 
 that it had not been celebrated in a manner equal to the sub- 
 ject, desired him to propose it to some better poet. Halifax 
 told him that there was no encouragement for genius ; that 
 worthless men were unprofitably enriched with public money, 
 without any care to find or employ those whose appearance 
 might do honor to their country. To this Godolphin replied 
 that such abuses should in time be rectified ; and that if a 
 man could be found capable of the task then proposed he 
 should not want an ample recompense. Halifax then named 
 Addison, but required that the treasurer should apply to him in 
 his own person. Godolphin sent the message by Mr. Boyle, 
 afterwards Lord Carleton ; and Addison, having undertaken 
 the work, communicated it to the treasurer, while it was yet 
 advanced no further than the simile of the angel, and was im- 
 mediately rewarded by succeeding Mr. Locke in the place of 
 comnussiuneLflfLappeals. 
 
 In the following year he was at_Hanaver-with_Lo_rd_ Hali- 
 fax ; and the year after he was made under secretary o f state, 
 first to Sir Charles Hedges, and in a fewTnonths m'ofe to'The 
 Earl of Sunderland. 
 
 About this time the prevalent taste for Italian operas in- 
 clined him to try what would be the effect of a musical drama 
 in our own language. He therefore wrote the opera of " Rosa- 
 mond," which, when exhibited on the stage, was either hissed 
 or neglected ; but, trusting that the readers would do him more 
 justice, he published it, with an inscription to the Duchess of 
 Marlborough ; a woman without skill, or pretensions to skill, 
 in poetry or literature. His dedication was therefore an in- 
 stance of servile absurdity, to be exceeded only by Joshua 
 Barnes's dedication of a Greek Anacreon to the duke. 
 
 His reputation had been somewhat advanced by ' ' The Tender 
 Husband," a comedy which Steele dedicated to him, with a 
 confession that he owed to him several of the most successful 
 scenes. To this play Addison supplied a prologue. 
 
 When the Marquis of Wharton was appointed lord lieuten- 
 ant of Ireland, Addison attended him as his secretary, and 
 was made keeper of the records in Birmingham's Tower, with a 
 
184 I>R- SAMUEL yOHNSOM OAT 
 
 salary of three hundred pounds a year. The office was little 
 more than nominal, and the salary was augmented for his ac- 
 commodation. 
 
 Interest and faction allow little to the operation of partic- 
 ular dispositions or private opinions. Two men of personal 
 characters more opposite than those of Wharton and Addison 
 could not easily be brought together. Wharton was impious, 
 profligate, and shameless, without regard, or appearance of re- 
 gard, to right and wrong : whatever is contrary to this may be 
 said of Addison ; but as agents of a party they were connected, 
 and how they adjusted their other sentiments we cannot know. 
 
 Addison must, however, not be too hastily condemned. It 
 is not necessary to refuse benefits from a bad man, when the 
 acceptance implies no approbation of his crimes ; nor has the 
 subordinate ofiicer any obligation to examine the opinions 
 or conduct of those under whom he acts, except that he may 
 not be made the instrument of wickedness. It is reasonable 
 to suppose that Addison counteracted, as far as he was able, 
 the malignant and blasting influence of the lieutenant ; and 
 that at least by his intervention some good was done and some 
 mischief prevented. 
 
 When he was in office he made a law to himself, as Swift 
 has recorded, never to remit his regular fees in civility to his 
 friends ; ' ' for, ' ' said he, "I may have a hundred friends ; 
 and if my fee be two guineas, I shall, by relinquishing my 
 right, lose two hundred guineas, and no friend gain more than 
 two : there is therefore no proportion between the good 
 imparted and the evil suffered." 
 
 He was in Ireland when Steele, without any communication 
 of his design, began the publication of the " Tatler," but he 
 was not long concealed ; by inserting a remark on Virgil which 
 Addison had given him, he discovered himself. It is indeed not 
 easy for any man to write upon literature or common life, so 
 as not to make himself known to those with whom he 
 familiarly converses, and who are acquainted with his track of 
 study, his favorite topic, his peculiar notions, and his habitual 
 phrases. 
 
 If Steele desired to write in secret, he was not lucky ; a 
 single month detected him. His first " Tatler" was published 
 April 22 (1709), and Addison's contribution appeared May 26. 
 Tickell observes that the ' ' Tatler' ' began and was concluded 
 without his concurrence. This is doubtless literally true ; but 
 the work did not suffer much by his unconsciousness of its 
 commencement or his absence at its cessation ; for he con- 
 tinued his assistance to December 23, and the paper stopped 
 
ADDISON. 1 85 
 
 on January 2. He did not distinguish his pieces by any signa- 
 ture ; and I know not whether his name was not kept secret till 
 the papers were collected into volumes. 
 
 To the " Tatler," in about two months, succeeded thp 
 " Spectator ;" a series of essays of the same kind, but written 
 with less levity, upon a more regular plan, and published daily, 
 Such an undertaking showed the writers not to distrust thei) 
 own copiousness of materials or facility of composition, and 
 their performance justified their confidence. They found, 
 however, in their progress, many auxiliaries. To attempt a 
 single paper was no terrifying labor ; many pieces were offered, 
 and many were received. 
 
 Addison had enough of the zeal of party, but Steele had at 
 that time almost nothing else. The ' ' Spectator, ' ' in one of 
 the first papers, showed the political tenets of its authors ; but 
 a resolution was soon taken of courting general approbation 
 by general topics and subjects on which faction had produced 
 no diversity of sentiments, such as literature, morality, and 
 familiar life. To this practice they adhered with few devia- 
 tions. The ardor of Steele once broke out in praise of Marl- 
 borough ; and when Dr. Fleetwood prefixed to some sermons 
 a preface overflowing with Whiggish opinions, that it might be 
 read by the queen, it was reprinted in the " Spectator." 
 
 To teach the minuter decencies and inferior duties, to reg- 1 
 ulate the practice of daily conversation, to- correct those de- 
 pravities which are rather ridiculous than criminal, and remove 
 those grievances which, if they produce no lasting calamities, 
 impress hourly vexation, was first attempted by Casa in his 
 book of Manners, and Castiglione in his "Courtier;" two 
 books yet celebrated in Italy for purity and elegance, and 
 which, if they are now less read, are neglected only because 
 they have effected that reformation which their authors in- 
 tended, and their precepts now are no longer wanted. Their 
 usefulness to the age in which they were written is sufficiently 
 attested by the translations which almost all the nations of 
 Europe were in haste to obtain. 
 
 This species of instruction was continued, and perhaps ad- 
 vanced, by the French ; among whom La Bruyere's " Manners 
 of the Age," though, as Boileau remarked, it is written with- 
 out connection, certainly deserves praise for livehness of de- 
 scription and justness of observation. 
 
 Before the " Tatler" and " Spectator," if the writers for 
 the theatre are excepted, England had no masters of common 
 life. No writers had yet undertaken to reform either the 
 savageness of neglect or the impertinence of civility ; to show 
 
l86 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 when to speak or to be silent ; how to refuse or how to com- 
 ply. We had many books to teach us our more important 
 duties, and to settle opinions in philosophy or politics ; but an 
 Arbiter Ekgantiarum, a judge of propriety, was yet wanting, 
 who should survey the track of daily conversation, and free it 
 from thorns and prickles, which tease the passer, though they 
 do not wound him. 
 
 For this purpose nothing is so proper as the frequent pub- 
 lication of short papers, which we read not as study but amuse- 
 ment. If the subject be slight, the treatise is short. The busy 
 may find time, and the idle may find patience. 
 
 This mode of conveying cheap and easy knowledge began 
 among us in the civil war, when it was much the interest of 
 either party to raise and fix the prejudices of the people. At 
 that time appeared " Mercurius Aulicus," " Mercurius Rus- 
 ticus," and " Mercurius Civicus." It is said that when any 
 title grew popular it was stolen by the antagonist, who by this 
 stratagem conveyed his notions to those who would not have 
 received him had he not worn the appearance of a friend. 
 The tumult of those unhappy days left scarcely any man 
 leisure to treasure up occasional compositions ; and so much 
 were they neglected that a complete collection is nowhere to 
 be found. 
 
 These Mercuries were succeeded by L'Estrange's " Obser- 
 vator," and that by Lesley's "Rehearsal," and perhaps by 
 others ; but hitherto nothing had been conveyed to the people 
 in this commodious manner but controversy relating to the 
 church or state, of which they taught many to talk whom 
 they could not teach to judge. 
 
 It has been suggested that the Royal Society was instituted 
 soon after the Restoration to divert the attention of the people 
 from public discontent. The " Tatler" and " Spectator" had 
 the same tendency ; they were published at a time when two 
 parties, loud, restless, and violent, each with plausible declara- 
 tions, and each perhaps without any distinct termination of its 
 views, were agitating the nation : to minds heated with polit- 
 ical contest they supplied cooler and more inoffensive reflec- 
 tions ; and it is said by Addison, in a subsequent work, that 
 they had a perceptible influence upon the conversation of that 
 time, and taught the frolicsome and the gay to unite merriment 
 with decency ; an effect which they can never wholly lose, 
 while they continue to be among the first books by which both 
 sexes are initiated in the elegances of knowledge. 
 
 The " Tatler" and " Spectator" adjusted, like Casa, the 
 unsettled practice of daily intercourse by propriety and polite- 
 
ADDISON. 
 
 187 
 
 ness ; and, like La Bruyere, exhibited the Characters and 
 Manners of the Age. The personages introduced in these 
 papers were not merely ideal ; they were then known, and 
 conspicuous in various stations. Of the " Tatler" this is told 
 by Steele in his last paper; and of the "Spectator" by 
 Budgell in the preface to ' ' Theophrastus, ' ' a book which Ad- 
 dison has recommended, and which he was suspected to have 
 revised, if he did not write it. Of those portraits, which may 
 be supposed to be sometimes embellished and sometimes aggra- 
 vated, the originals are now partly known and partly for- 
 gotten. 
 
 But to say that they united the plans of two or three emi- 
 nent writers, is to give them but a small part of their due 
 praise ; they superadded literature and criticism, and some- 
 times towered far above their predecessors, and taught, with 
 great justness of argument and dignity of language, the most 
 important duties and sublime truths. 
 
 All these topics were happily varied with elegant fictions 
 and refined allegories, and illuminated with different changes 
 of style and felicities of invention. 
 
 It is recorded by Budgell, that of the characters feigned or 
 exhibited in the ' ' Spectator, ' ' the favorite of Addison was Sir 
 Roger de Coverley, of whom he had formed a very delicate and 
 discriminate idea, which he would not suffer to be violated ; 
 and, therefore, when Steele had shown him innocently picking 
 up a girl in the Temple, and taking her to a tavern, he drew 
 upon himself so much of his friend's indignation that he was 
 forced to appease him by a promise of forbearing Sir Roger 
 for the time to come. 
 
 The reason which induced Cervantes to bring his hero to 
 the grave, para mi sola nacio'^Don Quixote, y yo para el, made 
 Addison declare, with undue vehemence of expression, that he 
 would kill Sir Roger, being of opinion that they were born 
 for one another, and that any other hand would do him 
 wrong. 
 
 It may be doubted whether Addison ever filled up his 
 original delineation. He describes his knight as having his 
 imagination somewhat warped ; but of this perversion he has 
 made very little use. The irregularities in Sir Roger's conduct 
 seem not so much the effects of a mind deviating from the 
 beaten track of life by the perpetual pressure of some over- 
 whelming idea, as of habitual rusticity, and that negligence 
 which solitary grandeur naturally generates. 
 
 The variable weather of the mind, the flying vapors of in- 
 cipient madness, which from time to time cloud reason, with- 
 
1 88 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 out eclipsing it, it requires so much nicety to exhibit, that Ad- 
 dison seems to have been deterred from prosecuting his own 
 design. 
 
 To Sir Roger, who, as a country gentleman, appears to be 
 a Tory, or, as it is gently expressed, an adherent to the landed 
 interest, is opposed Sir Andrew Freeport, a new man, a wealthy 
 merchant, zealous for the moneyed interest, and a Whig. 
 Of this contrariety of opinions it is probable more conse- 
 quences were at first intended than could be produced when 
 the resolution was taken to exclude party from the paper. Sir 
 Andrew does but little, and that little seems not to ha^•e 
 pleased Addison, who, when he dismissed him from the club, 
 changed his opinions. Steele had made him, in the true spirit 
 of unfeeling commerce, declare that he ' ' would not build a 
 hospital for idle people ;" but at last he buys land, settles in 
 the country, and builds, not a manufactory, but a hospital for 
 twelve old husbandmen ; for men with whom a merchant has 
 little acquaintance, and whom he commonly considers with lit- 
 tle kindness. 
 
 Of essays, thus elegant, thus instructive, and thus commo- 
 diously distributed, it is natural to suppose the approbation 
 general, and the sale numerous. I once heard it observed 
 that the sale may be calculated by the product of the tax, re- 
 lated in the last number to produce more than twenty pounds 
 a week, and therefore stated at one and twenty pounds, or three 
 pounds ten shillings a day : this, at a halfpenny a paper, will 
 give sixteen hundred and eighty for the daily number. 
 
 This sale is not great ; yet this, if Swift be credited, was 
 likely to grow less ; for he declares that tne " Spectator," 
 whom he ridicules for his endless mention of the fair sex, had 
 before his recess wearied his readers. 
 
 The next year (17 13), in which " Cato" came upon the 
 stage, was the grand climacteric of Addison's reputation. 
 Upon the death of Cato, he had, as is said, planned a tragedy 
 in the time of his travels, and had for several years the first 
 four acts finished, which were shown to such as were likely to 
 spread their admiration. They were seen by Pope, and by 
 Gibber, who relates that Steele, when he took back the copy, 
 told him, in the despicable cant of literary modesty, that, what- 
 ever spirit his friend had shown in the composition, he doubted 
 whether he would have courage sufificient to expose it to the 
 censure of a British audience. 
 
 The time, however, was now come when those who 
 affected to think liberty in danger affected likewise to think 
 that a stage play might preserve it ; and Addison was impor- 
 
ADDISON. 189 
 
 tuned, in tlie name of the tutelary deities of Britain, to show 
 his courage and his zeal by finishing his design. 
 
 To resume his work he seemed perversely and unaccount- 
 ably unwilling ; and by a request, which perhaps he wished to be 
 denied, desired Mr. Hughes to add a fifth act. Hughes sup- 
 posed him serious ; and, undertaking the supplement, brought 
 in a few days some scenes for his examination ; but he had in 
 the mean time gone to work himself and produced half an act, 
 which he afterwards completed, but with brevity irregularly 
 disproportionate to the foregoing parts, like a task performed 
 with reluctance and hurried to its conclusion. 
 
 It may yet be doubted whether " Cato" was made public 
 by any change of the author's purpose ; for Dennis charged 
 him with raising prejudices in his own favor by false posi- 
 tions of preparatory criticism, and with poisoning the town 
 by contradicting in the " Spectator" the established rule of 
 poetical justice, because his own hero, with all his virtues, was 
 to fall before a tyrant. The fact is certain ; the motives we 
 must guess. 
 
 Addison was, I believe, sufficiently disposed to bar all ave- 
 nues against all danger. When Pope brought him the pro- 
 logue, which is properly accommodated to the play, there were 
 these words : " Britons, arise ! be worth like this approved ;" 
 meaning nothing more than, Britons, erect and exalt yourselves 
 to the approbation of public virtue. Addison was frighted 
 lest he should be thought a promoter of insurrection, and the 
 line was liquidated to " Britons, attend." 
 
 Now " heavily in clouds came on the day, the great, the 
 important day, ' ' when Addison was to stand the hazard of the 
 theatre. That there might, however, be left as little hazard as 
 was possible, on the first night, Steele, as himself relates, un- 
 dertook to pack an audience. This, says Pope, had been tried 
 tor the first time in favor of the " Distrest Mother ;" and was 
 now, with more efficacy, practised for ' ' Cato. ' ' 
 
 The danger was soon over. The whole nation was at that 
 time on fire with faction. The Whigs applauded every line in 
 which liberty was mentioned, as a satire on the Tories ; and 
 the Tories echoed every clap, to show that the satire was unfelt. 
 The story of Bolingbroke is well known. He called Booth to 
 his box, and gave him fifty guineas for defending the cause of 
 liberty so well against a perpetual dictator. The Whigs, says 
 Pope, design a second present, when they can accompany it 
 with as good a sentence. 
 
 The play, supported thus by the emulation of factious 
 praise, was acted night after night for a longi^i; tiwq t;Jvan, I 
 
IgO DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 believe, the public had allowed to any drama before ; and the 
 author, as Mrs. Porter long afterwards related, wandered 
 through the whole exhibition behind the scenes with restless 
 and unappeasable solicitude. 
 
 When it was printed, notice was given that the Queen 
 would be pleased if it was dedicated to her ; " but, as he 
 had designed that compliment elsewhere, he found himself 
 obliged," says Tickell, " by his duty on the one hand, and his 
 honor on the other, to send it into the world without any dedi- 
 cation. ' ' 
 
 Human happiness has always its abatements ; the brightest 
 sunshine of success is not without a cloud. No sooner was 
 " Cato" offered to the reader than it was attacked by the acute 
 malignity of Dennis, with all the violence of angry criticism. 
 Dennis, though equally zealous, and probably by his temper 
 more furious, than Addison, for what they called liberty, and 
 though a flatterer of the Whig ministry, could not sit quiet at a 
 successful play ; but was eager to tell friends and enemies that 
 they had misplaced their admirations. The world was too 
 stubborn for instruction ; with the fate of the censurer ot 
 Corneille's Cid, his animadversions showed his anger without 
 effect, and " Cato" continued to be praised. 
 
 Pope had now an opportunity of courting the friendship of 
 Addison, by vilifying his old enemy, and could give resentment 
 its full play, without appearing to revenge himself. He there- 
 fore published " A Narrative of the Madness of John Den- 
 nis ;" a performance which left the objections to the play in their 
 full force, and therefore discovered more desire of vexing the 
 critic than of defending the poet. 
 
 Addison, who was no stranger to the world, probably saw 
 the selfishness of Pope's friendship ; and, resolving that he 
 should have the consequences of his ofiiciousness to himself, 
 informed Dennis by Steele that he was sorry for the insult ; 
 and that whenever he should think fit to answer his remarks he 
 would do it in a manner to which nothing could be objected. 
 
 The greatest weakness of the play is in the scenes of love, 
 which are said by Pope to have been added to the original plai? 
 upon a subsequent review, in compliance with the populai 
 practice of the stage. Such an authority it is hard to reject ; 
 yet the love is so intimately mingled with the whole action that 
 it cannot easily be thought extrinsic and adventitious ; for, if 
 it were taken away, what would be left ? or how were the four 
 acts filled in the first draught ? 
 
 At the publication the wits seemed proud to pay their at- 
 |;endaQfe with encomiastic verses. The best are from an un- 
 
ADDISON; 
 
 191 
 
 known haxid, which will perhaps lose somewhat of their praise 
 when the author is known to be Jeffreys. 
 
 " Cato" had yet other honors. It was censured as a party- 
 play by a scholar of Oxford, and defended in a favorable exami- 
 nation by Dr. Sewel. It was translated by Salvini into Italian, 
 and acted at Florence ; and by the Jesuits of St. Omer's into 
 Latin, and played by their pupils. Of this version a copy was 
 sent to Mr. Addison : it is to be wished that it could be found, 
 for the sake of comparing their version of the soliloquy with 
 that of Bland. 
 
 A tragedy was written on the same subject by Des 
 Champs, a French poet, which was translated with a criti- 
 cism on the English play. But the translator and the critic are 
 now forgotten. 
 
 Dennis lived on unanswered, and therefore little read. 
 Addison knew the policy of literature too well to make his 
 enemy important by drawing the attention of the public upon a 
 criticism which, though sometimes intemperate, was often irre- 
 fragable. 
 
 While " Cato" was upon the stage, another daily paper, 
 called the " Guardian," was published by Steele. To this 
 Addison gave great assistance, whether occasionally or by pre- 
 vious engagement is not known. 
 
 The character of the ' ' Guardian' ' was too narrow and too 
 serious : it might properly enough admit both the duties and 
 decencies of life, but seemed not to include literary speculations, 
 and was in some degree violated by merriment and burlesque. 
 What had the guardian of the lizards to do with clubs of tall 
 or of little men, with nests of ants or with Strada's prolusions ? 
 
 Of this paper nothing is necessary to be said, but that it 
 found many contributors, and that it was a continuation of 
 the " Spectator" with the same elegance and the same variety, 
 till some unlucky sparkle from a Tory paper set Steele's politics 
 on fire, and wit at once blazed into faction. He was soon too 
 hot for neutral topics, and quitted the "Guardian" to write 
 the " Englishman." 
 
 The papers of Addison are marked in the " Spectator" by 
 one of the letters in the name of Clio, and in the ' ' Guardian' ' 
 by a hand ; whether it was, as Tickell pretends to think, that 
 he was unwilling to usurp the praise of others, or, as Steele, 
 with far greater likelihood, insinuates, that he could not with- 
 out discontent impart to others any of his own. I have 
 heard that his avidity did not satisfy itself with the air of re- 
 nown, but that with great eagerness he laid hold on his propor- 
 tion of the profits, 
 
rga dr. samuel johnson on 
 
 Many of these papers were written with powers truly comic, 
 with nice discrimination of characters, and accurate observa- 
 tion of natural or accidental deviation from propriety ; but it 
 was not supposed that he had tried a comedy on the stage till 
 Steele after his death declared him the author of the " Drum- 
 mer." This, however, Steele did not know to be true by any 
 direct testimony ; for, when Addison put the play into his 
 hands, he only told him it was the work of a " Gentleman in 
 the company ;" and, when it was received, as is confessed, 
 with cold disapprobation, he was probably less willing to claim 
 it. Tickell omitted it in his collection ; but the testimony of 
 Steele, and the total silence of any other claimant, has deter- 
 mined the public to assign it to Addison, and it is now printed 
 with his other poetry. Steele carried the " Drummer" to the 
 play-house, and afterwards to the press, and sold the copy for 
 fifty guineas. 
 
 To the opinion of Steele may be added the proof supplied 
 by the play itself, of which the characters are such as Addison 
 would have delineated, and the tendency such as Addison 
 would have promoted. That it should have been ill received 
 would raise wonder, did we not daily see the capricious distri- 
 bution of theatrical praise. 
 
 He was not all this time an indifferent spectator of public 
 affairs. He wrote, as different exigencies required (in 1707), 
 " The present State of the War, and the Necessity of an 
 Augmentation ;" which, however judicious, being written on 
 temporary topics, and exhibiting no peculiar powers, laid hold 
 on no attention, and has naturally sunk by its own weight into 
 neglect. This cannot be said of the few papers entitled " The 
 Whig Examiner, ' ' in which is employed all the force of gay 
 malevolence and humorous satire. Of this paper, which just 
 appeared and expired, Swift remarks, with exultation, that 
 "it is now down among the dead men." He might well 
 rejoice at the death of that which he could not have killed. 
 Every reader of every party, since personal malice is past and 
 the papens which once inflamed the nation are read only as 
 affusions of wit, must wish for more of the Whig Examiners ; 
 for on no occasion was the genius of Addison more vigorously 
 exerted, and on none did the superiority of his powers more 
 evidently appear. His ' ' Trial of Count Tariff, ' ' written to 
 expose the treaty of commerce with France, lived no longer 
 than the question that produced it. 
 
 Not long afterwards an attempt was made to revive the 
 " Spectator," at a time indeed by no means favorable to litera- 
 ture, when the succession of a new family to the throne filled 
 
ADDISON. 193 
 
 the nation with anxiety, discord, and confusion ; and either 
 the turbulence of the times or the satiety of the readers put a 
 stop to the publication, after an experiment of eighty numbers, 
 which were afterwards collected into an eighth volume, per- 
 haps more valuable than any of those that went before it. Ad- 
 dison produced more than a fourth part, and the other contrib- 
 utors are by no means unworthy of appearing as his associ- 
 ates. The time that had passed during the suspension of the 
 " Spectator," though it had not lessened his power of humor, 
 seems to have increased his disposition to seriousness : the 
 proportion of his religious to his comic papers is greater than 
 in the former series. 
 
 The " Spectator," from its re-commencement, was pub- 
 lished only three times a week ; and no discriminative marks 
 were added to the papers. To Addison, Tickell has ascribed 
 twenty-three. 
 
 The " Spectator" had many contributors ; and Steele, 
 whose negligence kept him always in a hurry, when it was his 
 turn to furnish a paper, called loudly for the letters, of which 
 Addison, whose materials were more, made little use ; having 
 recourse to sketches and hints, the product of his former 
 studies, which he now reviewed and completed : among these 
 are named by Tickell the Essays on Wit, those on the Pleas- 
 ures of the Imagination, and the Criticism on Milton. 
 
 When the House of Hanover took possession of the throne, 
 it was reasonable to expect that the zeal of Addison would be 
 suitably rewarded. Before the arrival of King George, he was 
 made secretary to the regency, and was required by his office 
 to send notice to Hanover that the queen was dead, and that 
 the throne was vacant. To do this would not have been diffi- 
 cult to any man but Addison, who was ,so overwhelmed with 
 the greatness of the event, and so distracted by choice of ex- 
 pression, that the lords, who could not wait for the niceties of 
 criticism, called Mr. Southwell, a clerk in the House, and 
 ordered him to despatch the message. Southwell readily told 
 what was necessary in the common style of business, and 
 valued himself upon having done what was too hard for Ad- 
 dison. 
 
 He was better qualified for the "Freeholder," a paper 
 which he published twice a week, from December 23, 1715, to 
 the middle of the next year. This was undertaken in defence 
 of the established government, sometimes with argument and 
 sometimes with mirth. In argument he had many equals ; but 
 his humor was singular and matchless. Bigotry itself must be 
 delighted with the Tory fox-hunter. 
 
194 -0>e. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 There are, however, some strokes less elegant and less 
 decent ; such as the Pretender's Journal, in which one topic 
 of ridicule is his poverty. This mode of abuse had been em- 
 ployed by Milton against King Charles II. 
 
 " Jacoboei 
 
 Centum, exulantis viscera marsupii regis." 
 
 And Oldmixon delights to tell of some alderman of London, 
 that he had more money than the exiled princes ; but that 
 which might be expected from Milton's savageness or Old- 
 mixon's meanness was not suitable to the delicacy of Addison. 
 
 Steele thought the humor of the " Freeholder" too nice 
 and gentle for such noisy times ; and is reported to have said 
 that the ministry made use of a lute when they should have 
 called for a trumpet. 
 
 This year (1716)' he married the Countess Dowager of War- 
 wick, whom he had solicited by a very long and anxious court- 
 ship, perhaps with behavior not very unlike that of Sir Roger 
 to his disdainful widow ; and who, I am afraid, diverted her- 
 self often by playing with his passion. He is said to have first 
 known her by becoming tutor to her son. ' ' He formed, ' ' said 
 Tonson, ' ' the design of getting that lady from the time when 
 he was first recommended into the family. ' ' In what part of 
 his life he obtained the recommendation, or how long, and in 
 what manner, he lived in the family, I know not. His ad- 
 vances at first were certainly timorous, but grew bolder as his 
 reputation and influence increased ; till at last the lady was 
 persuaded to marry him, on terms much like those on which a 
 Turkish princess is espoused, to whom the Sultan is report- 
 ed to pronounce, " Daughter, I give thee this man for thy 
 slave. ' ' The marriage, if uncontradicted report can be credited, 
 made no addition to his happiness ; it neither found them nor 
 made them equal. She always remembered her own rank, 
 and thought herself entitled to treat with very little ceremony 
 the tutor of her son. Rowe's ballad of the " Despairing Shep- 
 herd " is said to have been written, either before or after mar- 
 riage, upon this memorable pair ; and it is certain that Addi- 
 son has left behind him no encouragement for ambitious love. 
 
 The year after (1717) he rose to his highest elevation, be- 
 ing made secretary of state. For this employment he might 
 justly be supposed qualified by long practice of business, and 
 by his regular ascent through other offices ; but expectation is 
 often disappointed ; it is uniyersally confessed that he wasjun- 
 equal to the duties _9i. his place. In the House of Commons 
 he"could~not speak, and therefore was useless to the defence of 
 
 * August 2, 
 
ADDISON. 
 
 195 
 
 the government. In the office, says Pope, he could not issue 
 an order without bsing bis time in quest of fine expressions. 
 What he gained in rank he lost in credit ; and, finding by ex- 
 perience his own inability, was forced to solicit his dismission, 
 with a pension of fifteen hundred pounds a year. His friends 
 palliated this relinquishment, of which both friends and ene- 
 mies knew the true reason, with an account of declining health 
 and the necessity of recess and quiet. 
 
 He now returned to his vocation, and began to plan lit- 
 erary occupations for his future life. He purposed a tragedy 
 on the death of Socrates ; a story of which, as Tickell remarks, 
 the basis is narrow, and to which I know not how love could 
 have been appended. There would, however, have been no 
 want either of virtue in the sentiments or elegance in the lan- 
 guage. 
 
 He engaged in a nobler work, a defence of the Christian 
 religion, of which part was published after his death ; and he 
 designed to have made a new poetical version of the 
 "Psalms." 
 
 These pious compositions Pope imputed to a selfish motive, 
 upon the credit, as he owns, of Tonson ; who, having quar- 
 relled with Addison, and not loving him, said, that when he 
 laid down the secretary's office, he intended to take orders 
 and obtain a bishopric ; ' ' for, ' ' said he, ' ' I always thought 
 him a priest in his heart. ' ' 
 
 That Pope should have thought this conjecture of Tonson 
 worth remembrance, is a proof, but indeed, so far as I have 
 found, the only proof, that he retained some malignity from 
 their ancient rivalry. Tonson pretended but to guess it ; no 
 other mortal ever suspected it ; and Pope might have reflected 
 that a man who had been secretary of state in the ministry of 
 Sunderland knew a nearer way to a bishopric than by defending 
 religion or translating the ' ' Psalms. ' ' 
 
 It is related that he had once a design to make an English 
 Dictionary, and that he considered Dr. Tillotson as the writer 
 of highest authority. There was formerly sent to me by Mr. 
 Locker, clerk of the Leathersellers' Company, who was emi- 
 nent for curiosity and literature, a collection of example^s col- 
 lected from Tillotson's works, as Locker said, by Addison'." It 
 came too late to be of use, so I inspected it but slightly, and 
 remember it indistinctly. I thought the passages too short. ( 
 
 Addison, however, did not conclude his life in peaceful 
 studies ; but relapsed, when he was near his end, to a political 
 dispute. 
 
 It so happened that (17 18-19) a controversy was agitated 
 
196 DR. SAMUEL '^OHNSOl^ ON 
 
 with great vehemence between those friends of long continu- 
 ance, Addison and Steele It may be asked, in the language of 
 Homer, what power or what cause should set them at variance. 
 The subject of their dispute was of great importance. The 
 Earl of Sunderland proposed an act called " The Peerage 
 Bill ;" by which the number of peers should be fixed, and the 
 king restrained from any new creation of nobility, unless when 
 an old family should be extinct. To this the lords would nat- 
 urally agree ; and the king, who was yet little acquainted with 
 his own prerogative, and, as is now well known, almost indif- 
 ferent to the possessions of the crown, had been persuaded to 
 consent. The only difficulty was found among the Commons, 
 who were not likely to approve the perpetual exclusion of 
 themselves and their posterity. The bill therefore was eagerly 
 opposed, and among others by Sir Robert Walpole, whose 
 speech was published. 
 
 The lords might think their dignity diminished by improper 
 advancements, and particularly by the introduction of twelve 
 new peers at once, to produce a majority of Tories in the last 
 reign ; an act of authority violent enough, yet certainly legal, 
 and by no means to be compared with that contempt of 
 national right with which, some time afterwards, by the instiga- 
 tion of Whiggism, the Commons, chosen by the people for three 
 years, chose themselves for seven. But, whatever might be the 
 disposition of the Lords, the people had no wish to increase 
 their power. The tendency of the bill, as Steele observed in a 
 letter to the Earl of Oxford, was to introduce an aristocracy ; 
 for a majority in the House of Lords, so limited, would have 
 been despotic and irresistible. 
 
 To prevent this subversion of the ancient establishment, 
 Steele, whose pen readily seconded his political passions, 
 endeavored to alarm the nation by a pamphlet called " The 
 Plebeian." To this an answer was published by Addison, 
 under the title of ' ' The Old Whig, ' ' in which it is not discov- 
 ered that Steele was then known to be the advocate for the 
 Commons. Steele replied by a second " Plebeian ;" and, 
 whether by ignorance or by courtesy, confined himself to his 
 question, without any personal notice of his opponent. Noth- 
 ing hitherto was committed against the laws of friendship or 
 proprieties of decency ; but controvertists cannot long retain 
 their kindness for each other. The " Old Whig" answered 
 the ' ' Plebeian, ' ' and could not forbear some contempt of ' ' lit- 
 tle Dicky, whose trade it was to write pamphlets." 'Dicky, 
 however, did not lose his settled veneration for his friend ; but 
 contented himself with quoting some lines of " Cato," which 
 " See note on page 430. 
 
ADDTSOM. 
 
 197 
 
 were at once detection and reproof. The bill was laid aside 
 during that session ; and Addison died before the next, in 
 which its commitment was rejected by two hundred and sixty- 
 five to one hundred and seventy-seven. 
 
 Every reader surely must regret that these two illustrious 
 friends, after so many years passed in confidence and endear- 
 ment, in unity of interest, conformity of opinion, and fellow- 
 ship of study, should finally part in acrimonious opposition. 
 Such a controversy was Belluin plus quam civile, as Lucan 
 expresses it. Why could not faction find other advocates ? 
 but among the uncertainties of the human state, we are doomed 
 to number the instability of friendship. 
 
 Of this dispute I have little knowledge but from the 
 " Biographia Britannica." The " Old Whig" is not inserted 
 in Addison's works, nor is it mentioned by Tickell in his life ; 
 why it was omitted, the biographers doubtless give the true 
 reason ; the fact was too recent, and those who had been 
 heated in the contention were not yet cool. 
 
 The necessity of complying with times and of sparing per- 
 sons is the great impediment of biography. History may be 
 formed from permanent monuments and records ; but lives can 
 only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing 
 every day less, and in a short time is lost forever. What is 
 known can seldom be immediately told ; and when it might be 
 told, it is no longer known. The delicate features of the 
 mind, the nice discriminations of character, and the minute 
 peculiarities of conduct, are soon obliterated ; and it is surely 
 better that caprice, obstinacy, frolic, and folly, however they 
 might delight in the description, should be silently forgotten 
 than that, by wanton merriment and unseasonable detection, a 
 pang should be given to a widow, a daughter, a brother, or a 
 friend. As the process of these narratives is now bringing me 
 among my contemporaries, I begin to feel myself ' ' walking 
 upon ashes under which the fire is not extinguished," and 
 coming to the time of which it will be proper rather to say 
 ' ' nothing that is false, than all that is true. ' ' 
 
 The end of this useful life was now approaching. Addison 
 had for some time been oppressed by shortness of breath, 
 which was now aggravated by a dropsy ; and, finding his dan- 
 ger pressing, he prepared to die conformably to his own pre- 
 cepts and professions. 
 
 During this lingering decay, he sent, as Pope relates, a 
 message by the Earl of Warwick to Mr. Gay, desiring to see 
 him , Gay, who had not visited" him for some time before, 
 obeyed the summons, and found himself received with great 
 
198 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 kindness. The purpose for which the interview had been 
 solicited was then discovered. Addison told him that he had 
 injured him ; but that, if he recovered, he would recoinpense 
 him. What the injury was he did not explain ; nor did Gay 
 ever know, but supposed that some preferment designed for 
 him had, by Addison's intervention, been withheld. 
 
 Lord Warwick was a young man of very irregular life, and 
 ■perhaps of loose opinions. Addison, for whom he did not 
 want respect, had very diligently endeavored to reclaim him ; 
 but his arguments and expostulations had no effect. One 
 experiment, however, remained to be tried : when he found his 
 life near its end, he directed the young lord to be called ; and 
 when he desired, with great tenderness, to hear his last injunc- 
 tions, told him, ' ' I have sent for you, that you may see how a 
 Christian can die. " What effect this awful scene had on the 
 earl, I know not : he likewise died himself in a short time. 
 
 In Tickell's excellent " Elegy" on his friend are these 
 
 lines : 
 
 " He taught us how to live ; and, oh ! too high 
 The price of knowledge ! taught us how to die," 
 
 in which he alludes, as he told Dr. Young, to this moving 
 interview. 
 
 Having given directions to Mr. Tickell for the publication 
 of his works, and dedicated them on his death-bed to his friend 
 Mr. Craggs, he died June 17, 17 19, at Holland House, leaving 
 no child but a daughter. 
 
 Of his virtue it is a sufficient testimony that the resentment 
 of party has transmitted no charge of any crime. He was not 
 one of those who are praised only after death ; for his merit 
 was so generally acknowledged that Swift, having observed 
 that his election passed without a contest, adds, that, if he pro- 
 posed himself for king, he would hardly have been refused. 
 
 His zeal for his party did not extinguish his kindness for 
 the merit of his opponents ; when he was secretary in Ireland, 
 he refused to intermit his acquaintance with Swift. 
 
 Of his habits, or external manners, nothing is so often 
 mentioned as that timorous or sullen taciturnity which his 
 friends called modesty by too mild a name. Steele mentions 
 with great tenderness " that remarkable bashfulness, which is a 
 cloak that hides and muffles merit;" and tells us, " that his 
 abilities were covered only by modesty, which doubles the 
 beauties which are seen, and gives credit and esteem to all that 
 are concealed. ' ' Chesterfield affirms that ' ' Addison was the 
 most timorous and awkward man that he ever saw." And 
 Addison, speaking of his own deficience in conversation, used 
 
ADDISON. 
 
 199 
 
 to say of himself, that, with respect to intellectual ' ' wealth, he 
 could draw bills for a thousand pounds, though he had not a 
 guinea in his pocket." 
 
 That he wanted current coin for ready payment, and by that 
 want was often obstructed and distressed ; that he was often 
 oppressed by an improper and ungraceful timidity, every testi- 
 mony concurs to prove ; but Chesterfield's representation is 
 doubtless hyperbolical. That man cannot be supposed very 
 inexpert in the arts of conversation and practice of life, who, 
 without fortune or alliance, by his usefulness and dexterity, be- 
 came secretary of state ; and who died at forty-seven, after 
 having not only stood long in the highest rank of wit and lit- 
 erature, but filled one of the most important offices of state. 
 
 The time in which he lived had reason to lament his obsti- 
 nacy of silence ; ' ' for he was, ' ' says Steele, ' ' above all men in 
 that talent called humor, and enjoyed it in such perfection 
 that I have often reflected, after a night spent with him apart 
 from all the world, that I had had the pleasure of conversing 
 with an intimate acquaintance of Terence and Catullus, who 
 had all their wit and nature, heightened with humor more 
 exquisite and delightful than any other man ever possessed. " 
 This is the fondness of a friend ; let us hear what is told us by 
 a rival. "Addison's conversation," says Pope, "had some- 
 thing in it more charming than I have found in any other man. 
 But this was only when familiar ; before strangers, or, perhaps, 
 a single stranger, he preserved his dignity by a stiff silence. ' ' 
 
 This modesty was by no means inconsistent with a very 
 highjophrion of his own merit. He demanded to be the first 
 name in modern wit ; ' and, with Steele to echo him, used to 
 depreciate Dryden, whom Pope and Congreve defended against 
 them. There is no reason to doubt that he suffered too much 
 pain from the prevalence of Pope's poetical reputation ; nor 
 is it without strong reason suspected that, by some disingenu- 
 ous acts, he endeavored to obstruct it : Pope was not the only 
 man whom he insidiously injured, though the only man of 
 whom he could be afraid. 
 
 His own powers were such as might have satisfied him with 
 conscious excellence. Of very extensive learning he has in- 
 deed given no proofs. He seems to have had small acquaint- 
 ance with the sciences, and to have read little except Latin 
 and French ; but of the Latin poets his Dialogues on Medals 
 show that he had perused the works with great diligence and 
 skill. The abundance of his own mind left him little in need 
 of adventitious sentiments ; his wit always could suggest what 
 the occasion demanded. He had read with critical eyes the 
 
200 Dk. SAMUEL yOHNSON ON 
 
 important volume of human life, and knew the heart of maij 
 from the depths of stratagem to the surface of affectation. 
 
 Wliat^he knew he could easily communicate. " This," 
 says Steele, '' was paFticulaf in-thts~-writer, that, when he had 
 taken his resolution, or made his plan for what he designed to 
 write, he would walk about a room, and dictate it into language 
 with as much freedom and ease as any one could write it 
 down, and attend to the coherence and grammar of what he 
 dictated. ' ' 
 
 Pope, who can be less suspected of favoring his memory, 
 declares that he wrote very fluently, but was slow and scru- 
 pulous in correcting; that many of his "Spectators" were 
 written very fast, and sent immediately to the press ; and that 
 it seemed to be for his advantage not to have time for much 
 revisal. 
 
 "He would alter," says Pope, "any thing to please his 
 friends, before publication ;. but would not retouch his pieces 
 afterwards ; and I believe not one word in ' Cato ' to which I 
 made an objection was suffered to stand. ' ' 
 
 The last line of " Cato" is Pope's, having been originally 
 written, 
 
 " And oh ! 'twas this that ended Cato's life." 
 
 Pope might have made more objections to the six conclud- 
 ing lines. In the first couplet the words " from hence" are 
 improper ; and the second line is taken from Dryden's Vir- 
 gil. Of the next couplet, the first verse, being included in 
 the second, is therefore useless ; and in the third discord is 
 made to produce strife. 
 
 Of the course of Addison's familiar day, before his mar- 
 riage. Pope has given a detail. He had in the house with him 
 Budgell, and perhaps Philips. His chief companions were 
 Steele, Budgell, Philips, Carey, Davenant, and Colonel Brett. 
 With one or other of these he always breakfasted. He studied 
 all the morning, then dined at a tavern, and went afterwards to 
 Button's. 
 
 Button had been a servant in the Countess of Warwick's , 
 family, who, under the patronage of Addison, kept a coffee- 
 house on the south side of Russel Street, about two doors from 
 Covent Garden. Here it was that the wits of that time used 
 to assemble. It is said, when Addison had suffered any vexation 
 from the countess, he withdrew the company from Button's 
 house. 
 
 From the coffee-house he went again to a tavern, where he 
 often sat late, and drank too much wine. In the bottle dis- 
 
ADDISOM'.* 20J 
 
 content Seeks for comfort, cowardice for courage, and bashful- 
 ness for confidence. It is not unlikely that Addison was first 
 seduced to excess by the manumission which he obtained from 
 the servile timidity of his sober hours. He that feels oppres- 
 sion from the presence of those to whom he knows himself 
 superior will desire to set loose his powers of conversation ; 
 and who that ever asked succors from Bacchus was able to pre- 
 serve himself from being enslaved by his auxiliary ? 
 
 Among those friends it was that Addison displayed the 
 elegance of his colloquial accomplishments, which may easily 
 be supposed such as Pope represents them. The remark of 
 Mandeville, who, when he had passed an evening in his com- 
 pany, declared that he was a parson in a tie-wig, can detract 
 little from his character ; he was always reserved to strangers, 
 and was not incited to uncommon freedom by a character like 
 that of Mandeville. 
 
 From any minute knciwledge of his familiar manners, the 
 intervention oU sixty years has now debarred us. Steele once 
 promised Congreve and the public a complete description of 
 his character ; but the promises of authors are like the vows of 
 lovers. Steele thought no more on his design, or thought on it 
 with anxiety that at last disgusted him, and left his friend in 
 the ha^ids of Tickell. 
 
 One slight lineament of his character Swift has preserved. 
 It was his practice, when he found any man invincibly wrong, to 
 flatter his opinions by acquiescence, and sink him yet deeper 
 in absurdity. This artifice of mischief was admired by Stella ; 
 and Swift seems to approve her admiration. 
 
 His works will supply some information. It appears, from 
 his various pictures of the world, that, with all his bashfulness, 
 he had conversed with many distinct classes of men, had sur- 
 veyed their ways with very diligent observation, and marked 
 with great acuteness the effects of different modes of life. 
 He was a man in whose presence nothing reprehensible was 
 out of danger ; quick in discerning whatever was wrong or 
 ridiculous, and not unwilling to expose it. " There are," says 
 Steele, ' ' in his writings many oblique strokes upon some of the 
 wittiest men of the age. ' ' His delight was more to excite mer- 
 riment than detestation ; and he detects follies rather than 
 crimes. 
 
 If any judgment be made, from his books, of his moral char- 
 acter, nothing will be found but purity and excellence. Knowl- 
 edge of mankind, indeed, less extensive than that of Addison 
 will show that to write and to live are very different. Many 
 who praise virtue do no more than praise it. Yet it is rea- 
 
202 JDS. SAMVEL fOHNSON ON 
 
 sonable to believe that Addison's professions and practice were 
 at no great variance, since, amidst that storm of faction in 
 which most of his life was passed, though his station made him 
 conspicuous and his activity made him formidable, the char- 
 acter given him by his friends was never contradicted by his 
 enemies : of those with whom interest or opinion united him 
 he had not only the esteem, but the kindness ; and of others, 
 whom the violence of opposition drove against him, though he 
 might lose the love, he retained the reverence. 
 
 It is justly observed by Tickell that he employed wit on 
 the side of virtue and religion. He not only made the proper 
 use of wit himself, but taught it to others ; and from his time it 
 has been generally subservient to the cause of reason and of 
 truth. He has dissipated the prejudice that had long connected 
 gayety with vice and easiness of manners with laxity of princi- 
 ples. He has restored virtue to its dignity, and taught inno- 
 cence not to be ashamed. This is an elevation of literary char- 
 acter " above all Greek, above all Roman fame." No greater 
 felicity can genius attain than that of having purified intellec- 
 tual pleasure, separated mirth from indecency, and wit from 
 licentiousness ; of having taught a succession of writers to 
 bring elegance and gayety to the aid of goodness ; and, if I may 
 use expressions yet more awful, of having " turned many to 
 righteousness." 
 
 ' Addison, in his life, and for some time afterwards, was con- 
 sidered by the greater part of his readers as supremely excelling 
 both in poetry and criticism. Part of his reputation may be 
 properly ascribed to the advancement of his fortune ; when, as 
 Swift observes, he became a statesman, and saw poets waiting 
 at his levee, it was no wonder that praise was accumulated 
 upon him. Much likewise may be more honorably ascribed to 
 his personal character : he who, if he had claimed it, might 
 have obtained the diadem, was not likely to be denied the 
 laurel. 
 
 But time quickly puts an end to artificial and accidental 
 fame ; and Addison is to pass through futurity protected only 
 by his genius. Every name which kindness or interest once 
 raised too high is in danger, lest the next age should, by the 
 vengeance of criticism, sink it in the same proportion. A 
 great writer has lately styled him ' ' an indifferent poet and a 
 worse critic." 
 
 His poetry is first to be considered ; of which it must be 
 confessed that it has not often those felicities of diction which 
 give lustre to sentiments, or that vigor of sentiment that ani- 
 mates diction ; there is little of ardor, vehemence, or trans- 
 
ADDISON. 203 
 
 port ; there is very rarely the awfulness of grandeur, and not 
 very often the splendor of elegance. He thinks justly, but he 
 thinks faintly. This is his general character ; to which, doubt- 
 less, many single passages will furnish exceptions. 
 
 Yet, if he seldom reaches supreme excellence, he rarely 
 sinks into dulness, and is still more rarely entangled in absurd- 
 ity. He did not trust his powers enough to be negligent. 
 There is in most of his compositions a calmness and equabil-l 
 ity deliberate and cautious, sometimes with little that delights, 
 but seldom with any thing that offends. 
 
 Of this kind seem to be his poems to Dryden, to Somers, 
 and to the King. His "Ode on St. Cecilia" has been imi- 
 tated by Pope, and has something in it of Dryden's vigor. Of 
 his account of the English poets, he used to speak as a " poor 
 thing;" but it is not worse than his usual strain. He has 
 said, not very judiciously, in his character of Waller, 
 
 " Thy verse could show ev'n Cromwell's innocence ; 
 And compliment the storms that bore him hence. 
 Oh ! had thy Muse not come an age too soon. 
 But seen great Nassau on the British throne, 
 How had his triumph glitter'd in thy page !" 
 
 What is this but to say, that he who could compliment 
 Cromwell had been the proper poet for King William ? Addi- 
 son, however, never printed the piece. 
 
 The letter from Italy has been always praised, but has 
 never been praised beyond its merit. It is more correct, with 
 less appearance of labor, and more elegant, with less ambition 
 of ornament, than any other of his poems. There is, however, 
 one broken metaphor, of which notice may properly be 
 taken : 
 
 " Fir'd with that name, 
 I bridle in my struggling Muse with pain. 
 That longs to launch into a nobler strain." 
 
 To bridle a goddess is no very delicate idea ; but why 
 must she be bridled? because she longs to launch; an act 
 which was never hindered by a bridle : and whither will she 
 launch ? into a nobler strain. She is in the first line a horse, in 
 the second a boat j and the care of the poet 'is to keep his 
 horse or his boat from singing. 
 
 The next composition is the far-famed " Campaign," which 
 Dr. Warton has termed a " Gazette in Rhyme," with harshness 
 not often used by the good-nature of his criticism. Before a 
 censure so severe is admitted, let us consider that war is a fre- 
 quent subject of poetry, and then inquire who has described it 
 
204 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 with more justness artd force. Many of our own writers tried 
 their powers upon this year of victory ; ye. Addison's is con- 
 fessedly the best performance ; his poem is the work of a man 
 not blinded by the dust of learning ; his images are not bor- 
 rowed merely from books. The superiority which he confers 
 upon his hero is not personal prowess and " mighty bone," 
 but deliberate intrepidity, a calm command of his passions, 
 and the power of consulting his own mind in the midst of dan- 
 ger. The rejection and contempt of fiction is rational and 
 manly. 
 
 It may be observed that the last line is imitated by Pope : 
 
 " Marlb' rough's exploits appear divinely bright— 
 
 Rais'd of themselves their genuine charms they boast, 
 And those that paint them truest, praise them most. ' ' 
 
 This Pope had in his thoughts ; but, not knowing how to use 
 what was not his own, he spoiled the thought when he had bor- 
 rowed it : 
 
 ' ' The well-sung woes shall soothe my pensive ghost ; 
 He best can paint them who shall feel them most." 
 
 Martial exploits vcLZ.y \>^ painted ; perhaps woes may he painted; 
 but they are surely not painted by being well-sung : it is not 
 easy to paint in song or to sing in colors. 
 
 No passage in the " Campaign" has been more often men- 
 tioned than the simile of the angel, which is said in the " Tat- 
 ler" to be " one of the noblest thoughts that ever entered into 
 the heart of man," and therefore worthy of attentive consider- 
 ation. Let it be first inquired whether it be a simile. A poet- 
 ical simile is the discovery of likeness between two actions, in 
 their general nature dissimilar, or of causes terminating by 
 dififerent operations in some resemblance of effect. But the 
 mention of another like consequence from a like cause, or of a 
 like performance by a like agency, is not a simile, but an exem- 
 pHfication. It is not a simile to say that the Thames waters 
 fields as the Po waters fields ; or that as Hecla vomits flames 
 in Iceland, so ^^tna vomits flames in Sicily. When Horace 
 says of Pindar, that he pours his violence and rapidity of 
 verse as a river swoln with rain rushes from the mountain ; or 
 of himself, that his genius wanders in quest of poetical decora- 
 tions, as the bee wanders to collect honey ; he, in either case, 
 produces a simile ; the mind is impressed with the resemblance 
 of things generally unlike, as unlike as intellect and body. 
 But if Pindar had been described as writing with the copious- 
 ness and grandeiir of Homer, or Horace had tpjcj that be 
 
ADDISON 
 
 205 
 
 reviewed and finished his own poetry with the same care as 
 Isocrates poHshed his orations, instead of similitude, he would 
 have exhibited almost identity ; he would have given the same 
 portraits with different names. In the poem now examined, 
 when the English are represented as gaining a fortified pass, by 
 repetition of attack and perseverance of resolution, their obsti- 
 nacy of courage and vigor of onset is well illustrated by-the 
 sea that breaks, with incessant battery, the dikes of Holland. 
 This is a simile ; but when Addison, having celebrated the 
 beauty of Marlborough's person, tells us that "Achilles thus 
 was formed with every grace, ' ' here is no simile, but a mere 
 exemplification. A simile may be compared to lines converg- 
 ing at a point, and is more excellent as the lines approach from 
 greater distance ; an exemplification may be considered as two 
 parallel lines which run on together without approximation, 
 never far separated, and never joined. 
 
 Marlborough is so like the angel in the poem, that the 
 action of both is almost the same, and performed by both in 
 the same manner. Marlborough " teaches the battle to rage ;" 
 the angel " directs the storm :" Marlborough is " unmoved in 
 peaceful thought ;" the angel is " calm and serene :" Marl- 
 borough stands "unmoved amidst the shock of hosts;" the 
 angel rides " calm in the whirlwind." The lines on Marl- 
 borough are just and noble ; but the simile gives almost the 
 same images a second time. 
 
 But perhaps this thought, though hardly a simile, was 
 remote from vulgar conceptions, and required great labor of 
 research or dexterity of application. Of this Dr. Madden, a 
 name which Ireland ought to honor, once gave me his opinion. 
 " If I had set, ' ' said he, ' ' ten school-boys to write on the bat- 
 tle of Blenheim, and eight had brought me the angel, I should 
 not have been surprised." 
 
 The opera of " Rosamond," though it is seldom men- 
 tioned, is one of the first of Addison's compositions. The 
 subject is well chosen, the fiction is pleasing, and the praise of 
 Marlborough, for which the scene gives an opportunity, is, 
 what perhaps every human excellence must be, the product of 
 good-luck, improved by genius. The thoughts are sometimes 
 tender ; the versification is easy and gay. There is doubtless 
 some advantage in the lines, which there is little temptation to 
 load with expletive epithets. The dialogue seems commonly 
 better than the songs. The two comic characters of Sir 
 Trusty and Grideline, though of no great value, are yet such as 
 the poet intended. Sir Trusty's account of the death of Rosa- 
 mond is, I think, too grossly absurd. The whole draiwa is airy 
 
206 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 and elegant ; engaging in its process, and pleasing in its con- 
 clusion. If Addison had cultivated the hghter parts of poetry, 
 he would probably have excelled. 
 
 The trag edyof J^' Cato, ' ' which, contrary to the rule ob- 
 served liTselecting the works of other poets, has by the weight 
 of its character forced its way into the late collection, is un- 
 questionably the noblest production of Addison's genius. Of 
 a work so much read it is difficult to say any thing new. 
 About things on which the public thinks long, it commonly 
 attains to think right, and of " Cato" it has been not unjustly 
 determined that it is rather a poem in dialogue than a drama, 
 rather a succession of just sentiments in elegant language than 
 a representation of natural affections, or of any state probable 
 or possible in human life. Nothing here ' ' excites or assuages 
 emotion ;" here is "no magical power of raising fantastic ter- 
 ror or wild anxiety." The events are expected without solici- 
 tude, and are remembered without joy or sorrow. Of the 
 agents we have no care ; we consider not what they are doing 
 or what they are suffering ; we wish only to know what they 
 have to say. Cato is a being above our solicitude ; a man of 
 whom the gods take care, and whom we leave to their care 
 with heedless confidence. To the rest neither gods nor men 
 can have much attention ; for there is not one amongst them 
 that strongly attracts either affection or esteem. But they are 
 made the vehicles of such sentiments and such expression, that 
 there is scarcely a scene in the play which the reader does not 
 wish to impress upon his memory. 
 
 When " Cato" was shown to Pope, he advised the author 
 to print it, without any theatrical exhibition ; supposing that it 
 would be read more favorably than heard. Addison declared 
 himself of the same opinion ; but urged the importunity of his 
 friends for its appearance on the stage. The emulation of par- 
 ties made it successful beyond expectation ; and its success has 
 introduced or confirmed among us the use of dialogue too de- 
 clamatory, or of unaifecting elegance and chill philosophy. 
 
 The universality of applause, however it might quell the 
 censure of common mortals, had no other effect than to harden 
 Dennis in fixed dislike ; but his dislike was not merely capri- 
 cious. He found and showed many faults ; he showed them 
 indeed with anger, but he found them with acuteness, such as 
 ought to rescue his criticism from oblivion ; though, at last, it 
 will have no other life than it derives from the work which it 
 endeavors to oppress. 
 
 Why he pays no regard to the opinion of the audience, he 
 gives his reason by remarking that, 
 
ADDISON. 207 
 
 * A deference is to be paid to a general applause, when it 
 appears that the applause is natural aiiU spontaneous ; but that 
 little regard is to be had to it when it is affected and artificial. 
 Of all the tragedies which in his memory have had vast and 
 violent runs, not one has been excellent, few have been tolera- 
 ble, most have been scandalous. When a poet writes a trag- 
 edy, who knows he has judgment, and who feels he has genius, 
 that poet presumes upon his own merit, and scorns to make a 
 cabal. That people come coolly to the representation of such 
 a tragedy, without any violent expectation, or delusive imagina- 
 tion, or invincible prepossession ; that such an audience is liable 
 to receive impressions which tlie poem shall naturally make on 
 them, and to judge by their own reason and their own judg- 
 ments, and that reason and judgment are calm and serene, not 
 formed by nature to make proselytes, and to control and lord 
 it over the imaginations of others. But that when an author 
 writes a tragedy, who knows he has neither genius nor judg- 
 ment, he has recourse to the making a party, and he endeavors 
 to make up in industry what is wanting in talent, and to sup- 
 ply by poetical craft the absence of poetical art ; that such an 
 author is humbly contented to raise men's passions by a plot 
 without doors, since he despairs of doing it by that which he 
 brings upon the stage. That party, and passion, and prepos- 
 session are clamorous and tumultuous things, and so much the 
 more clamorous and tumultuous by how much the more erro- 
 neous : that they domineer and tyrannize over the imaginations 
 of persons who want judgment, and sometimes too of those 
 who have it ; and, like a fierce and outrageous torrent, bear 
 down all opposition before them." 
 
 He then condemns the neglect of poetical justice ; which is 
 always one of his favorite principles. 
 
 " It is certainly the duty of every tragic poet, by the exact 
 distribution of poetical justice, to imitate the Divine dispensa- 
 tion, and to inculcate a particular providence. It is true, in- 
 deed, upon the stage of the world, the wicked sometimes pros- 
 per and the guiltless suffer. But that is permitted by the Gov- 
 ernor of the world, to show, from the attribute of his infinite 
 justice, that there is a compensation in futurity, to prove the 
 immortality of the human soul, and the certainty of future 
 rewards and punishments. But the poetical persons in tragedy 
 exist no longer than the reading or the representation ; the 
 whole extent of their enmity is circumscribed by those ; and, 
 therefore, during that reading or representation, according to 
 their merits or demerits, they must be punished or rewarded.. 
 If this is not done, there is no impartial distribution of poetical 
 
208 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 justice, no instructive lecture of a particular providence, and no 
 imitation of the Divine dispensation. And yet the author of 
 this tragedy does not only run counter to this, in the fate of hia 
 principal character, but everywhere, throughout it, makes vir- 
 tue suffer and vice triumph ; for not only Cato is vanquished 
 by Csesar, but the treachery and perfidiousness of Syphax pre- 
 vail over the honest simplicity and the credulity of Juba ; and 
 the sly subtlety and dissimulation of Fortius over the generous 
 frankness and open-heartedness of Marcus. ' ' 
 
 Whatever pleasure there may be in seeing crimes punished 
 and virtue rewarded, yet, since wickedness often prospers in 
 real life, the poet is certainly at liberty to give it prosperity on 
 the stage. For if poetry has an imitation of reality, how are 
 its laws broken by exhibiting the world in its true form ? The 
 stage may sometimes gratify our wishes ; but if it be truly the 
 ' ' mirror of life, ' ' it ought to show us sometimes what we are 
 to expect. 
 
 Dennis objects to the characters, that they are not natural 
 or reasonable ; but as heroes and heroines are not beings that 
 are seen every day, it is hard to find upon what principles their 
 conduct shall be tried. It is, however, not useless to consider 
 what he says of the manner in which Cato receives the account 
 of his son's death. 
 
 " Nor is the grief of Cato, in the fourth act, one jot more 
 in nature than that of his son and Lucia in the third. Cato 
 receives the news of his son's death not only with dry eyes, but 
 with a sort of satisfaction ; and in the same page sheds tears 
 for the calamity of his country, and does the same thing in the 
 next page upon the bare apprehension of the danger of his 
 friends. Now, since the love of one's country is the love of 
 one's countrymen, as I have shown upon another occasion, I 
 desire to ask these questions : Of all our countrymen, which 
 do we love most, those whom we know or those whom we 
 know not ? And of those whom we know, which do we cherish 
 most, our friends or our enemies ? And of our friends, which 
 are the dearest to us, those who are related to us or those who 
 are not ? And of all our relations, for which have we most 
 tenderness, for those who are near to us or for those who are 
 remote ? And of our near relations, which are the nearest, and 
 consequently the dearest to us, our offspring or others ? Our 
 offspring most certainly ; as Nature, or, in other words, Provi- 
 dence, has wisely contrived for the preservation of mankind. 
 Now, does it not follow from what has been said, that for a man 
 to receive the news of his son's death with dry eyes, and to weep 
 at the same time for the calamities of his country, is a wretched 
 
ADDISON. 
 
 209 
 
 affectation and a miserable inconsistency ? Is not that, in plain 
 English, to receive with dry eyes the news of the deaths of 
 those for whose sake our country is a name so dear to us, and 
 at the same time to shed tears for those for whose sakes our 
 country is not a name so dear to us ?' ' 
 
 But this formidable assailant is less resistible when he 
 attacks the probability of the action and the reasonableness of 
 the plan. Every critical reader must remark that Addison 
 has, with a scrupulosity almost unexampled on the English 
 stage, confined himself in time to a single day, and in place to 
 rigorous unity. The scene never changes, and the whole 
 action of the play passes in the great hall of Cato's house at 
 Utica. Much therefore is done in the hall, for which any 
 other place would be more fit ; and this impropriety affords 
 Dennis many hints of merriment and opportunities of triumph. 
 The passage is long ; but as such disquisitions are not com- 
 mon, and the objections are skilfully formed and vigorously 
 urged, those who delight in critical controversy will not think 
 it tedious. 
 
 " Upon the departure of Fortius, Sempronius makes but 
 one soliloquy, and immedately in comes Syphax, and then the 
 two politicians are at it immediately. They lay their heads 
 together, with their snuff-boxes in their hands, as Mr. Bayes 
 has it, and feague it away. But in the midst of' that wise 
 scene, Syphax seems to give a seasonable caution to Sempro-" 
 nius : 
 
 " ' Syph. But is it true, Sempronius, that your senate 
 Is called together ? Gods ! thou must be cautious ; 
 Cato has piercing eyes. ' 
 
 ' ' There is a great deal of caution shown indeed, in meeting 
 in a governor's own hall to carry on their plot against him. 
 Whatever opinion they have of his eyes, I suppose they have 
 none of his ears, or they would never have talked at this fool- 
 ish rate so near : 
 
 " ' Gods ! thou must be cautious.' 
 
 ' ' Oh ! yes, very cautious ; for if Cato should overhear you, 
 and turn you off for politicians, Csesar would never take you ; 
 no, Caesar would never take you. 
 
 " When Cato, Act II., turns the senators out of the hall, 
 upon pretence of acquainting Juba with the result of their de- 
 bates, he appears to me to do a thing which is neither reasona- 
 ble nor civil. Juba might certainly have better been made 
 acquainted with the result of that debate in some private apart- 
 ment of the place, But the poet was driven upon this absurd- 
 
210 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 ity to make way for another ; and that is, to give Juba an op- 
 portunity to demand Marcia of her father. But the quarrel 
 and rage of Juba and Syphax, in the same act ; the invectives 
 of Syphax against the Romans and Cato ; the advice that 
 he gives Juba, in her father's hall, to bear away Marcia by 
 force ; and his brutal and clamorous rage upon his refusal, and 
 at a time when Cato was scarcely out of sight, and perhaps not 
 out of hearing, at least some of his guards or domestics must 
 necessarily be supposed to be within hearing ; is a thing that is 
 so far from being probable that it is hardly possible. 
 
 " Sempronius, in the second act, comes back once more in 
 the same morning to the governor's hall, to carry on the con- 
 spiracy with Syphax against the governor, his country, and his 
 family ; which is so stupid that it is below the wisdom of the 
 
 O 's, the Mac's, and the Teague's ; even Eustace Cummins 
 
 himself would never have gone to Justice Hall, to have conspired 
 against the government. If officers at Portsmouth should lay 
 
 their heads together, in order to the carrying off J G 's 
 
 niece or daughter, would they meet in J G 's hall to 
 
 carry on that conspiracy ? There would be no necessity for 
 their meeting there, at least till they came to the execution of 
 their plot, because there would be other places to meet in. 
 There would be no probability that they should meet there, be- 
 cause there would be places more private and more commodi- 
 ous. Now there ought to be nothing in a tragical action but 
 what is necessary or probable. 
 
 ' ' But treason is not the only thing that is carried on in this 
 hall ; that, and love, and philosophy take their turns in it, 
 without any manner of necessity or probability occasioned by 
 the action, as duly and as regularly, without interrupting one 
 another, as if there were a triple league between them, and a 
 mutual agreement that each should give place to and make 
 way for the other, in a due and orderly succession. 
 
 ' ' We now come to the third act. Sempronius, in this act, 
 comes into the governor's hall, with the leaders of the mutiny ; 
 but, as soon as Cato is gone, Sempronius, who but just before 
 had acted like an unparalleled knave, discovers himself, like an 
 egregious fool, to be an accomplice in the conspiracy. 
 
 " ' Semp. Know, villains, when such paltry slaves presume 
 To mix in treason, if the plot succeeds, 
 They're thrown neglected by ; but, if it fails, 
 They're sure to die like dogs, as you shall do. 
 Here, take these factious monsters, drag them forth 
 To sudden death. ' 
 
 " It is true, indeed, the second leader says, there are none 
 
ADDISON. 211 
 
 there but friends ; but is that possible at such a juncture ? 
 Can a parcel of rogues attempt to assassinate the governor of a 
 town of war, in his own house, in mid-day ? and, after they are 
 discovered and defeated, can there be none near them but 
 friends ? Is it not plain from these words of Sempronius, 
 
 ' ' Here, take these factious monsters, drag them forth 
 To sudden death — ' 
 
 and from the entrance of the guards upon the word of com- 
 mand, that those guards were within ear-shot ? Behold Sem- 
 pronius then palpably discovered. How comes it to pass, 
 then, that instead of being hanged up with the rest, he remains 
 secure in the governor's hall and there carries on his con- 
 spiracy against the government, the third time in the same day, 
 with his old comrade Syphax, who enters at the same time that 
 the guards are carrying away the leaders, big with the news of 
 the defeat of Sempronius ; though where he had his intelli- 
 gence so soon is difi&cult to imagine ? And now the reader 
 may expect a very extraordinary scene ; there is not abundance 
 of spirit indeed, nor a great deal of passion, but there is wis- 
 dom more than enough to supply all defects. 
 
 " ' Syph. Our first design, my friend, has prov'd abortive, 
 Still there remains an after-game to play : 
 My troops are mounted, their Numidian steeds 
 Snuff up the winds, and long to scour the desert. 
 Let but Sempronius lead us in our flight. 
 We'll force the gate, where Marcus keeps his guard, 
 And hew down all that would oppose our passage : 
 A day will bring us into Caesar's camp. 
 
 Semp. Confusion ! I have fail'd of half my purpose ; 
 Marcia, the charming Marcia's left behind.' 
 
 " Well ! but though he tells us the half purpose he has failed 
 of, he does not tell us the half that he has carried. But what 
 does he mean by 
 
 " ' Marcia, the charming Marcia's left behind ' ? 
 
 "He is now in her own house ! and we have neither seen 
 her nor heard of her, anywhere else since the play began. 
 But now let us hear Syphax : 
 
 " ' What hinders then, but that you find her out, 
 And hurry her away by manly force ? ' 
 
 "But what does old Syphax mean by finding her out ? They 
 talk as if she were as hard to be found as a hare in a frosty 
 morning. 
 
 " ' Semp. But how to gain admission ! ' 
 
212 DS. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 " Oh ! she is found out then, it seems. 
 
 " ' But how to gain admission ! for access 
 
 Is given to none, but Juba and her brothers. ' 
 
 " But, raillery apart, why access to Juba? For he was 
 owned and received as a lover neither by the father nor by the 
 daughter. Well ' but let that pass. Syphax puts Sempronius 
 out of pain immediately ; and, being a Numidian, abounding 
 in wiles, supplies him with a stratagem for admission that, I 
 believe, is a non-pareille. 
 
 " ' Syph. Thou shall have Juba's dress, and Juba's guards. 
 The doors will open when Numidia's prince 
 Seems to appear before them. ' 
 
 " Sempronius is, it seems, to pass for Juba in full day at 
 Cato's house, where they were both so very well known, by 
 having Juba's dress and his guards ; as if one of the marshals 
 of France could pass for the Duke of Bavaria at noon-day, at 
 Versailles, by having his dress and liveries. But How does 
 Syphax pretend to help Sempronius to young Juba's dress .■' 
 Does he serve him in a double capacity, as a general and mas- 
 ter of his wardrobe ? But why Juba's guards ? For the devil 
 of any guards has Juba appeared with yet. Well ! though this is 
 a mighty politic invention, yet, methinks, they might have done 
 without it ; for, since the advice that Syphax gave to Sempro- 
 nius was, 
 
 ' ' ' To hurry her away by manly force, ' 
 
 in my opinion the shortest and likeliest way of coming at the 
 lady was by demolishing, instead of putting on an impertinent 
 disguise to circumvent two or three slaves. But Sempronius, 
 it seems, is of another opinion. He extols to the skies the in- 
 vention of old Syphax : 
 
 " ' Semp. Heavens ! what a thought was there ! ' 
 
 ' ' Now I appeal to the reader if I have not been as good as 
 my word. Did I not tell him that I would lay before him a 
 very wise scene ? 
 
 " But now let us lay before the reader that part of the 
 scenery of the fourth act which may show the absurdities which 
 the author has run into through the indiscreet observance of 
 the unity of place. I do not remember that Aristotle has said 
 any thing expressly concerning the unity of place. It is true, 
 implicitly he has said enough in the rules which he has laid 
 
ADDISON. 2 1 3 
 
 down for the chorus. For, by making the chorus an essential 
 part of tragedy, and by bringing it on the stage immediately 
 after the opening of the scene, and retaining it till the very ca- 
 tastrophe, he has so determined and fixed the place of action 
 that it was impossible for an author on the Grecian stage to 
 break through that unity. I am of opinion that if a modern 
 tragic poet can preserve the unity of place without destroying 
 the probability of the incidents, it is always best for him to do 
 it ; because, by the preserving of that unity, as we have taken 
 notice above, he adds grace, and clearness, and comeliness to 
 the representation. But since there are no express rules about 
 it, and we are under no compulsion to keep it, since we have 
 no chorus as the Grecian poet had, if it cannot be preserved 
 without rendering the greater part of the incidents unreasona- 
 ble and absurd, and perhaps sometimes monstrous, it is cer- 
 tainly better to break it. 
 
 " Now comes bully Sempronius, comically accoutred and 
 equipped with his Numidian dress and his Numidian guards. 
 Let the reader attend to him with all his ears ; for the words 
 of the wise are precious : 
 
 " ' Semp. The deer is lodg'd, I've track'd her to her covert.' 
 
 " Now, I would fain know why this deer is said to be 
 lodged, since we have heard not one word, since the play began, 
 of her being at all out of harbor ; and if we consider the dis- 
 course with which she and Lucia begin the act, we have reason 
 to believe that they had hardly been talking of such matters in 
 the street. However, to pleasure Sempronius, let us suppose 
 for once that the deer is lodged. 
 
 " ' The deer is lodg'd, I've track'd her to her covert.' 
 
 "If he had seen her in the open field, what occasion had 
 he to track her, when he had so many Numidian dogs at his 
 heels, which, with one halloo, he might have set upon her 
 haunches ? If he did not see her in the open field, how could 
 he possibly track her ? If he had seen her in the street, why 
 did he not set upon her in the street, since through the street 
 she must be carried at last ? Now here, instead of having his 
 thoughts upon his business and upon the present danger ; in- 
 stead of meditating and contriving how he shall pass with his 
 mistress through the southern gate (where her brother Marcus 
 is upon the guard, and where he would certainly prove an im- 
 pediment to him), which is the Roman word for the baggage ; 
 instead of doing this, Sempronius is entertaining himself with 
 whimsies : 
 
214 ^^- SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 " ' Semp. How will the young Numidian rave to see 
 His mistress lost ! If aught could glad ray soul, 
 Beyond th' enjoyment of so bright a prize, 
 'T would be to toi ture that young, gay barbarian. 
 But, hark ! what noise ? Death to my hopes ! 'tis he, 
 'Tis Juba's self ! There is but one way left ! 
 He must be murder'd, and a passage cut 
 Through those his guards.' 
 
 " Pray, what are ' those his guards ' ? I thought, at pres- 
 ent, that Juba's guards had been Sempronius's tools, and had 
 been dangling after his heels. 
 
 " But now let us sum up all these absurdities together. 
 Sempronius goest at noon-day, in Juba's clothes and with 
 Juba's guards, to Cato's palace, in order to pass for Juba, in a 
 place where they were both so very well known ; he meets 
 Juba there, and resolves to murder him with his own guards. 
 Upon the guards appearing a little bashful, he threatens them : 
 
 " ' Hah ! Dastards, do you tremble ! 
 
 Or act like men ; or, by yon azure heav'n — ' 
 
 "But the guards still remaining restive, Sempronius him- 
 self attacks Juba, while each of the guards is representing Mr. 
 Spectator's sign of the Gaper, awed, it seems, and terrified by 
 Sempronius's threats. Juba kills Sempronius, and takes his 
 own army prisoners, and carries them in triumph away to 
 Cato. Now I would fain know if any part of Mr. Bayes's 
 tragedy is so full of absurdity as this ? 
 
 " Upon hearing the clash of swords, Lucia and Marcia 
 come in. The question is, why no men come in upon hearing 
 the noise of swords in the governor's hall ? Where was the 
 governor himself ? Where were his guards ? Where were his 
 servants ? Such an attempt as this, so near the person of a 
 governor of a place of war, was enough to alarm the whole gar- 
 rison ; and yet, for almost half an hour after Sempronius was 
 killed, we find none of those appear who were the likeliest in 
 the world to be alarmed ; and the noise of swords is made to 
 draw only two poor women thither^ who were most certain to 
 run away from it. Upon Lucia and Marcia' s coming in, 
 Lucia appears in all the symptoms of an hysterical gentle- 
 woman : 
 
 " ' Luc. Sure 'twas the clash of swords ! my troubled heart 
 Is so cast down, and sunk amidst its sorrows. 
 It throbs with fear, and aches at every sound ! ' 
 
 And immediately her old whimsy returns upon her : 
 
 " ' O Marcia, should thy brothers, for my sake — 
 I die away with horror at the thought. ' 
 
ADDISON. 215 
 
 ' ' She fancies that there can be no cutting of throats but it 
 must be for her. If this is tragical, I would fain know what is 
 comical. Well ! upon this they spy the body of Sempronius ; 
 and Marcia, deluded by the habit, it seems, takes him for 
 Juba ; for, says she, 
 
 " ' The face is muffled up within the garment.' 
 
 " Now, how a man could fight and fall, with his face 
 muffled up in his garment, is, I think, a little hard to con- 
 ceive ! Besides, Juba, before he killed him, knew him to be 
 Sempronius. It was not by his garment that he knew this ; it 
 was by his face then : his face therefore was not mufHed. 
 Upon seeing this man with his muffled face, Marcia falls a-rav- 
 ing ; and, owning her passion for the supposed defunct, begins 
 to make his funeral oration. Upon which Juba enters listen- 
 ing, I suppose on tiptoe ; for I cannot imagine how any one 
 can enter listening in any other posture. I would fain know 
 how it comes to pass that during all this time he had sent no- 
 body, no, not so much as a candle-snuffer, to take away the 
 dead body of Sempronius. Well ! but let us regard him lis- 
 tening. Having left his apprehension behind him, he, at first, 
 applies what Marcia says to Sempronius. But finding at last, 
 with much ado, that he himself is the happy man, he quits his 
 eavesdropping, and discovers himself just time enough to pre- 
 vent his being cuckolded by a dead man, of whom the moment 
 before he had appeared so jealous ; and greedily intercepts the 
 bliss which was fondly designed for one who could not be the 
 better for it. But here I must ask a question : how comes 
 Juba to listen here, who had not listened before throughout the 
 play ? Or how comes he to be the only person of this tragedy 
 who listens, when love and treason were so often talked in so 
 public a place as a hall ? I am afraid the author was driven 
 upon all these absurdities only to introduce this miserable mis- 
 take of Marcia, which, after all, is much below the dignity of 
 tragedy, as any thing is which is the effect or result of trick. 
 
 " But let us come to the scenery of the fifth act. Cato 
 appears first upon the scene, sitting in a thoughtful posture ; 
 in his hand Plato's treatise on the Immortality of the Soul, a 
 drawn sword on the table by him. Now, let us consider the 
 place in which this sight is presented to us. The place, for- 
 sooth, is a long halL Let us suppose that any one should 
 place himself in this posture in the midst of one of our halls in 
 London ; that he should appear solus in a sullen posture, a 
 drawn sword on the table by him ; in his hand Plato's treatise 
 on the Immortality of the Soul, translated lately by Bernard 
 
2l6 DR. SAMUEL fOffNSON ON 
 
 Lintot : I desire the reader to consider whether such a person 
 as this would pass with them who beheld him for a great 
 patriot, a great philosopher, or a general, or some whimsical 
 person who fancied himself all these ? and whether the people 
 who belonged to the family would think that such a person 
 had a design upon their midriffs or his own ? 
 
 " In short, that Cato should sit long enough in the aforesaid 
 posture, in the midst of this large hall, to read over Plato's 
 treatise on the Immortality of the Soul, which is a lecture of 
 two long hours ; that he should propose to himself to be .pri- 
 vate there upon that occasion ; that he should be angry with 
 his son for intruding there ; then, that he should leave this hall 
 upon the pretence of sleep, give himself the mortal wound in 
 his bedchamber, and then be brought back into that hall to 
 expire, purely to show his good breeding and save his friends 
 the trouble of coming up to his bedchamber ; all this appears 
 to me to be improbable, incredible, impossible. 
 
 Such is the censure of Dennis. There is, as Dryden 
 expresses it, perhaps " too much horse-play in his raillery ;" 
 but if his jests are coarse his arguments are strong. Yet, as 
 we love better to be pleased than be taught, " Cato" is read 
 and the critic is neglected. 
 
 Flushed with consciousness of these detections of absurdity 
 in the conduct, he afterwards attacked the sentiments of Cato ; 
 but he then amused himself with petty cavils and minute ob- 
 jections. 
 
 Of Addison's smaller poems no particular mention is 
 necessary ; they have little that can employ or require a critic. 
 The parallel of the princes and gods, in his verses to Kneller, 
 is often happy, but is too well known to be quoted. 
 
 His translations, so far as I have compared them, want the 
 exactness of a scholar. That he understood his authors can- 
 not be doubted ; but his versions will not teach others to un- 
 derstand them, being too licentiously paraphrastical. They 
 are, however, for the most part, smooth and easy, and — what is 
 the first excellence of a translator — such as may be read with 
 pleasure by those who do not know the originals. 
 
 His poetry is polished and pure, the product of a mind too 
 judicious to commit faults, but not sufficiently vigorous to 
 attain excellence. He has sometimes a striking line or a shin- 
 ing paragraph ; but in the whole he is warm rather than fervid, 
 and shows more dexterity than strength. He was, however, 
 one of our earliest examples of correctness. 
 
 The versification which he had learned from Dryden he di- 
 
ADDISON. 2 1 7 
 
 based rather than refined. His rhymes are often dissonant ; 
 in his "Georgic" he admits broken lines. He uses both trip- 
 lets and Alexandrines, but triplets more frequently in his trans- 
 lations than his other works. The mere structure of verses 
 seems never to have engaged much of his care. But his lines 
 are very smooth in " Rosamond," and too smooth in " Cato." 
 
 Addison is now to be considered as a critic ; a name which 
 the present generation is scarcely Willing to allow him. His 
 criticism is condemned as tentati\e or experimental, rather 
 than scientific ; and he is considered as deciding by taste 
 rather than by principles. jv ,.' 
 
 It is not uncommon for those who have grown wise by thei 
 labor of others to add a little of their own and o.verlook their 
 masters. Addison is now despised by some who perhaps 
 would never have seen his defects but by the lights which he 
 afforded them. That he always wrote as he would think it 
 necessary to write now, cannot be affirmed : his instructions 
 were such as the characters of his readers made proper. That 
 general knowledge which now circulates in common talk was in 
 his time rarely to be found. Men not professing learning were 
 not ashamed of ignorance ; and, in the female world, any 
 acquaintance with books was distinguished only to be cen- 
 sured. His purpose was to infuse literary curiosity, by gentle 
 and unsuspected conveyance, into the gay, the idle, and the 
 wealthy ; he therefore presented knowledge in the most allur- 
 ing form, not lofty and austere, but accessible and familiar. 
 When he showed them their defects, he showed them likewise 
 that they might be easily supplied. His attempt succeeded ; 
 inquiry was awakened and comprehension expanded. An 
 emulation of intellectual elegance was excited ; and from this 
 time to our own life has been gradually exalted and conver- 
 sation purified and enlarged. 
 
 Dryden had, not many years before, scattered criticism 
 over his prefaces with very little parsimony ; but though he 
 sometimes condescended to be smnewhat familiar, his manner 
 was in general too scholastic for those who had yet their rudi- 
 ments to learn, and found it not easy to understand their mas- 
 ter. His observations were framed rather for those that were 
 learning to write than for those that read only to talk. 
 
 An instructor like Addison was now wanting, whose 
 remarks, being superficial, might be easily understood, and 
 being just, might prepare the mind for more attainments. 
 Had he presented " Paradise Lost " to the public with all the 
 pomp of system and severity of science, the criticism would 
 perhaps have been admired and the poem still have been neg- 
 
2l8 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 lected ; but by the blandishments of gentleness and facility he 
 has made Milton an universal favorite, with whom readers of 
 every class think it necessary to be pleased. 
 
 He descended now and then to lower disquisitions ; and 
 by a serious display of the beauties of ' ' Chevy-Chase, ' ' ex- 
 posed himself to the ridicule of Wagstaffe, who bestowed a like 
 pompous character on " Tom Thumb ;" and to the contempt 
 of Dennis, who, considering the fundamental position of his 
 criticism, that " Chevy-Chase" pleases, and ought to please 
 because it is natural, observes that " there is a way of deviat- 
 ing from nature, by bombast or tumor, which soars above 
 nature and enlarges images beyond their real bulk ; by affecta- 
 tion, which -forsakes nature in quest of something unsuitable ; 
 and by imbecility, which degrades nature by faintness and 
 diminution, by obscuring its appearances, and weakening its 
 effects." In " Chevy-Chase" there is not much of either bom- 
 bast or affectation ; but there is chill and lifeless imbecility. 
 The story cannot possibly be told in a manner that shall make 
 less impression on the mind. 
 
 Before the profound observers of the present race repose 
 too securely on the consciousness of their superiority to Ad- 
 dison, let them consider his Remarks on Ovid, in which may 
 be found specimens of criticism sufficiently subtle and refined ; 
 let them peruse likewise his "Essays on Wit" and on the 
 " Pleasures of Imagination," in which he founds art on the base 
 of nature, and draws the principles of invention from disposi- 
 tions inherent in the mind of man with skill and elegance, such 
 as his contemners will not easily attain. 
 
 As a describer of life and manners he must be allowed to 
 stand perhsps the first of the first rank. His humor, which, 
 as Steele observes, is peculiar to himself, is so happily diffused 
 as to give the grace of novelty to domestic scenes and daily 
 occurrences. He never "outsteps the modesty of nature," 
 nor raises merriment or wonder by the violation of truth. His 
 figures neither divert by distortion nor amaze by aggravation. 
 He copies life with so much fidelity that he can be hardly said 
 to invent ; yet his exhibitions have an air so much original, 
 that it is difficult to suppose them not merely the product of 
 imagination. 
 
 As a teacher of wisdom he may be confidently followed. 
 His religion has nothing in it enthusiastic or superstitious ; he 
 appears neither weakly credulous nor wantonly sceptical ; his 
 morality is neither dangerously lax nor impracticably rigid. 
 All the enchantment of fancy and all the cogency of argument 
 are employed to recommend to the reader his real interest, the 
 
ADDISON. 219 
 
 care of pleasing the Author of his being. Truth is shown 
 sometimes as the phantom of a vision ; sometimes appears half ■ 
 veiled in an allegory ; sometimes attracts regard in the robes of 
 fancy ; and sometimes steps forth in the confidence of reason. 
 She wears a thousand dresses, and in all is pleasing. 
 
 " Mille habet omatus, mille decenter habet." 
 
 His prose is the model of the middle style ; on grave subjects 
 not formal, on light occasions not grovelling ; pure withoii'. 
 scrupulosity, and exact without apparent elaboration ; alwa\;; 
 equable and always easy, without glowing words or pointed 
 sentences. Addison never deviates from his track to snatch a 
 grace ; he seeks no ambitious ornaments and tries no hazard- 
 ous innovations. His page is always luminous, but never 
 blazes in unexpected splendor. 
 
 It was apparently his principal endeavor to avoid all harsh- 
 ness and severity of diction ; he is therefore sometimes verbose 
 in his transitions and connections, and sometimes descends too 
 much to the language of conversation ; yet if his language had 
 been less idiomatical it might have lost somewhat of its gen- 
 uine Anglicism. What he attempted he performed ; he is 
 never feeble, and he did not wish to be energetic ; he is 
 never rapid, and he never stagnates. His sentences have 
 neither studied amplitude nor affected brevity ; his periods, 
 though not diligently rounded, are voluble and easy. Who- 
 ever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, 
 and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights 
 to the volumes of Addison. 
 
DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON POPE. 
 
 Alexander Pope was born in London, May 2p, 1688, of 
 parents whose rank or station was never ascertaineci : we are 
 informed that they were of " gentle blood ;" that his father was 
 of a family of which the Earl of Downe was the head ; and that 
 his mother was the daughter of William Turner, Esquire, of 
 York, who had likewise three sons, one of whom had the honor 
 of being killed and the other of dying in the service of Charles 
 the First ; the third was made a general officer in Spain, from 
 whom the sister inherited what sequestrations' and forfeitures 
 had left in the family. 
 
 This, and this only, is told by Pope, who is more willing, 
 as I have heard observed, to show whiat his father was not 
 than what he was. It is allowed that he grew rich by trade ; 
 but whether in a shop or on the exchange was never discov- 
 ered till Mr. Tyers told, on the authority of Mrs. Racket, that 
 he was a linen-draper in the Strand, Both parents were 
 papists. 
 
 Pope was from his birth of a constitution tender and deli- 
 cate, but is said to have shown remarkable gentleness and 
 sweetness of disposition. The weakness of his body continued : 
 through his life ; but the mildness of his mind perhaps ended 
 with his childhood. His voice, when he was young, was so 
 pleasing that he was called in fondness ' ' The Little Night- 
 ingale. ' ' 
 
 Being not sent early to school, he was taught to read by an 
 aunt ; and when he was seven or eight years old became a lover 
 of books. He first learned to write by imitating printed books ; 
 a species of penmanship in which he retained great excellence 
 through his whole life, though his ordinary hand was not 
 elegant. 
 
 When he was about eight he was placed in Hampshire, 
 under Taverner, a Romish priest, who, by a method very 
 rarely practised, taught him the Greek and Latin rudiments i 
 together. He was ^now first regularly initiated in poetry 
 by the perusal of Ogilby's Homer and Sandys's Ovid. 
 Ogilby's assistance he never repaid with any praise ; but of 
 Sandys he declared, in his notes to the " Iliad," that English 
 poetry owed much of its beauty to his translations. Sandys 
 very rarely attempted original composition. 
 
 From the care of Taverner, under wUqi?, Ws prqgciency/ 
 
222 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 was considerable, he was removed to a school at Twyford, 
 near Winchester, and again to another school, about Hyde 
 Park Corner ; from which he used sometimes to stroll to the 
 playhouse, and was so delighted with theatrical exhibitions 
 that he formed a kind of play from Ogilby's "Iliad," with 
 some verses of his own intermixed, which he persuaded his 
 school-fellows to act, with the addition of his master's gardener, 
 who personated Ajax. 
 
 At the two last schools he used to represent himself as hav- 
 ing lost part of what Taverner had taught him ; and on his 
 master at Twyford he had already exercised his poetry in a 
 lampoon. Yet under those masters he translated more than a 
 fourth part of the " Metamorphoses." If he kept the same 
 proportion in his other exercises, it cannot be thought that his 
 loss was great. 
 
 *^ He tells of himself, in his poems, that " he lisped in num- 
 bers ;" and used to say that he could not remember the time 
 when he began to make verses. In the style of fiction it might 
 have been said of him, as of Pindar, that when" he lay in his 
 cradle " the bees swarmed about his mouth." 
 
 About the time of the Revolution his father, who was un- 
 doubtedly disappointed by the sudden blast of popish pros- 
 perity, quitted his trade and retired to Binfield, in Windsor 
 Forest, with about twenty thousand pounds, for which, being 
 conscientiously determined not to entrust it to the government, 
 he found no better use than that of locking it up in a chest, 
 and taking from it what his expenses required ; and his life 
 was long enough to consume a great part of it before his son 
 came to the inheritance. 
 
 To Binfield Pope was called by his father when he was 
 about twelve years old ; and there he had, for a few months, 
 the assistance of one Deane, another priest, of whom he 
 learned only to construe a little of Tully's Offices. How 
 Mr. Deane could spend, with a boy who had translated so 
 much of Ovid, some months over a small part of Tully's 
 Offices, it is now vain to inquire. 
 
 Of a youth so successfully employed, and so conspicuously 
 improved, a minute account must be naturally desired ; but 
 curiosity must be contented with confused, imperfect, and 
 sometimes improbable intelligence. Pope, finding little ad- 
 vantage from external help, resolved thenceforward to direct 
 himself, and at twelve formed a plan of study which he com- 
 pleted with little other incitement than the desire of excellence. 
 
 His primary and principal purpose was to be a poet, with 
 \which his father ^Qeidentally concurred by proposing subjects 
 
POPE. 223 
 
 and obliging him to correct his performances by many revisals, 
 after which the old gentleman, when he was satisfied, would 
 say, " These are good rhymes." 
 
 In his perusal of the English poets he soon distinguished^ 
 the versification of Dryden, which he considered as the model 
 to be studied, and was impressed with such veneration for his 
 instructor that he persuaded some friends to take him to the 
 coffe e-ho use which Dryden frequented, and pleased himself 
 with having seen him. . 
 
 Dryden died May i, 170/, some days before Pope was 
 twelve ; so early must he therefore have felt the power of har- 
 mony and the zeal of genius. Who does not wish that Dryden 
 could have known the value of the homage that was paid him, 
 and foreseen the greatness of his young admirer ? 
 
 The earliest of Pope's productions is his " Ode on Soli- 
 tude, ' ' written before he was twelve, in which there is nothing 
 more than other forward boys have attained, and which is not 
 equal to Cowley's performances at the same age. 
 
 His time was now wholly spent in reading and writing. As 
 he read the classics he amused himself with translating them ; 
 and at fourteen made a version of the first book of " The 
 Thebais," which, with some revision, he afterwards published. 
 He must have been at this time, if he had no help, a consider- 
 able proficient in the Latin tongue. 
 
 By Dryden's Fables, which had then been not long pub- 
 lished, and were much in the hands of poetical readers, he was 
 tempted to try his own skill in giving Chaucer a more fashion- 
 able appearance, and put "January and May," and the 
 " Prologue of the Wife of Bath," into modern English. He 
 translated likewise the epistle of ' ' Sappho to Phaon, ' ' from 
 Ovid, to complete the version which was before imperfect, 
 and wrote some other small pieces which he afterwards 
 printed. 
 
 He sometimes imitated the English poets, and professed to 
 have written at fourteen his poem upon " Silence" after Roch- 
 ester's " Nothing." He had now formed his versification, and 
 the smoothness of his numbers surpassed his original ; but this 
 is a small part of his praise : he discovers such acquaintance 
 both with human life and public affairs as is not easily con- 
 ceived to have been attainable by a boy of fourteen in Windsor 
 Forest. 
 
 Next year he was desirous of opening to himself new sources 
 of knowledge, by making himself acquainted with modern 
 languages, and removed for a time to London, that he might 
 Study French and Italian, which, as he desired nothing more 
 
2 24 ^^- SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 than to read them, were by diligent application soon de- 
 spatched. Of Italian learning he does not appear to have ever 
 made much use in his subsequent studies. 
 
 He then returned to Binfield, and delighted himself with his 
 own poetry. He tried all styles and many subjects. He wrote 
 a comedy, a tragedy, an epic poem, with panegyrics on all the 
 princes of Europe ; and, as he confesses, ' ' thought himself the 
 greatest genius that ever was." Self-confidence is the first 
 requisite to great undertakings. He, indeed, who forms his 
 opinion of himself in solitude, without knowing the powers of 
 other men, is very liable to error ; but it was the felicity of 
 Pope to rate himself at his real value. 
 
 Most of his puerile productions were, by his maturer judg- 
 ment, afterwards destroyed. "Alcander, " the epic poem, 
 was burnt by the persuasion of Attgrbury. The tragedy was 
 founded on the legend of St. Genevieve. Of the comedy there 
 is no account. 
 
 Concerning his studies it is related that he translated TuUy 
 on Old Age ; and that besides his books of poetry and criti- 
 cism he read Temple's Essays and Locke on the Human Un- 
 derstanding. ' ' His reading, though his favorite authors are 
 not known, appears to have been sufficiently extensive and 
 multifarious ; for his early pieces show with sufficient evidence 
 his knowledge of books. 
 
 He that is pleased with himself easily imagines that he shall 
 please others. Sir William Trumbull, who had been ambassa- 
 dor at Constantinople, and secretary of state, when he retired 
 from business, fixed his residence in the neighborhood of Bin- 
 field. Pope, not yet sixteen, was introduced to the statesman 
 of sixty, and so distinguished himself that their interviews 
 ended in friendship and correspondence. Pope was, through 
 his whole life, ambitious of splendid acquaintance ; and he 
 seems to have wanted neither diligence nor success in attracting 
 the notice of the great ; for from his first entrance into the 
 world, and his entrance was very early, he was admitted to 
 familiarity with those whose rank or station made them most 
 conspicuous. 
 
 From the age of sixteen the life of Pope, as an author, may 
 be properly computed. He now wrote his Pastorals, which 
 were shown to the poets and critics of that time ; as they well 
 deserved, they were read with admiration, and many praises 
 were bestowed upon them and upon the Preface, which is both 
 elegant and learned in a high degree ; they were, however, not 
 published till five years afterwards. 
 
 Cowley, Milton, and Pope are distinguished among the 
 
POPE. 
 
 225 
 
 English poets by the early exertion of their powers ; but the 
 works of Cowley alone were published in his childhood, and 
 therefore of him only can it be certain that his puerile perform-1 
 ances received no improvement from his maturer studies. | 
 
 At this time began his acquaintance with Wycherley, a man 
 who seems to have had among his contemporaries his full share 
 of reputation, to have been esteemed without virtue, and ca- 
 ressed without good-humor. Pope was proud of his notice ; , . 
 Wycherley wrote verses in his praise, which he was charged by 0'-<^^^-^ 
 Dennis with writing to himself, and they agreed for awhile to '*^''^*f^ 
 flatter one another. It is pleasant to remark how soon Pope^"^ • J' 
 learned the cant of an author, and began to treat critics with^-^*-*""'''^^''^' 
 contempt, though he had yet suffered nothing from them. 
 
 But the fondness of Wycherley was too violent to last. 
 His esteem of Pope was such that he submitted some poems to 
 his revision ; and when Pope, perhaps proud of such confi- ' 
 dence, was sufficiently bold in his criticisms and liberal in his 
 alterations, the old scribbler was angry to see his pages de- 
 faced, and felt more pain from the detection than content 
 from the amendment of his faults. They parted ; but Pope 
 always considered him with kindness, and visited him a little 
 time before he died. 
 
 Another of his early correspondents was Mr. Cromwell, of 
 whom I have learned nothing particular but that he used to 
 ride a hunting in a tie-wig. He was fond, and perhaps vain, 
 of amusing himself with poetry and criticism ; and sometimes 
 sent his performances to Pope, who did not forbear such re- 
 marks as were now and then unwelcome. Pope, in his turn, 
 put the juvenile version of ' ' Statius' ' into his hands for cor- 
 rection. 
 
 Their correspondence afforded the public its first knowl- 
 edge of Pope's epistolary powers ; for his Letters were given 
 by Cromwell to one Mrs. Thomas, and she, many years after- 
 wards, sold them to Curll, who inserted them in a volume of 
 his Miscellanies. 
 
 Walsh, a name yet preserved among the minor poets, was 
 one of his first encouragers. His regard was gained by the 
 Pastorals, and from him Pope received the counsel by which he 
 seems to have regulated his studies. Walsh advised him to 
 correctness, which, as he told him, the English poets had 
 hitherto neglected, and which therefore was left to him as a 
 basis of fame ; and, being delighted with rural poems, recom- 
 mended to him to write a pastoral comedy, like those which 
 are read so eagerly in Italy, a design which Pope probably did 
 not approve, as he di4 not follow it, 
 
2 26 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 ' Pope had now declared himself a poet ; and, thinking him- 
 self entitled to poetical conversation, began at seventeen to fre- 
 quent Will's, a coffee-house on the ijorth side of Russell Street, 
 in Covent Garden, where the wits of that time used to assem- 
 ble, and where Dryden had, when he lived, been accustomed 
 to preside. 
 
 During this period of his life he was indefatigably diligent 
 and insatiably curious, wanting health for violent and money 
 for expensive pleasures ; ■ and having excited in himself very 
 strong desires of intellectual eminence, he spent much of his 
 time over his books ; but he read only to store his mind with 
 facts and images, seizing all that his authors presented with un- 
 distinguishing voracity, and with an appetite for knowledge too 
 eager to be nice. In a mind like his, however, all the faculties 
 were at once involuntarily improving. Judgment is forced 
 upon us by experience. He that reads many books must 
 compare one opinion or one style with another, and when he 
 compares must necessarily distinguish, reject, and prefer. 
 But the account given by himself of his studies was, that from 
 fourteen to twenty he read only for amusement, from twenty 
 to twenty-seven for improvement and instruction ; that in the 
 first part of this time he desired only to know, and in the sec- 
 ond he endeavored^ to judge. 
 
 The Pastorals, which had been for some time handed about 
 among poets and critics, were at last printed (1709) in Ton- 
 4on's " Miscellany," in a volume which began with the Pasto- 
 rals of Philips and ended with those of Pope. 
 
 The sa.me year was written the "i^ssay on CriticisnJ, " a 
 work which displays such extent of comprehension, such nicety 
 of distinction, such acquaintance with mankind, and such 
 [knowledge both of ancient and modern learning, as are not 
 'often attained by the maturest age and longest experience. It 
 was published about two years afterwards ; and, being praised 
 by Addison in the " Spectator" with sufiicifinl^liberality,.. met 
 wiyi_sQ_miich__£avBr. as enraged Dennis^-!.' who^il he says; 
 ' found himself attacked, without any manner of provocation on 
 his_side,^and-attacked in Jiis„ person, instead of his writings, by 
 one who was wholly a stranger to him, at a time when all the 
 world knew he was persecuted by fortune ; and not only saw 
 that this was attempted in" a clandestine manner, with the 
 utmost falsehood and calumny, but found that all this was 
 done by a little aifected hypocrite, who had nothing in his 
 mouth at the same time but truth, candor, friendship, good 
 nature, humanity, and magnanimity." 
 
 How the attack was clandestine is not easily perceived, nor 
 
POPE. 227 
 
 how his person is depreciated ; but he seems to have known 
 something of Pope's character, in whom may be discovered an 
 appetite to talk too frequently of his own virtues. 
 
 The pamphlet is such as rage might be expected to dictate. 
 He supposes himself to be asked two questions ; whether the 
 Essay will succeed, and who or what is the author. 
 
 Its success he admits to be secured by the false opinions 
 then prevalent ; the author he concludes to be " young and 
 raw." 
 
 " First, because he discovers a sufficiency beyond his little 
 ability, and hath rashly undertaken a task infinitely above his 
 force. Secondly, while this little author struts and affects the 
 dictatorian air, he plainly shows that at the same time he is 
 under the rod ; and while he pretends to give laws to others, 
 is a pedantic slave to authority and opinion. Thirdly, he 
 hath, like schoolboys, borrowed both from living and dead. 
 Fourthly, he knows not his own mind, and frequently contra- 
 dicts himself. Fifthly, he is almost perpetually in the wrong. ' ' 
 
 All these positions he attempts to prove by qiiotations and 
 remarks ; but his desire to do mischief is greater than his 
 power. He has, however, justly criticised some passages in 
 these lines : 
 
 " There are whom Heaven has bless'd with store of wit, 
 Yet want as much again to manage it ; 
 For Wit and Judgment ever are at strife. ' ' 
 
 It is apparent that wit has two meanings, and that what is 
 wanted, though called wit, is truly judgment. So far Dennis 
 is undoubtedly right ; but, not content with argument, he will 
 have a little mirth, and triumphs over the first couplet in terms 
 too elegant to be forgotten. ' ' By the way, what rare numbers 
 are here ! Would not one swear that this youngster had 
 espoused some antiquated muse, who had sued out a divorce 
 on account of impotence from some superannuated sinner ; 
 and having been p — xed by her former spouse, has got the ^out 
 in her decrepit age, which makes her hobble so damnably?" 
 This was the man who would reform a nation sinking into bar- 
 barity. 
 
 In another place Pope himself allowed that Dennis had de- 
 tected one of those blunders which are called "bulls." The 
 first edition had this line : 
 
 ' ' What is this Wit — 
 Where wanted, scorn'd ; and envied where acquir'd ?" 
 
 " How," says the critic, " can wit be scorned where it is 
 
228 DR. SAMUEL yotiNSON 01^ 
 
 not ? Is not this a figure frequently employed in Hibernian 
 land ? The person that wants this wit may indeed be scorned, 
 but the scorn shows the honor which the contemner has for 
 wit. ' ' Of this remark Pope made the proper use by correcting 
 the passage. 
 
 I have preserved, I think, all that is reasonable in Dennis's 
 criticism ; it remains that justice be done to his delicacy. 
 " For his acquaintance (says Dennis) he names Mr. Walsh, 
 who had by no means the qualification which this author reck- 
 ons absolutely necessary to a critic, it being very certain that 
 he was, like this essayer, a very indifferent poet ; he loved to 
 be well dressed ; and I remember a little young gentleman 
 whom Mr. Walsh used to take into his company as a double 
 foil to his person and capacity. Inquire, between Sunninghill 
 and Oakingham, for a young, short, squab gentleman, the 
 very bow of the god of love, and tell rne whether he be a 
 proper author to make personal reflections ? He may extol the 
 ancients, but he has reason to thank the gods that he was born 
 a modern ; for had he been born of Grecian parents, and his 
 father consequently had by law had the absolute disposal of 
 him, his life had been no longer than that of one of his poems, 
 the life of half a day. Let the person of a gentleman of his 
 parts be never so contemptible, his inward man is ten times 
 more ridiculous ; it being impossible that his outward form, 
 though it be that of downright monkey, should differ so much 
 from human shape as his unthinking immaterial part does from 
 human understanding." Thus began the hostility between 
 Pope and Dennis, which, though it was suspended for a short 
 time, never was appeased. Pope seems at first to have at- 
 tacked him wantonly ; but, though he always professed to de- 
 spise him, he discovers, by mentioning him very often, that he 
 felt his force or his venom. 
 
 Of this essay Pope declared that he did not expect the 
 sale to be quick, because ' ' not one gentleman in sixty, even of 
 liberal education, could understand it." The gentlemen and 
 the education of that time seem to have been of a lower char- 
 acter than they are of this. He mentioned a thousand copies 
 as a numerous impression. 
 
 Dennis was not his only censurer ; the zealous papists 
 thought the monks treated with too much contempt and Eras- 
 mus too studiously praised ; but to these objections he had not 
 much regard. 
 
 The Essay has been translated into French by Hamilton, 
 author of the ' ' Comte de Grammont, ' ' whose version was 
 uevcr printed ; by Robotham, secretary to the king for Har.- 
 
POPE. i2g 
 
 Ovet, and by Resnel ; and commented by Dr. Warburton, who 
 has discovered in it such order and connection as was not 
 perceived by Addison, nor, as is said, intended by the au- 
 thor. 
 
 Almost every poem consisting of precepts is so far arbitrary 
 and immethodical that many of the paragraphs may change 
 places with no apparent inconvenience ; for of two or more 
 positions depending upon some remote and general principle 
 there is seldom any cogent reason why one should precede the 
 other. But for the order in which they stand, whatever it be, 
 a little ingenuity may easily give a reason. "It is possible," 
 says Hooker, " that by long circumduction from any one 
 truth all truth may be inferred. ' ' Of all homogeneous truths, 
 at least of all truths respecting the same general end, in what- 
 ever series they may be produced, a concatenation by interme- 
 diate ideas may be formed, such as, when it is once shown, 
 shall appear natural ; but if this order be reversed, another 
 mode of connection equally specious may be found or made. 
 Aristotle is praised for naming Fortitude first of the cardinal 
 virtues, as that without which no other virtue can steadily be 
 practised ; but he might, with equal propriety, have placed 
 Prudence and Justice before it, since without Prudence Forti- 
 tude is mad ; without Justice it is mischievous. 
 
 As the end of method is perspicuity, that series is suffi- 
 ciently regular that avoids obscurity, and where there is no 
 obscurity it will not be difficult to discover method. (-3 
 
 In the ' ' Spectator' ' was published the Messiah, which he ^''■<^^**- 
 first submitted to the perusal of Steele, and corrected in com-"*^'''-^ 
 pliance with his criticisms. '^-^'rt^t 
 
 It is reasonable to infer, from his Letters, that the " Verses'^ ^TV^" 
 on an Unfortunate Lady" were written about the time when ^ 
 his Essay was published. The lady's name and adventures I 
 have sought with fruitless inquiry. 
 
 I can therefore tell no more than I have learned from Mr. 
 Ruffhead, who writes with the confidence of one who could 
 trust his information. She was a woman of eminent rank and 
 large fortune, the ward of an uncle, who, having given her a 
 proper education, expected, like other guardians, that she should 
 make at least an equal match ; and such he proposed to her, 
 but found it rejected in favor of a young gentleman of inferior 
 condition. 
 
 Having discovered the correspondence between the two 
 lovers, and finding the young lady determined to abide by her 
 own choice, he supposed that separation might do what can 
 rarely be done by arguments, and sent her into a foreign 
 
230 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 country, where she was obliged to converse only with those 
 from whom her uncle had nothing to fear. 
 
 Her lover took care to repeat his vows ; but his letters were 
 intercepted and carried to her guardian, who directed her to be 
 watched with still greater vigilance, till of this restraint she 
 grew so impatient that she bribed a woman servant to procure 
 her a sword, which she directed to her heart. 
 
 From this account, given with evident intention to raise the 
 lady's character, it does not appear that she had any claim to 
 praise, nor much to compassion. She seems to have been im- 
 patient, violent, and ungovernable. Her uncle's power could 
 not have lasted long ; the hour of liberty and choice would 
 have come in time. But her desires were too hot for delay, 
 and she liked self-murder better than suspense. 
 
 Nor is it discovered that the uncle, whoever he was, is with 
 much justice delivered to posterity as " a false guardian ;" he 
 seems to have done only that for which a guardian is 
 appointed ; he endeavored to direct his niece till she should be 
 able to direct herself. Poetry has not often been worse em- 
 ployed than in dignifying the amorous fury of a raving girl. 
 
 Not long after, he wrote " The._R^p£_Q£_tlie_LQck, " the 
 most airy, the most ingenious, and the most delightful of all his 
 compositions, occasioned by a frolic of gallantry, rather too 
 familiar, in which Lord Petre cut off a lock of Mrs. Arabella 
 ^Fermor's hair. This, whether stealth or violence, was so 
 much resented that the commerce of the two families, before 
 very friendly, was interrupted. Mr. Caryl, a gentleman who, 
 being secretary to King James's queen, had followed his mis- 
 tress into France, and who, being the author of ' ' Sir Solomon 
 Single, ' ' a comedy, and some translations, was entitled to the 
 notice of a wit, solicited Pope to endeavor a reconciliation by 
 a ludicrous poem, which might bring both the parties to a bet- 
 ter temper. In compliance with Caryl's request, though his 
 name was for a long time marked only by the first and last let- 
 ters, C — 1, a poem of two cantos was written (17 11), as is said, 
 in a fortnight, and sent to the offended lady, who liked it well 
 enough to show it ; and, with the usual process of literary 
 transactions, the author, dreading a surreptitious edition, was 
 forced to publish it. 
 
 The event is said to have been such as was desired, the paci- 
 fication and diversion of all to whom it related, except Sir 
 George Brown, who complained with some bitterness that, in 
 the character of Sir Plume, he was made to talk nonsense. 
 Whether all this be true I have some doubt ; for at Paris, a 
 few years ago, a niece of Mrs. Fermor, who presided in an 
 
POPE. 2^1 
 
 English convent, mentioned Pope's work with very little grat- 
 itude, rather as an insult than an honor ; and she may be sup- 
 posed to have inherited the opinion of her family. 
 
 At its first appearance it was termed by Addison merum sal. 
 Pope, however, saw that it was capable of improvement, and, 
 having luckily contrived to borrow his machinery from the 
 Rosicrucians, imparted the scheme with which his head was 
 teeming to Addison, who told him that his work, as it stood, 
 was " a delicious little thing," and gave him no encouragement 
 to retouch it. 
 
 This has been too hastily considered as an instance of Ad- 
 dison's jealousy ; for, as he could not guess the conduct of the 
 new design, or the possibilities of pleasure comprised in a fic- 
 tion of which there had been no examples, he might very 
 reasonably and kindly persuade the author to acquiesce in his 
 own prosperity, and forbear an attempt which he considered as 
 an unnecessary hazard. 
 
 Addison's counsel was happily rejected. Pope foresaw the 
 future efflorescence of imagery then budding in his mind, and 
 resolved to spare no art or industry of cultivation. The soft 
 luxuriance of his fancy was already shooting, and all the gay 
 varieties of diction were ready at his hand to color and embel- 
 lish it. 
 
 His attempt was justified by its success. " The Rape of 
 the Lock " stands forward, in the classes of literature, as the 
 most exquisite example of ludicrou s poetr y. Berkeley congrat- 
 ulated him upoB-tlre^ispIay of powers more truly poetical than 
 he had shown before : with elegance of description and just- 
 ness of precepts he had now exhibited boundless fertility of 
 invention. 
 
 He always considered the intermixture of the machinery 
 with the action as his most successful exertion of poetical art. 
 He indeed could never afterwards produce any thing of such 
 unexampled excellence. Those performances which strike 
 with wonder are combinations of skilful genius with happy 
 casualty ; and it is not likely that any felicity like the discovery 
 of a new race of preternatural agents should happen twice to 
 the same man. 
 
 Of this poem the author was, I think, allowed to enjoy the 
 praise for a long time without disturbance. Many years after- 
 wards, Dennis published some remarks upon it, with very little 
 force, and with no effect ; for the opini(m of the public was 
 already settled, and it was no longer at the mercy of criticism. 
 
 About this time he published " The Temple of Fame," 
 which, as he tells Steele in their cqrresfiondence, he had writ- 
 
232 DX. SAMUEL yOHNSOM ON' 
 
 ten two years before — that is, when he ' was only twenty-twO 
 years old, an early time of life for so much learning and so 
 much observation as that work exhibits. 
 
 On this poem Dennis afterwards published some remarks, 
 of which the most reasonable is, that some of the lines repre- 
 sent Motion as exhibited by Sculpture. 
 
 Of the epistle from ' ' Eloisa to_Abelard, " I do not know 
 the date. His first inclination to attempt a composition of that 
 tender kind arose, as Mr. Savage told me, from his perusal of 
 Prior's "Nut-brown Maid." How much he has surpassed 
 Prior's work it is not necessary to mention, when perhaps it 
 inay be said with justice that he has excelled every composi- 
 tion of the same kind. The mixture of religious hope and 
 resignation gives an elevation and dignity to disappointed love 
 which images merely natural cannot bestow. The gloom of a 
 convent strikes the imagination with far greater force than the 
 solitude of a grove. 
 
 This piece was, however, not much his favorite in his latter 
 years, though I never heard upon what principle he slighted it. 
 
 In the next year (17 13) he published " Windsor Forest ;" 
 of which part was, as he relates, written at sixteen, about the 
 same time as his Pastorals, and the latter part was added after- 
 wards : where the addition begins we are not told. The lines 
 relating to the peace confess their own date. It is dedicated 
 to Lord Lansdowne, who was then high in reputation and in- 
 fluence among the Tories ; and it is said that the conclusion of 
 the poem gave great pain to Addison, both as a poet and a 
 politician. Reports like this are always spread with boldness 
 very disproportionate to their evidence. Why should Addison 
 receive any particular disturbance from the last lines of 
 ' ' Windsor Forest " ? If contrariety of opinion could poison a 
 politician, he would not live a day ; and as a poet he must 
 have felt Pope's force of genius much more from many other 
 parts of his works. 
 
 The pain that Addison might feel it is not likely that he 
 would confess ; and it is certain that he so well suppressed 
 his discontent that Pope now thought himself his favorite ; 
 for, having been consulted in the revisal of ' ' Cato, ' ' he intro- 
 duced it by a Prologue ; and when Dennis published his Re- 
 marks, undertook, not indeed to vindicate, but to revenge his 
 friend, by a " Narrative of the Frenzy of John Dennis." 
 
 There is reason to believe that Addison gave no encour- 
 agement to this disingenuous hostility ; for, says Pope, in a 
 letter to him, " indeed your opinion, that it is entirely to be 
 neglected, would be my own in my own case ; but I felt more 
 
POPE. 233 
 
 warmth here than I did when I first saw his book against myself 
 (though indeed in two minutes it made me heartily merry)." 
 Addison was not a man on whom such cant of sensibility 
 could make much impression. He left the pamphlet to itself, 
 having disowned it to Dennis, and perhaps did not think Pope 
 to have deserved much by his officiousness. 
 
 This year was printed in the " Guardian" the ironical 
 comparison between the Pastorals of Philips and Pope, a 
 composition of artifice, criticism, and literature, to which noth- 
 ing equal will easily be found. The superiority of Pope is so 
 ingeniously dissembled, and the feeble lines of Philips so skil- 
 fully preferred, that Steele, being deceived, was unwilling to 
 print the paper, lest Pope should be offended. Addison imme- 
 diately saw the writer's design, and, as it seems, had malice 
 enough to conceal his discovery, and to permit a publication 
 which, by making his friend Philips ridiculous, made him for- 
 ever an enemy to Pope. 
 
 It appears that about this time Pope had a strong inclina- 
 tion to unite the art of painting with that of poetry, and put 
 himself under the tuition of Jeryas. He was near-sighted, and 
 therefore not formed by nature for a painter ; he tried, how- 
 ever, how far he could advance, and sometimes persuaded his 
 friends to sit. A picture of Betterton, supposed to be drawn 
 by him, was in the possession of Lord Mansfield : if this was 
 taken from the life, he must have begun to paint earlier, for 
 Betterton was now dead. Pope's ambition of this new art 
 produced some encomiastic verses to Jervas, which certainly 
 show his power as a poet ; but I have been told that they be- 
 tray his ignorance of painting. , 
 
 He appears to have regarded Betterton with kindness and! 
 esteem ; and after his death published, under his name, a ver- 
 sion into modern English of Chaucer's Prologues, and one of 
 his Tales, which, as was related by Mr. Harte, were believed 
 to have been the performance of Pope himself by Fenton, who 
 made him a gay offer of five pounds if he would show them in 
 the hand of Betterton. 
 
 The next year (17 13) produced a bolder attempt, by which 
 profit was sought as well as praise. The poems which he had 
 hitherto written, however they might have diffused his name, 
 had made very little addition to his fortune. The allowance 
 which his father made him, though, proportioned to what he 
 had, it might be liberal, could not be large ; his religion 
 hindered him from the occupation of any civil employment ; 
 and he complained that he wanted even money to buy 
 books. 
 
234 ^^- 'SAmVML JOHN son om 
 
 He therefore resolved to try how far the favor of the pub- 
 lic extended, by soliciting a subscription to a version of the 
 " lUad," with large notes. 
 
 To print by subscription was, for some time, a practice 
 i peculiar to the English. The first considerable work, for 
 I which this expedient was employed is said to have been Dry- 
 den's " Vijpl," and it had been tried again with success when 
 the " Tatlers" were collected into volumes. 
 
 There was reason to believe that Pope's attempt would be 
 successful. He was in the full bloom of reputation, and was 
 personally known to almost all whom dignity of employment 
 or splendor of reputation had made eminent ; he conversed 
 indifferently with both parties, and never disturbed the public 
 with his political opinions ; and it might be naturally expected, 
 as each faction then boasted its literary zeal, that the great 
 men, who on other occasions practised all the violence of 
 opposition, would emulate each other in their encouragement of 
 a poet who had delighted all and by whom none had been 
 offended. 
 
 With those hopes he_^offered an English " IliadJ^Jo subscrib- 
 jgrs,, in six volumes in quarfopfoi^'six'gnineas 7 a sum,^ccora- 
 ing to the value of money at that time, by no means inconsid- 
 erable, and greater than I believe to have been ever asked be- 
 fore. His proposal, however, was very favorably received, 
 and the patrons of literature were busy to recommend his un- 
 dertaking and promote his interest. Lord Oxford, indeed, 
 lamented that such a genius should be wasted upon a work not 
 original ; but proposed no means by which he might live with- 
 out it. Addison recommended caution and moderation, and 
 advised him not to be content with the praise of half the 
 nation when he might be universally favored. 
 
 The greatness of the design, the .popularity of the author, 
 and the attention of the literary world, naturally raised such 
 expectations of the future sale that the booksellers made their 
 offers with great eagerness ; but the highest bidder was Ber- 
 nard Lijvtot, who became proprietor on condition of supplying 
 at his own expense all the copies which were to be delivered 
 to subscribers or presented to friends, and paying two hundred 
 pounds for every volume. 
 
 Of the quartos it was, I believe, stipulated that none should 
 be printed but for the author, that the subscription might not be 
 depreciated ; but Lintot impressed the same pages upon a 
 small folio, and paper perhaps a little thinner, and sold ex- 
 actly at half the price, for half a guinea each volume, books so 
 little inferior to the quartos that, by a fraud of trade, those 
 
POPE. 235 
 
 folios, being afterwards shortened by cutting away the top and 
 bottom, were sold as copies printed for the subscribers. 
 
 Lintot printed two hundred and fifty on royal paper in 
 folio, for two guineas a volume ; of the small folio, having 
 printed seventeen hundred and fifty copies of the first volume, 
 he reduced the number in the other volumes to a thousand. 
 
 It is unpleasant to relate that the bookseller, after all his 
 hopes and all his liberality, was, by a very unjust and illegal 
 action, defrauded of his profit. An edition of the English 
 " Iliad " was printed in Holland, in duodecimo, and imported 
 clandestinely for the gratification of those who were impatient 
 to read what they could not yet afford to buy. This fraud 
 could only be counteracted by an edition equally cheap and 
 more commodious ; and Lintot was compelled to contract his 
 folio at once into a duodecimo and lose the advantage of an 
 intermediate gradation. The notes, which in the Dutch copies 
 were placed at the end of each book, as they had been in the 
 large volumes, were now subjoined to the text in the same page, 
 and are therefore more easily consulted. Of this edition two 
 thousand five hundred were first printed, and five thousand a 
 few weeks afterwards ; but indeed great numbers were neces- 
 sary to produce considerable profit. 
 
 Pope, having now emitted his proposals, and engaged not 
 only his own reputation, but in some degree that of his friends 
 who patronized his sulascription, began to be frighted at his 
 own undertaking ; and finding himself at first embarrassed with 
 difficulties which retarded and oppressed him, he was for a 
 time timorous and uneasy, had his nights disturbed by 
 dreams of long journeys through unknown ways, and wished, 
 as he said, " that somebody would hang him." 
 
 This misery, however, was not of long continuance ; he 
 grew by degrees more acquainted with Homer's images and 
 expressions, and practice increased his facility of versification. 
 In a short time he represents himself as despatching regularly 
 fifty verses a day, which would show him by an easy computa- 
 tion the termination of his labor. 
 
 Q) His own diffidence was not his only vexation. He that, 
 asks a subscription soon finds tha^i^e has enemies. All who 
 do not encourage him defame him. He that wants money will 
 rather be thought angry than poor ; and he that wishes to save ' 
 his money conceals his avarice by his malice. Addison had ' 
 hinted his suspicion that Pope was too much a Tory ; and 
 some of the Tories suspected his principles because he had con- 
 tributed to the " Guardian," which was carried on,by Steele. 
 
 To those who censured his politics ^n^i? addei^nemies yet 
 
236 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 more dangerous, who called in question his knowledge of 
 Greek and his qualifications for a translator of Homer. To 
 these he made no public opposition ; but in one of his letters 
 escapes from them as well as he can. At an age like his, for he 
 was not more than twenty-five, with an irregular education, 
 and a course of life of which much seems to have passed in con- 
 versation, it is not very likely that he overflowed with Greek. 
 But when he felt himself deficient he sought assistance ; and 
 what man of learning would refuse to help him ? Minute in- 
 quiries into the force of words are less necessary in translating 
 Homer than other poets, because his positions are general 
 and his representation'; natural, with very little dependence on 
 local or temporary customs, on those changeable scenes of 
 artificial life which, by mingling originally with accidental 
 notions, and crowding the mind with images which time 
 effaces, produces ambiguity in diction and obscurity in books. 
 To this open display of unadulterated nature it must be 
 ascribed that Homer has fewer passages of doubtful meaning 
 than any other poet either in the learned or in modern lan- 
 guages. I have read of a man who, being by his ignorance 
 of Greek compelled to gratify his curiosity with the jLatin 
 printed on the opposite page, declared that from the rude 
 simplicity of the lines literally rendered he formed nobler 
 ideas of the Homeric majesty than from the labored elegance 
 of polished versions. 
 
 Those literal translations were always at hand, and from them 
 he could easily obtain his author's sense with sufficient cer- 
 tainty ; and among the readers of Homer the number is very 
 small of those who find much in the Greek more than in the 
 Latin, except the music of the numbers. 
 
 If more help was wanting, he had the poetical translation 
 of Eobanus Hessus, an unwearied writer of Latin verses ; he 
 had the French Homers of La Valterie and Dacier, and the 
 j-English of Chapman, Hobbes, and Ogilby. With Chapman, 
 whose work, though now totally neglected, seems to have been 
 popular almost to the end of the last century, he had very fre- 
 quent consultations, and perhaps never translated any passage 
 till he had read his version, which indeed he has been some- 
 times suspected of using instead of the original. 
 
 Notes were likewise to be provided, for the six volumes 
 would have been very little more than six pamphlets without 
 them. What the mere perusal of the text could suggest. Pope 
 wanted no assistance to collect or methodize ; but more was 
 necessary ; many pages were to be filled, and learning must 
 supply materials to wjt and judgment, Soniething might be 
 
POPE. 237 
 
 gathered from Dacier ; but no man loves to be indebted to his 
 contemporaries, and Dacier was accessible to common readers. 
 E ustathi us was therefore necessarily consulted. To read 
 Eustathius, of whose work there was then no Latin version, 
 I suspect Pope, if he had been willing, not to have been able ; 
 some other was therefore to be found who had leisure as well 
 as abilities ; and he was doubtless most readily employed who 
 would do much work for little money. 
 
 The history of the notes has never been traced. Broome, 
 in his preface to his poems, declares himself the commentator 
 " in part upon the Iliad ;" and it appears from Fenton's letter, 
 preserved in the Museum, that Broome was at first engaged in 
 consulting Eustathius, but that after a time, whatever was the 
 reason, he desisted ; another man of Cambridge was then 
 employed, who soon grew weary of the work ; and a third, 
 that was recommended by Thirlby, is now discovered to have 
 been Jortin, a man since well known to the learned world, who 
 complained that Pope, having accepted and approved his per- 
 formance, never testified any curiosity to see him, and who 
 professed to have forgotten the terms on which he worked. 
 The terms which Fenton uses are very mercantile : " I think at 
 first sight that his performance is very commendable, and have 
 sent word for him to finish the seventeenth book, and to send it 
 with his demands for his trouble. I have here enclosed the 
 specimen ; if the rest come before the return, I will keep them 
 till I receive your order. ' ' 
 
 Broome then offered his service a second time, which was 
 probably accepted, as they had afterwards a closer correspond- 
 ence. Pamell contributed the life of Homer, which Pope 
 found so harsh that he took great pains in correcting it ; and 
 by his own diligence, with such help as kindness or money 
 could procure him, in somewhat more than five years he com- 
 pleted his version of the ' ' Uiad, ' ' with the notes. He began 
 it in 1712, his twenty-fifth year, and concluded it in 17 18, his 
 thirtieth year. 
 
 When we find him translating fifty lines a day, it is natural 
 to suppose that he would have brought his work to a moie 
 speedy conclusion. The ' ' Iliad, ' ' containing less than sixteen 
 thousand verses, might have been despatched in less than three 
 hundred and twenty days by fifty verses in a day. The notes, 
 compiled with the assistance of his mercenaries, could not be 
 supposed to require more time than the text. 
 
 According to this calculation, the progress of Pope may 
 seem to have been slow ; but the distance is commonly very 
 great between actual performances ^ijd speculative possibil- 
 
238 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 ity. It is natural to suppose that as much as has been dont 
 to-day may be done to-morrow ; but on the morrow some diffi- 
 culty emerges, or some external impediment obstructs. Indo- 
 lence, interruption, business, and pleasure, all take their turns 
 of retardation ; and every long work is lengthened by a thou- 
 sand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be re- 
 counted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance 
 was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the under- 
 taker's mind. He that runs against time has an antagonist 
 not subject to casualties. 
 
 The encouragement given to this translation, though report 
 seems to have overrated it, was such as the world has not often 
 seen. The subscribers were five hundred and seventy-five. 
 The copies for which subscriptions were given were six hun- 
 dred and fifty-four, and only six hundred and sixty were 
 printed. For these copies Pope had nothing to pay ; he there- 
 fore received, including the two hundred pounds a volume, five 
 thousand three hundred and twenty pounds four shillings, with- 
 out deduction, as the books were supplied by Lintot. 
 
 By the success of his subscription Pope was relieved from 
 those pecuniary distresses with which, notwithstanding his pop- 
 ularity, he had hitherto struggled. Lord Oxford had often 
 lamented his disqualification for public employment, but never 
 proposed a pension. While the translation of Homer was in 
 its progress, Mr. Craggs, then secretary of state, offered to 
 procure him a pension, which, at least during his ministry, 
 might be enjoyed with secrecy. This was not accepted by 
 Pope, who told him, however, that if he should be pressed 
 with want of money, he would send to him for occasional sup- 
 plies. Craggs was not long in power, and was never solicited 
 for money by Pope, who disdained to beg what he did not 
 want. 
 
 With the product of this subscription, which he had too 
 much discretion to squander, he secured his future life from 
 want by considerable annuities. The estate of the Duke of 
 Buckingham was found to have been charged with five hundred 
 pounds a years, payable to Pope, which doubtless his transla- 
 tion enabled him to purchase. 
 
 It cannot be unwelcome to literary curiosity that I deduce 
 |thus minutely the history of the English ' ' Iliad. " It is cer- 
 tainly the noblest version of poetry which the world has ever 
 jpeen ; and its publication must therefore be considered as one 
 of the great events in the annals of learning. 
 
 To those who have skill to estimate the excellence and diffi- 
 culty of this great work, it must be very desirable to know how 
 
POPE. 
 
 239 
 
 it was performed, and by what gradations it advanced to cor- 
 rectness. Of such an intellectual process the knowledge has 
 very rarely been attainable ; but happily there remains the 
 original copy of the " Iliad," which, being obtained by Boling- 
 broke as a curiosity, descended from him to Mallet, and 
 is now, by the solicitation of the late Dr. Maty, reposited in 
 the Museum. 
 
 Between this manuscript, which is written upon accidental 
 fragments of paper, and the printed edition, there must have 
 been an intermediate copy, that was perhaps destroyed as it re- 
 turned from the press. 
 
 From the first copy I have procured a few transcripts, and 
 shall exhibit first the printed lines, distinguished by inverted 
 commas ; then those of the manuscripts, with all their varia- 
 tions. Those words which are given in italics are cancelled in 
 the copy, and the words placed under them adopted in their 
 stead. 
 
 The beginning of the first book stands thus : 
 
 " The wrath of Peleus' son, the direful spring 
 Of all the Grecian woes, O Goddess, sing, 
 That wrath which hurl 'd. to Pluto's gloomy reign 
 The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain." 
 
 The stern Pelides' rage, O Goddess, sing, 
 
 wrath 
 Of all the woes of Greece the fatal spring, 
 
 Grecian 
 That strew'd with warriors dead the Phrygian plain, 
 
 heroes 
 And peopled the dark hell with heroes slain ; 
 fiU'd the shady hell with chiefs untimely 
 
 " Whose limbs, unburied on the naked shore, 
 Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore. 
 Since great Achilles and Atrides strove : 
 Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove. ' 
 
 Whose limbs, unburied on the hostile shore. 
 
 Devouring dogs and greedy vultures tore. 
 
 Since first Atrides and Achilles strove : 
 
 Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove. 
 
 " Declare, O Muse, in what ill-fated hour 
 Sprung the fierce strife, from what offended Power ? 
 Latona's son a dire contagion spread, 
 And heap'd the camp with mountains of the dead ; 
 The King of men his reverend priest defied, 
 And for the King's offence the people died," 
 
240 DR. SAMUET. JOHNSON ON 
 
 Declare, O Goddess, what offended Power 
 Enflam'd their rage, in that ill-omen' d hour ; 
 
 anger fatal, hapless 
 
 Phoebus himself the dire debate procur'd, 
 
 fierce 
 T' avenge the wrongs his injur'd priest endur'd; 
 For this the God a dire infection spread, 
 And heap'd the camp with millions of the dead j 
 The King of men the sacred Sire defied. 
 And for the King's offence the people died. 
 
 " For Chryses sought with costly gifts to gain 
 His captive daughter from the Victor's chain ; 
 Suppliant the venerable Father stands, 
 Apollo's awful ensigns grace his hands ; 
 By these he begs, and, lowly bending down. 
 Extends the sceptre and the laurel crown." 
 
 For Chryses sought by presents to regain 
 costly gifts to gain 
 His captive daughter from the Victor's chain ! 
 Suppliant the venerable Father stands, 
 Apollo's awful ensigns grac'd his hands. 
 By these he begs, and, lowly bending down 
 The golden sceptre and the laurel crown, 
 Presents the sceptre 
 For these as ensigns of his God he bare 
 The God that sends his golden shafts afar j 
 Then, low on earth, the venerable man. 
 Suppliant, before the brother kings began. 
 
 '' He sued to all, but chief implor'd for grace 
 The brother kings of Atreus' royal race : ' 
 Ye kings and warriors, may your vows be crown'd, 
 And Troy's proud walls lie level with the ground : 
 May Jove restore you, when your toils are o'er, 
 Safe to the pleasures of your native shore. ' ' 
 
 To all he sued, but chief implor'd for grace 
 
 The brother Kings of Atreus' royal race : 
 
 Ye sons of Atreus , may your vows be crown'd, 
 
 kings and warriors 
 Your labors, by the Gods be all your labors crown'd. 
 So may the Gods your arms 'with conquest bless. 
 And 'Troy's proud walls lie level with the ground f 
 Till laid 
 
 And crown your labors uuith deserv'd success j 
 May Jove restore you, when your toils are o'er, 
 Safe to the pleasures of your native shore. 
 
 " But, oh ! relieve a wretched parent's pain, 
 And give Chryseis to these arms again ; 
 If mercy fail, yet let my present move. 
 And dread avenging Phoebus, son of Jove." 
 
POPE. 241 
 
 But, oh ! relieve a hapless parent's pain, 
 And give my daughter to these arms again ; 
 Receive my gifts ; if mercy fails, yet let my present move, 
 And fear ihe God that deals his darts aroutui. 
 avenging Phcebus, son of Jove. 
 
 " The Greeks, in shouts, their joint assent declare 
 The priest to reverence and release the fair. 
 Not so Atrides ; he, with kingly pride, 
 Repuls'd the sacred Sire, and thus replied." 
 
 He said, the Greeks their joint assent declare, 
 The father said, the generous Greeks relent, 
 T' accept the ransom, and release the fair ; 
 Revere the priest, and speak their joint assent ; 
 Not so the tyrant, he, with kingly pride, 
 
 Atries 
 Repuls'd the sacred Sire, and thus replied. 
 [Not so the tyrant. Dryden.] 
 
 Of these lines, and of the whole first book, I am told that 
 there was yet a former copy, more varied and more deformed 
 with interlineations. 
 
 The beginning of the second book varies very little from 
 the printed page, and is therefore set down without a parallel ; 
 the few differences do not require to be elaborately displayed. 
 
 " Now pleasing sleep had seal'd each mortal eye ; 
 Stretch'd in their tents the Grecian leaders lie ; 
 Th' Immortals slumber'd on their thrones above, 
 All but the ever-watchful eye of Jove. 
 To honor Thetis' son he bends his care. 
 And plunge the Greeks in all the woes of war. 
 Then bids an empty phantom rise to sight, 
 And thus commands the vision of the night : 
 
 directs 
 Fly hence, delusive dream, and, light as air, 
 To Agamemnon's royal tent repair ; 
 Bid him in arms draw forth th' embattled train, 
 March all his legions to the dusty plain. 
 Now tell the King 'tis giv'n him to destroy 
 Declare ev'n now 
 The lofty walls of wide-extended Troy ; 
 
 tow'rs 
 For now no more the Gods with fate contend ; 
 At Juno's suit the heavenly factions end. 
 Destruction hovers o'er yon devoted wall, 
 
 hangs 
 And nodding Ilium waits th' impending fall." 
 
 Itivo-ation to the catalogue of ships. 
 
242 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 " Say, Virgins, seated round the throne divine, 
 All-knowing Goddesses ! immortal Nine I 
 Since Earth's wide regions, Heav'n's unmeasur'd height, 
 And Hell's abyss, hide nothing from your sight 
 (We, wretched mortals ! lost in doubts below, 
 But guess by rumor, and but boast we know), 
 Oh ! say what heroes, fir'd by thirst of fame, 
 Or urg'd by wrongs, to Troy's destruction came ! 
 To count them all demands a thousand tongues, 
 A throat of brass and adamantine lungs." 
 
 Now, Virgin Goddesses, immortal Nine ! 
 That round Olympus' heavenly summit shine, 
 Who see through Heav'n and Earth, and Hell profound, 
 And all things know, and all things can resound ! 
 Relate what armies sought the Trojan land. 
 What nations foUow'd, and what chiefs command 
 (For doubtful fame distracts mankind below. 
 And nothing can we tell and nothing know) ; 
 Without your aid, to count th' unnumber'd train, 
 A thousand mouths, a thousand tongues, were vain. 
 
 £ook V. V. I. 
 
 " But Pallas now Tydides' soul inspires. 
 Fills with her- force, and warms with all her fires : 
 Above the Greeks his deathless fame to raise. 
 And crown her hero with distinguish'd praise. 
 High on his helm celestial lightnings play. 
 His beamy shield emits a living ray ; 
 Th' unwearied blaze incessant streams supplies. 
 Like the red star that fires th' autumnal skies." 
 
 But Pallas now Tydides' soul inspires, 
 Fills with her rage, and warms with all her fires ; 
 
 force 
 O'er all the Greeks decrees his fame to raise. 
 Above the Greeks Mer warrior's fame to raise, 
 
 his deathless 
 And crown her hero with immortal praise : 
 
 distinguish'd 
 Bright from his beamy crest the lightnings play. 
 
 High on helm 
 
 From his broad buckler flash'd the living ray ; 
 High on his helm celestial lightnings play, 
 His beamy shield emits a living ray ; 
 The Goddess with her breath the flames supplies. 
 Bright as the star whose fires in Autumn rise ; 
 Her breath divine thick streaming flames supplies. 
 Bright as the star fires th' autumnal skies : 
 Th' unwearied blaze incessant streams supplies, 
 Like the red star that fires th' autumnal skies. 
 
 " When first he rears his radiant orb to sight, 
 And, bath'd in Ocean, shoots a keener light. 
 
POPE. 
 
 Such glories Pallas on the chief bestow'd, 
 Such from his arms the fierce effulgence flow'd ; 
 Onward she drives him, furious to engage, 
 Where the fight burns, and where the thickest rage." 
 
 When fresh he rears his radiant orb to sight 
 And gilds old Ocean with a blaze of light. 
 Bright as the star that fires th' autumnal skies, 
 Fresh from the deep, and gilds the seas and skies ; 
 Such glories Pallas on her chief bestow'd. 
 Such sparkling rays from his bright armor flow'd ; 
 Such from his arms the fierce effulgence flow'd ; 
 Onward she drives him headlong to engage, 
 
 furious 
 Where the war bleeds, and where the fiercest rage, 
 fight burns, thickest 
 
 ' The sons of Dares first the combat sought, 
 A wealthy priest, but rich without a fault ; 
 In Vulcan's fane the father's days were led. 
 The sons to toils of glorious battle bred." 
 
 There liv'd a Trojan — Dares was his name, 
 The priest of Vulcan, rich, yet void of blame ; 
 The sons of Dares first the combat sought, 
 A wealthy priest, but rich without a fault. 
 
 Conclusion of Book viii. v. 687. 
 ' As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night, 
 O'er Heav'n's clear azure spreads her sacred light. 
 When not a breath disturbs the deep serene. 
 And not a cloud o'ercasts the solemn scene ; 
 Around her throne the vivid planets roll, 
 And stars unnumber'd gild the glowing pole ; 
 O'er the daik trees a yellower verdure shed. 
 And tip with silver every mountain's head ; 
 Then shine the vales, the rocks in prospect rise, 
 A flood of glory bursts from all the skies ; 
 The conscious swains, rejoicing in the sight. 
 Eye the blue vault, and bless the useful light. 
 So many flames before proud Ilion blaze. 
 And lighten glimmering Xanthus with their rays : 
 The long reflections of the distant fires 
 Gleam on the walls, and tremble on the spires. 
 A thousand piles the dusky horrors gild, 
 And shoot a shady lustre o'er the field. 
 Full fifty guards each flaming pile attend. 
 Whose umber'd arms by fits thick flashes send ; 
 Loud neigh the coursers o'er the heaps of corn. 
 And ardent warriors wait the rising morn." 
 
 As when in stillness of the silent night, 
 As when the moon in all her lustre bright ; 
 As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night, 
 O'er Heav'n's clear azure sheds her silver light ; 
 pure spreads sacred 
 
 243 
 
244 ^^- ^^^^^^ yoHNSON ON 
 
 As still in air the trembling lustre stood, 
 And o'er its golden border shoots a flood ; 
 When no hose gale disturbs the deep serene, 
 
 not a breath 
 And no dim cloud o'ercasts the solemn scene ; 
 
 not a 
 Around her silver throne the planets glow, 
 And stars unnumber'd trembling beams bestow : 
 Around her throne the vivid planets roll 
 And stars unnumber'd gild the glowing pole ; 
 Clear gleams of light o'er the dark trees are seen, 
 
 o'er the dark trees a yellow sheds, 
 O'er the dark trees a yellower green they shed 
 
 gleam 
 verdure 
 And tip with silver all the mountain heads, 
 
 forest 
 And tip with silver every mountain's head, 
 The valleys open, and the forests rise. 
 The vales appear, the rocks in prospect rise, 
 Then shine the vales, the rocks in prospect rise, 
 AU nature stands reveal'd before our eyes ; 
 A flood of glory bursts from all the skies. 
 The conscious shepherd, joyful at the sight. 
 Eyes the blue vault, and numbers every light. 
 The conscious swains, rejoicing at the sight, 
 shepherds, gazing with delight 
 Eye the blue vault, and bless the vivid light, 
 
 glorious 
 useful 
 So many flames before the navy blaze, 
 
 proud Ilion 
 And lighten glimmering Xanthus with their rays ; 
 Wide o'er the fields to Troy extend the gleams. 
 And tip the distant spires with fainter beams ; 
 The long reflections of the distant fires 
 Gild the high walls, and tremble on the spires ; 
 Gleam on the walls, and tremble on the spires ; 
 A thousand fires, at distant stations, bright. 
 Gild the dark prospect, and dispel the night. 
 
 Of these specimens every man who has cultivated poetry, 
 or who delights to trace the mind from the rudeness of its first 
 conceptions to the elegance of its last, will naturally desire a 
 greater number ; but most other readers are already tired, and 
 I am not writing only to poets and philosophers. 
 
 The ' ' Iliad ' ' was published volume by volume, as the 
 translation proceeded : the four first books appeared in 1715. 
 The expectation of this work w;as undoubtedly high, and every 
 man who had connected his name with criticism or poetry was 
 desirous of such intelligence as might enable him to talk upon 
 the popular topic. Halifax, who, by having been first a poet 
 
POPE. 245 
 
 and then a patron of poetry, had acquired the right of being a 
 judge, was willing to hear some books while they were yet un- 
 published. Of this rehearsal Pope afterwards gave the follow- 
 ing account : 
 
 ' ' The famous Lord Halifax was rather a pretender to taste 
 than really possessed of it. When I had finished the two or 
 three first books of my translation of the ' Iliad, ' that lord de- 
 sired to have the pleasure of hearing them read at his house — 
 Addison, Congreve, and Garth were there at the reading. In 
 four or five places Lord Halifax stopped me very civilly, and 
 with a speech each time of much the same kind, ' I beg your 
 pardon, Mr. Pope ; but there is something in that passage that 
 does not quite please me. Be so good as to mark the place, 
 and consider it a little at your leisure. I am sure you can give 
 it a little turn.' I returned from Lord Halifax's with Dr. 
 Garth, in his chariot ; and as we were going along was saying 
 to the doctor that my lord had laid me under a great deal of 
 difficulty by such loose and general observations ; that I had 
 been thinking over the passages almost ever since, and could 
 not guess at what it was that offended his lordship in either of 
 them. Garth laughed heartily at my embarrassment ; said I 
 had not been long enough acquainted with Lord Halifax to 
 know his way yet ; that I need not puzzle myself about look- 
 ing those places over and over when I got home. ' All you 
 need do (says he) is to leave them just as they are ; call on 
 Lord Halifax two or three months hence, thank him for his 
 kind observations on those passages, and then read them to him 
 as altered. I have known him much longer than you have, 
 and will be answerable for the event. ' I followed his advice, 
 waited on Lord Halifax some time after, said I hoped he 
 would find his objections to those passages removed, read 
 them to him exactly as they were at first, and his lordship was 
 extremely pleased with them, and cried out, ' Ay, now they 
 are perfectly right ; nothing can be better. ' 
 
 It is seldom that the great or the wise suspect that they are 
 despised or cheated. Halifax, thinking this a lucky opportu- 
 nity of securing immortality, made some advances of favor and 
 some overtures of advantage to Pope, which he seems to have 
 received with sullen coldness. All our knowledge of this 
 transaction is derived from a single letter (December i, 1714), in 
 which Pope says, " I am obliged to you, both for the favors 
 you have done me and those you intend me. I distrust 
 neither your will nor your memory, when it is to do good ; and 
 if I ever become troublesome or solicitous, it must not be out 
 of expectation, but out of gratitude. Your lordship may cause 
 
246 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 me to live agreeably in the town, or contentedly in the coun- 
 try, which is really all the difference I set between an easy for- 
 tune and a small one. It is indeed a high strain of generosity 
 in you to think of making me easy all my life, only because I 
 have been so happy as to divert you some few hours ; but, if I 
 may have leave to add, it is because you think me no enemy to 
 my native country, there will appear a better reason ; for I 
 must of consequence be very much (as I sincerely am) yours, 
 etc." 
 
 These voluntary offers, and this faint acceptance, ended 
 without effect. The patron was not accustomed to such frigid 
 gratitude, and the poet fed his own pride with the dignity of 
 independence. They probably were suspicious of each other. 
 Pope would not dedicate till he saw at what rate his praise was 
 •Valued ; he would be ' ' troublesome out of gratitude, not ex- 
 pectation." Halifax thought himself entitled to confidence, 
 and would give nothing unless he knew what he should receive. 
 Their commerce had its beginning in hope of praise on one 
 side and of money on the other, and ended because Pope was 
 less eager of money than Halifax of praise. It is not likely 
 that Halifax had any personal benevolence to Pope ; it is evi- 
 dent that Pope looked on Halifax with scorn and hatred. 
 
 The reputation of this great work failed of gaining him a 
 patronj^Jiut-it deprived him of a friend. Addison and he were 
 now at the head of poetry and criticism ; and both in such a 
 state of elevation, that, like the two rivals in the Roman state, 
 one could no longer bear an equal nor the other a superior. 
 Of the gradual abatement of kindness between friends, the be- 
 ginning is often scarcely discernible to themselves, and the 
 process is continued by petty provocations and incivilities, 
 sometimes peevishly returned and sometimes contemptuously 
 neglected, which would escape all attention but that of pride, 
 and drop from any memory but that of resentment. That the 
 quarrel of these two wits should be minutely deduced, is not to 
 be expected from a writer to whom, as Homer says, " nothing 
 but rumor has reached, and who has no personal knowledge. ' ' 
 
 Pope doubtless approached Addison, when the reputation 
 of their wit first brought them together, with the respect due to 
 a man whose abilities were acknowledged, and who, having 
 attained that eminence to which he was himself aspiring, had 
 in his hands the distribution of literary fame. He paid court 
 with sufficient dihgence by his prologue to "Cato," by his 
 abuse of Dennis, and with praise yet more direct by his poem 
 on the " Dialogues on Medals," of which the immediate publi- 
 cation was then intended. In all this there was no hypocrisy ; 
 
POPE. 247 
 
 for he confessed that he found in Addison something more 
 pleasing than in any other man. 
 
 It may be supposed, that as Pope saw himself favored by 
 the world, and more frequently compared his own powers with 
 those of others, his confidence increased and his submission 
 lessened ; and that Addison felt no delight from the advances 
 of a young wit who might soon contend with him for the 
 highest place. Every great man, of whatever kind be his 
 greatness, has among his friends those who officiously or in- 
 sidiously quicken his attention to offences, heighten his dis- 
 gust, and stimulate his resentment. Of such adherents Ad- 
 dison doubtless had many, and Pope was now too high to be 
 without them. 
 
 From the emission and reception of the proposals for the 
 " Iliad," the kindness of Addison seems to have abated. Jer- 
 vas the painter once pleased himself (August 20, 1714) with im- 
 agining that he had re-established their friendship, and wrote 
 to Pope that Addison once suspected him of too close a con- 
 federacy with Swift, but was now satisfied with his conduct. 
 To this Pope answered, a week after, that his engagements to 
 Swift were such as his services in regard to the subscription 
 demanded, and that the Tories never put him under the neces- 
 sity of asking leave to be grateful. ' ' But, ' ' says he, ' ' as Mr. 
 Addison must be the judge in what regards himself, and seems 
 to have no very just one in regard to me, so I must own to you 
 I expect nothing but civility from him. ' ' In the same letter 
 he mentions Philips as having been busy to kindle animosity 
 between them ; but in a letter to Addison he expresses some 
 consciousness of behavior inattentively deficient in respect. 
 
 Of Swift's industry in promoting the subscription there 
 remains the testimony of Kennet, no friend to either him or 
 Pope. 
 
 " November 2, 1713, Dr. Swift came into the coffee-house, 
 and had a bow from everybody bift me, who, I confess, could not 
 but despise him. When I came to the ante-chamber to wait, 
 before prayers. Dr. Swift was the principal man of talk and 
 business, and acted as master of requests. Then he instructed 
 a young nobleman that the best poet in England was Mr. Pope 
 (a papist), who had begun a translation of Homer into English 
 verse, for which he must have them all subscribe ; for, says he, 
 the author shall not begin to print till / have a thousand 
 guineas for him. ' ' 
 
 About this time it is likely that Steele, who was, with all his 
 political fury, good-natured and officious, procured an inter- 
 view between these angry rivals, which ended in aggravated 
 
248 HR. SAMUEL yOHNSON ON 
 
 malevolence. On this occasion, if the reports be true, Pope 
 made his complaint with frankness and spirit, as a man unde- 
 servedly neglected or opposed, and Addison affected a con- 
 temptuous unconcern, and, in a calm, even voice, reproached 
 Pope with his vanity, and telling him of the improvements 
 Avhich his early works had received from his own remarks and 
 those of Steele, said that he, being now engaged in public 
 business, had no longer any care for his poetical reputation, nor 
 had any other desire, with regard to Pope, than that he should 
 not by too much arrogance alienate the public. 
 
 To this Pope is said to have replied with great keenness 
 and severity, upbraiding Addison with perpetual dependence, 
 and with the abuse of those qualifications which he had ob- 
 tained at the public cost, and charging him with mean endeav- 
 ors to obstruct the progress of rising merit. The contest rose 
 so high that they parted at last without any interchange of 
 civility. 
 
 The first volume of Homer was (1715) in time published, 
 and a rival version of the first ' ' Iliad, ' ' for rivals the time of 
 their appearance inevitably made them, was immediately print- 
 ed, with the name of Tickell. It was soon perceived that 
 among the followers of Addison, Tickell had the preference, 
 and the critics and poets divided into factions. " I," says 
 Pope, ' ' have the town, that is, the mob, on my side ; but it is 
 not uncommon for the smaller party to supply by industry what 
 it wants in numbers. I appeal to the people as my rightful 
 judges, and while they are not inclined to condemn me shall 
 not fear the high-flyers at Button's." This opposition he im- 
 mediately imputed to Addison, and complained of it in terms 
 sufficiently resentful to Craggs, their common friend. 
 
 When Addison's opinion was asked, he declared the ver- 
 sions to be both good, but Tickell's the best that had ever 
 been written ; and sometimes said that they were both good, 
 but that Tickell had more of Homer. 
 
 Pope was now sufficiently irritated ; his reputation and his 
 interest were at hazard. He once intended to print together 
 'the four versions of Dryden, Maynwaring, Pope, and Tickell, 
 that they might be readily compared and fairly estimated. 
 This design seems to have been defeated by the refusal of 
 Tonson, who was the proprietor of the other three versions. 
 
 Pope intended, at another time, a rigorous criticism of 
 Tickell's translation, and had marked a copy, which I have 
 seen, in all places that appeared defective. But while he was 
 thus meditating defence or revenge, his adversary sunk before 
 him without a blow ; the voice of the public was not long 
 
Pope. 24^ 
 
 divided, and the preference was universally given to Pope's 
 performance. 
 
 He was convinced, by adding one circumstance to another, 
 that the other translation was the work of Addison himself ; 
 but if he knew it in Addison's lifetime, it does not appear 
 that he told it. He left his illustrious antagonist to be pun- 
 ished by what has been considered as the most painful of all 
 reflections, the remembrance of a crime perpetrated in vain. 
 
 The other circumstances of their quarrel were thus related 
 by Pope : 
 
 " Philips seemed to have been encouraged to abuse me in 
 coffee-houses and conversations ; and Gildon wrote a thing 
 about Wycherley, in which he had abused both me and my 
 relations very grossly. Lor d War wick himself told me one 
 day that it was in vain for me to endeavor to be well with Mr. 
 Addison ; that his jealous temper would never admit of a set- 
 tled friendship between us ; and to convince me of what he 
 had said, assured me that Addison had encouraged Gildon to 
 publish those scandals, and had given him ten guineas after 
 they were published. The next day, while I was heated with 
 what I had heard, I wrote a letter to Mr. Addison, to let him 
 know that I was not unacquainted with this behavior of his ; 
 that, if I was to speak severely of him in return for it, it should 
 be not in such a dirty way ; that I should rather tell him, him- 
 self, fairly of his faults, and allow his good qualities ; and that 
 it should be something in the following manner ; I then ad- 
 joined the first sketch of what has since been called my satire 
 on Addison. Mr. Addison used me very civilly ever after." 
 
 The verses on Addison, when they were sent to Atterbury, 
 were considered by him as the most excellent of Pope's per- 
 formances ; and the writer was advised, since he knew where 
 his strength lay, not to suffer it to remain unemployed. 
 
 This year (1715) being by the subscription enabled to live 
 more by choice, having persuaded his father to sell their estate 
 at Binfield, he purchased, I think only for his life, that house at 
 Twickenham, to which his residence afterwards procured so 
 much celebration, and removed thither with his father and 
 mother. 
 
 Here he planted the vines and the quincunx which his 
 verses mention ; and being under the necessity of making a 
 subterraneous passage to a garden on the other side of the road 
 he adorned it with fossil bodies, and dignified it with the title 
 of a grotto, a place of silence and retreat, from which he en- 
 deavored to persuade his friends and himself that cares and 
 passions could be excluded. 
 
250 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 A grotto is not often the wish or pleasure of an Englisli- 
 man, who has more frequent need to sohcit than exclude the 
 sun ; but Pope's excavation was requisite as an entrance to his 
 garden, and, as some men try to be proud of their defects, he 
 extracted an ornament from an inconvenience, and vanity pro- 
 duced a grotto where necessity enforced a passage. It may 
 be frequently remarked of the studious and speculative that 
 they are proud of trifles, and that their amusements seem friv- 
 olous and childish ; whether it be that men conscious of great 
 reputation think themselves above the reach of censure, and 
 safe in the admission of negligent indulgences, or that man- 
 kind expect from elevated genius an uniformity of greatness, 
 and watch its degradation with malicious wonder, like him 
 who, having followed with his eye an eagle into the clouds, 
 should lament that she ever descended to a perch. 
 
 While the volumes of his Homer were annually published, 
 he collected his former works (17 17) into one quarto volume, 
 to which he prefixed a preface written with great sprightliness 
 and elegance, which was afterwards reprinted, with some pas- 
 sages subjoined that he at first omitted ; other marginal addi- 
 tions of the same kind he made in the later editions of his 
 poems. Waller remarks that poets lose half their praise be- 
 cause the reader knows not what they have blotted. Pope's 
 voracity of fame taught him the art of obtaining the accumu- 
 lated honor both of what he had published and of what he had 
 suppressed. 
 
 In this year his father died suddenly, in his seventy-fifth 
 year, having passed twenty-nine years in privacy. He is not 
 known but by the character which his son has given him , If 
 the money with which he retired was all gotten by himself, he 
 had traded very successfully in times when sudden riches were 
 rarely attainable. 
 
 The publication of the " Iliad" was at last completed in 
 1720. The splendor and success of this work raised Pope 
 many enemies that endeavored to depreciate his abilities. 
 Burnet, who was afterwards a judge of no mean reputation, 
 censured him, in a piece called " Homerides," before it was 
 published. Ducket likewise endeavored to make him ridicu- 
 lous. Dennis was the perpetual persecutor of all his studies. 
 But whoever his critics were, their writings are lost, and the 
 names which are preserved are preserved in the " Dunciad." 
 
 In this disastrous year (1720) of national infatuation, when 
 more riches than Peru can boast were expected from the South 
 Sea, when the contagion of avarice tainted every mind, and 
 even poets panted after wealth, Pope was seized with the uni- 
 
POPE. 251 
 
 versal passion and ventured some of his money. The stock 
 rose in its price, and for awhile he thought himself the lord of 
 thousands. But this dream of happiness did not last long, 
 and he seems to have waked soon enough to get clear with the 
 loss of what he once thought himself to have won, and perhaps 
 not wholly of that. 
 
 Next year he published some select poems of his friend Dr. 
 Pamell, with a very elegant dedication to the Earl of Oxford, 
 who, after all his struggles and dangers, then lived in retire- 
 ment, still under the frown of a victorious faction, who could 
 take no pleasure in hearing his praise. 
 
 He gave, the same year (1721), an edition of Shakespeare. 
 His name was now of so much authority that Tonson thought 
 himself entitled, by annexing it, to demand a subscription of 
 six guineas for Shakespeare's plays in six quarto volumes ; nor 
 did his expectation much deceive him, for of seven hundred 
 and fifty which he printed, he dispersed a great number at the 
 price proposed. The reputation of that edition indeed sunk 
 afterwards so low that one hundred and forty copies were sold 
 at sixteen shillings each. 
 
 On this undertaking, to which Pope was induced by a 
 reward of two hundred and seventeen pounds twelve shillings, 
 he seems never to have reflected afterwards without vexation ; 
 for Theobald, a man of heavy diligence, with very slender 
 powers, first, in a book called " Shakespeare Restored," and 
 then in a formal edition, detected his deficiencies with all the 
 insolence of victory ; and as he was now high enough to be 
 feared and hated, Theobald had from others all the help that 
 could be supplied by the desire of humbling a haughty char- 
 acter. 
 
 From this time Pope became an enemy to editors, collators, 
 commentators, and verbal critics, and hoped to persuade the 
 world that he miscarried in this undertaking only by having a 
 mind too great for such minute employment. 
 
 Pope in his edition undoubtedly did many, things wrong, 
 and left many things undone ; but let him not be defrauded of 
 his due praise. He was the first that knew, at least the first 
 that told, by what helps the text might be improved. If he 
 inspected the early editions negligently, he taught others to be 
 more accurate. In his preface he expanded with great skill and 
 elegance the character which had been given of Shakespeare by 
 Dryden, and he drew the public attention upon his works, 
 which, though often mentioned, had been little read. 
 
 Soon after the appearance of the " Iliad," resolving not to 
 let the general kindness cool, he published proposals for a 
 
252 DR. SAMUEL yOHNSON ON 
 
 translation of the " Odyssey," in five volumes, for five guineas. 
 He was willing, however, now to have associates in his labor, 
 being either weary with toiling upon another's thoughts, or 
 having heard, as Ruffhead relates, that Fenton and Broome had 
 lalready begun the work, and liking better to have them con- 
 federates than rivals. 
 
 In the patent, instead of saying that he had " translated" 
 the " Odyssey," as he had said of the " Iliad," he says that he 
 had "undertaken" a translation; and in the proposals the 
 subscription is said to be not solely for his own use, but for 
 that of " two of his friends who have assisted him in this 
 work. ' ' 
 
 In 1723, while he was engaged in this new version, he ap- 
 peared before the Lords at the memorable tjial of Bishop Atter- 
 bury, with whom he had lived in great familiarity and frequent 
 correspondence. Atterbury had honestly recommended to him 
 the study of the popish controversy, in hope of his conversion, 
 to which Pope answered in a manner that cannot much recom- 
 mend his principles or his judgment. In questions and proj- 
 ects of learning they agreed better. He was called at the trial 
 to give an account of Atterbury' s domestic life and private em- 
 ployment, that it might appear how little time he had left for 
 plots. Pope had but few words to utter, and in those few he 
 made several blunders. 
 
 His letters to Atterbury express the utmost esteem, tender- 
 ness, and gratitude ; ' ' perhaps, ' ' says he, "it is not only in 
 this world that I may have cause to remember the Bishop of 
 Rochester." At their last interview in the tower Atterbury 
 presented him with a Bible. 
 
 Of the " Odyssey" Pope translated only twelve books, the 
 rest were the work of Broome and Fenton ; the notes were 
 written wholly by Broome, who was not over-liberally reward- 
 ed. The public was carefully kept ignorant of the several 
 shares, and an account was subjoined at the conclusion which 
 is now known not to be true. 
 
 The first copy of Pope's books, with those of Fenton, are 
 to be seen in the Museum. The parts of Pope are less inter- 
 lined than the " Iliad," and the latter books of the " Iliad" 
 less than the former. He grew dexterous by practice, and 
 every sheet enabled him to write the next with more facility. 
 The books of Fenton have very few alterations by the hand of 
 Pope. Those of Broome have not been found ; but Pope 
 complained, as it is reported, that he had much trouble in cor- 
 recting them. 
 
 His contract with Lin tot was the sam? as for the " Iliad," 
 
POPE. 253 
 
 except that only one hundred pounds were to be paid him for 
 each volume. The number of subscribers were five hundred 
 and seventy-four, and of copies eight hundred and nineteen ; so 
 that his profit', when he had paid his assistants, was still very 
 considerable. The work was finished in 1725, and from that 
 time he resolved to make no more translations. 
 
 The sale did not answer Lintot's expectation ; and he then 
 pretended to discover something of fraud in Pope, and com- 
 menced or threatened a suit in Chancery. 
 
 On the English " Odyssey" a criticism was published by 
 Spence, at that time pr elect or of poetry at Oxford, a man 
 whose learning was not very great, and whose mind was not 
 very powerful. His criticism, however, was commonly just. 
 What he thought he thought rightly, and his remarks were 
 recommended by his coolness and candor. In him Pope had 
 the first experience of a critic without malevolence, who 
 thought it as much his duty to display beauties as expose 
 faults ; who censured with respect and praised with alacrity. 
 
 With this criticism Pope was so little offended that he 
 sought the acquaintance of the writer, who lived with him from 
 that time in great familiarity, attended him in his last hours, 
 and compiled memorials of his conversation. The regard of 
 Pope recommended him to the great and powerful, and he ob- 
 tained very valuable preferments in the church. 
 
 Not long after. Pope was returning home from a visit in a 
 friend's coach, which, in passing a bridge, was overturned into 
 the water ; the windows were closed, and being unable to 
 force them open, he was in danger of immediate death, when 
 the postilion snatched him out by breaking the glass, of which 
 the fragments cut two of his fingers in such a manner that he 
 lost their use. 
 
 Voltaire, who was then in England, sent him a letter of 
 consolation. He had been entertained by Pope at his table, 
 where he talked with so much grossness that Mrs. Pope was 
 driven from the room. Pope discovered, by a trick, that he 
 was a spy for the court, and never considered him as a man 
 worthy of confidence. 
 
 He soon afterwards (1727) joined with Swift, who was 
 then in England, to publish three volumes of " Miscellanies," 
 in which among other things he inserted the ' ' Memoirs of a 
 Parish Clerk," in ridicule of Burnet's importance in his own 
 History, and a " Debate upon Black and White Horses," writ- 
 ten in all the formalities of a legal process, by the assistance, 
 as is said, of Mr. Fortescue, afterwards master of the rolls. 
 Before these " Miscellanies" is a preface signed by Swift a,n(J 
 
254 ^^- SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 Pope, but apparently written by Pope, in which he makes a 
 ridiculous and romantic complaint of the robberies committed 
 upon authors by the clandestine seizure and sale of their 
 papers. He tells in tragic strains how " the cabinets of the 
 sick and the closets of the dead have been broken open and 
 ransacked ;" as if those violences were often committed for 
 papers of uncertain and accidental value which are rarely 
 provoked by real treasures ; as if epigrams and essays were in 
 danger where' gold and diamonds are safe. A cat hunted for 
 his musk is, according to Pope's account, but the emblem of a 
 wit winded by booksellers. 
 
 His complaint, however, received some attestation ; for the 
 same year the ' ' Letters' ' written by him to Mr. Cromwell in his 
 youth were sold by Mrs. Thomas to Curll, who printed them. 
 
 In these " Miscellanies" was first published the " Art of 
 Sinking in Poetry, ' ' which, by such a train of consequences as 
 usually passes in literary quarrels, gave in a short time, accord- 
 ing to Pope's account, occasion to the " Dunciad."' 
 
 In the following year (1728) he began to put Atterbury's 
 advice in practice, and showed his satirical powers by publish- 
 ing the "Dunciad," one of his greatest and most elaborate 
 j performances, in which he endeavored to sink into contempt 
 .'all the writers by whom he had been attacked, and some others 
 'whom he thought unable to defend themselves. 
 
 At the head of the dunces he placed poor Theobald, whom 
 he accused of ingratitude, but whose real crime was supposed 
 to be that of having revised " Shakespeare" more happily than 
 himself. This satire had the effect which he intended, by 
 blasting the characters which it touched. Ralph, who unneces- 
 sarily interposing in the quarrel, got a place in a subsequent 
 edition, complained that for a time he was in danger of starv- 
 ing, as the booksellers had no longer any confidence in his 
 capacity. 
 
 The prevalence of this poem was gradual and slow : the 
 plan, if not wholly new, was little understood by common 
 readers. Many of the allusions required illustration ; the 
 names were often expressed only by the initial and final letters, 
 and, if they had been printed at length, were such as few had 
 known or recollected. The subject itself had nothing generally 
 interesting, for whom did it concern to know that one or an- 
 other scribbler was a dunce ? If, therefore, it had been possi- 
 ble for those who were attacked to conceal their pain and their 
 resentment, the "Dunciad" might have made its way very 
 ^lowly in the world. 
 
 This, howeyer, was not to be expected : every man is of 
 
POPE. 255 
 
 importance to himself, and therefore, in his own opinion, to 
 others, and, supposing the world already acquainted with all 
 his pleasures and his pains, is perhaps the first to publish in- 
 juries or misfortunes which had never been known unless 
 related by himself, and at which those that hear them will only 
 laugh ; for no man sympathizes with the sorrows of vanity. 
 
 The history of the " Dunciad " is very minutely related by 
 Pope himself in a dedication which he wrote to Lord Middle- 
 sex in the name of Savage. 
 
 ' ' I will relate the war of the ' Dunces ' (for so it has been 
 commonly called), which began in the year 1727 and ended in 
 1730. 
 
 " When Dr. Swift and Mr. Pope thought it proper, for rea- 
 sons specified in the preface to their Miscellanies, to publish 
 such little pieces of theirs as had casually got abroad, there was 
 added to them the ' Treatise of the Bathos, ' or the ' Art of 
 Sinking in Poetry. ' It happened that in one chapter of this 
 piece the several species of bad poets were ranged in classes, to 
 which were prefixed almost all the letters of the alphabet 
 (the greatest part of them at random) ; but such was the num- 
 ber of poets eminent in that art that some one or other took 
 every letter to himself ; all fell into so violent a fury that for 
 half a year or more the common newspapers (in most of which 
 they had some property, as being hired writers) were filled with 
 the most abusive falsehoods and scurrilities they could possibly 
 devise ; a liberty noways to be wondered at in those people 
 and in those papers that for many years during the uncon- 
 trolled license of the press had aspersed almost all the great 
 characters of the age, and this with impunity, their own per- 
 sons and names being utterly secret and obscure. 
 
 " This gave Mr. Pope the thought that he had now some 
 opportunity of doing good by detecting and dragging into light 
 these common enemies of mankind ; since, to invalidate this 
 universal slander, it sufficed to show what contemptible men 
 were the authors of it. He was not without hopes that by 
 manifesting the dulness of those who had only malice to 
 recommend them, either the booksellers would not find their 
 account in employing them, or the men themselves, when dis- 
 covered, want courage to proceed in so unlawful an occupa- 
 tion. This it was that gave birth to the ' Dunciad ;' and he 
 thought it a happiness that by the late flood of slander on 
 himself he had acquired such a peculiar right over their names 
 as was necessary to this design. 
 
 " On the 12th of March, 1729, at St. James's, that poem 
 was presented to the king and queen (who had before been 
 
256 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 pleased to read it) by the right honorable Sir Robert Walpole ; 
 and, some days after, the whole impression was taken and dis- 
 persed by several noblemen and persons of the first distinction. 
 
 " It is certainly a true observation that no people are so 
 impatient of censure as those who are the greatest slanderers, 
 which was wonderfully exemplified on the occasion. On the 
 day the book was first vended, a crowd of authors besieged the 
 shop ; entreaties, advices, threats of law and battery, nay, cries 
 of treason, were all employed to hinder the coming out of the 
 ' Dunciad ; ' on the other side, the booksellers and hawkers 
 made as great efforts to procure it. What could a few poor 
 authors do against so great majority as the public ? There was 
 no stopping a current with a finger ; so out it came. 
 
 ' ' Many ludicrous circumstances attended it. The ' Dunces ' 
 (for by this name they were called) held weekly clubs to consult 
 of hostilities against the author : one wrote a letter to a great 
 minister, assuring him Mr. Pope was the greatest enemy the 
 government had ; and another bought his image in clay, to 
 execute him in effigy, with which sad sort of satisfaction the 
 gentjemen were a little comforted. 
 
 " Some false editions of the book having an owl in their 
 frontispiece, the true one, to distinguish it, fixed in his stead 
 an ass laden with authors. Then another surreptitious one 
 being printed, with the same ass, the new edition in octavo 
 returned for distinction to the owl again. Hence arose a great 
 contest of booksellers against booksellers, and advertisements 
 against advertisements, some recommending the edition of the 
 owl and others the edition of the ass, by which names they 
 came to be distinguished, to the great honor also of the gentle- 
 men of the ' Dunciad.' " 
 
 Pope appears by this narrative to have contemplated his 
 victory over the " Dunces" with great exultation ; and such 
 was his delight in the tumult which he had raised, that for a 
 while his natural sensibility was suspended, and he read 
 reproaches and invectives without emotion, considering them 
 only as the necessary effects of that pain which he rejoiced in 
 having given. 
 
 It cannot, however, be concealed that by his own confes- 
 sion he was the aggressor ; for nobody believes that the letters 
 in the " Bathos" were placed at random ; and it may be dis- 
 covered that when he thinks himself concealed he indulges 
 the common vanity of common men, and triumphs in those 
 distinctions which he had affected to despise. He is proud 
 that his book was presented to the king and queen by the right 
 honorable Sir Robert Walpole ; he is proud that they had read 
 
POPE. 
 
 257 
 
 it before ; he is proud that the edition was taken off by the 
 nobility and persons of the first distinction. 
 
 The edition of which he speaks was, I believe, that which, 
 by telling in the text the names, and in the notes the charac- 
 ters, of those whom he had satirized, was made intelligible and 
 diverting. The critics had now declared their approbation of 
 the plan, and the common reader began to like it without fear ; 
 those who were strangers to petty literature, and therefore un- 
 able to decipher initials and blanks, had now names and per- 
 sons brought within their view, and delighted in the visible 
 effect of those shafts of malice which they had hitherto con- 
 templated as shot into the air. 
 
 Dennis, upon the fresh provocation now given him, re- 
 newed the enmity which had for a time been appeased by 
 mutual civilities, and published remarks, which he- had till then 
 suppressed, upon ' ' The Rape of the Lock. ' ' Many more 
 grumbled in secret, or vented their resentment in the news- 
 papers by epigrams or invectives. 
 
 Ducket, indeed, being mentioned as loving Burnet with 
 pious passion, ' ' pretended that his moral character was in- 
 jured, and for some time declared his resolution to take ven- ' 
 geance with a cudgel. But Pope appeased him by changing) 
 "pious passion" to "cordial friendship," and by a note, in 
 which he vehemently disclaims the malignity of meaning im- 
 puted 10 the first expression. 
 
 Aa ron Hil l, who was represented as diving for the prize, 
 expostulated with Pope in a manner so much superior to all 
 mean solicitation, that Pope was reduced to sneak and shuffle, 
 sometimes to deny, and sometimes to apologize : he first en- 
 deavors to wound, and is then afraid to own that he meant a 
 blow. 
 
 The " Dunciad," in the complete edition, is addressed to 
 Dr. Swift : of the notes, part were written by Dr. Arbuthnot ; 
 and an apologetical letter was prefixed signed by Cleland, but 
 supposed to have been written by Pope. 
 
 After this general war upon dulness he seems to have in- 
 dulged himself awhile in tranquillity ; but his subsequent pro- 
 ductions prove that he was not idle. He published (1731) a 
 poem on ' ' Taste^ ' ' in which he very particularly and severely 
 criticises the house, the furniture, the gardens, and the enter- 
 tainments of Timon, a man of great wealth and little taste. 
 By Timon he was universally supposed, and by the Earl of 
 Burlington, to whom the poem is addressed, was privately said, ' 
 to mean the Duke of Chandos ; a man perhaps too much de- 
 lighted with pomp and show, but of a temper kind and benefi- 
 
258 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 cent, and who had consequently the voice of the public in his 
 favor. 
 
 A violent outcry was therefore raised against the ingrati- 
 tude and treachery of Pope, who was said to have been indebt- 
 ed to the patronage of Chandos for a present of a thousand 
 pounds, and who gained the opportunity of insulting him by 
 the kindness of his invitation. 
 
 The receipt of the thousand pounds Pope publicly denied ; 
 but from the reproach which the attack on a character so amiable 
 brought upon him he tried all means of escaping. The name 
 of Cleland was again employed in an apology, by which no man 
 was satisfied, and he was at last reduced to shelter his 'temerity 
 behind dissimulation, and endeavor to make that disbelieved 
 which he never had confidence openly to deny. He wrote an 
 exculpatory, letter to the duke, which was answered with great 
 magnanimity, as by a man who accepted his excuse without be- 
 lieving his professions. He said that to have ridiculed his 
 taste or his buildings had been an indifferent action in an- 
 other man ; but that in Pope, after the reciprocal kindness that 
 had been exchanged between them, it had been less easily ex- 
 cused. 
 
 Pope, in one of his letters, complaining of the treatment 
 which his poem had found, ' ' owns that such critics can intimi- 
 date him, nay, almost persuade him to write no more, which is 
 a compliment this age deserves. ' ' The man who threatens the 
 world is always ridiculous ; for the world can easily go on 
 without him, and in a short time will cease to miss him. I 
 have heard of an idiot who used to revenge his vexations by 
 lying all night upon the bridge. "There is nothing," says 
 Juvenal, "that a man will not believe in his own favor." 
 Pope had been flattered till he thought himself one of the mov- 
 ing powers in the system of life. When he talked of laying 
 down his pen those who sat round him entreated and im- 
 plored, and self-love did not suffer him to suspect that they 
 went away and laughed. 
 
 The following year deprived him of Gay, a man whom he 
 had known early, and whom he seemed to love with more ten- 
 derness than any other of his literary friends. Pope was now 
 forty-four years old ; an age at which the mind begins less 
 easily to admit new confidence, and the will to grow less flexi- 
 ble ; and when, therefore, the departure of an old friend is 
 very acutely felt. 
 
 In the next year he lost his mother, not by an unexpected 
 death, for she lasted to the age of ninety-three ; but she did 
 not die unlamented. The filial piety of Pope was in the high- 
 
POPR. 259 
 
 est degree amiable and exemplary ; his parents had the happi- 
 ness of living till he was at the summit of poetical reputation, 
 till he was at ease in his fortune, and without a rival in his 
 fame, and found no diminution of his respect or tenderness. 
 Whatever was his pride, to them he was obedient ; and what- 
 ever was his irritability, to them he was gentle. Life has 
 among its soothing and quiet comforts few things better to give 
 than such a son. 
 
 One of the passages of Pope's life which seems to deserve 
 some inquiry was a pub licat ion of letters between him and^ 
 many of his friends, which falling into the hands of Curll, zj 
 rapacious bookseller of no good fame, were by him printed and, 
 sold. This volume containing some letters from noblemen. 
 Pope incited a prosecution against him in the House of Lords 
 for breach of privilege, and attended himself to stimulate the 
 resentment of his friends. Curll appeared at the bar, and, 
 knowing himself in no great danger, spoke of Pope with very 
 little reverence. ' ' He has, ' ' said Curll, ' ' a knack at versify- 
 ing, but in prose I think myself a match for him. ' ' When the 
 orders of the House were examined, none of them appeared to 
 be infringed ; Curll went away triumphant, and Pope was left 
 to seek some other remedy. 
 
 Curll's account was, that one evening a man in a clergyman's 
 gown, but with a lawyer's band, brought and offered to sale a 
 number of printed volumes, which he found to be Pope's epis- 
 tolary correspondence ; that he asked no name, and was told 
 none, but gave the price demanded, and thought himself 
 authorized to use his purchase to his own advantage. 
 
 That Curll gave a true account of the transaction it is rea- 
 sonable to believe, because no falsehood was ever detected ; 
 and when, some years afterwards, I mentioned it to Lintot, the 
 son of Bernard, he declared his opinion to be that Pope knew 
 better than anybody else how Curll obtained the copies, because 
 another was at the same time sent to himself, for which no 
 price had ever been demanded, as he made known his resolu- 
 tion not to pay a porter, and consequently not to deal with a 
 nameless agent. 
 
 Such care had been taken to make them public that-jthey 
 were sent at once to two booksellers ; to Curll, who was likely 
 to seize them as prey, and to Lintot, who might be ex- 
 pected to give Pope information of the seeming injury. Lin- 
 tot, I believe, did nothing ; and Curll did what was expected. 
 That to make them public was the only purpose may be rea- 
 sonably supposed, because the numbers offered for sale by the 
 
260 DR. SAMUEL JOHMSON ON- 
 
 private messengers showed that hows of gain could not have 
 been the motive of the impression. i7i/\ 
 
 It seems that Pope, being desirous of printing his Let- 
 ters, and not knowing how to do so without imputation of van- 
 ity, what has in this country been done very rarely, contrived 
 an appearance of compulsion, that when he could complain 
 that his letters were surreptitiously published, he might de- 
 cently and defensively publish them himself. 
 
 Pope's private correspondence, thus promulgated, filled the 
 nation with praises of his candor, tenderness, and benevolence, 
 the purity of his purposes, and the fidelity of his friendship. 
 There were some letters which a very good or a very wise man 
 would wish suppressed ; but as they had been already ex- 
 posed it was impracticable now to retract them. 
 
 From the perusal of those Letters, Mr. Allen first con- 
 ceived the desire of knowing him ; and with so much zeal did 
 he cultivate the friendship which he had newly formed, that 
 when Pope told his purpose of vindicating his own property by 
 a genuine edition he offered to pay the cost. 
 
 This, however. Pope did not accept ; but in time solicited 
 a subscription for a quarto volume, which appeared (1737), I 
 believe, with sufficient profit. In the preface he tells that his 
 Letters were reposited in a friend's library, said to be the 
 Earl of Oxford's, and that the copy thence stolen was sent to 
 the press. The story was doubtless received with different de- 
 grees of credit. It may be suspected that the preface to the 
 Miscellanies was written to prepare the public for such an 
 incident ; and to strengthen this opinion James Worsdale, a 
 painter, who was employed in clandestine negotiations, but 
 whose veracity was very doubtful, declared that he was the 
 messenger who carried, by Pope's direction, the books to 
 Curll. 
 
 When they were thus published and avowed, as they had 
 relation to recent facts and persons either then living or not 
 yet forgotten, they may be supposed to have found readers ; 
 but as the facts were minute, and the characters, being either 
 private or literary, were httle known or little regarded, they 
 awakened no popular kindness or resentment : the book never 
 became much the subject of conversation ; some read it as a 
 contemporary history, and some perhaps as a model of episto- 
 lary language ; but those who read it did not talk of it. Not 
 much therefore was added by it to fame or envy, nor do I 
 remember that it produced either public praise or public cen- 
 sure. 
 
 It had however, in some degree, the recommendation of 
 
POPE. 261 
 
 novelty ; our language had few letters, except those of states- 
 mSnT" Howel, indeed, about a century ago, published his Let- 
 ters, which are commended by Morhoff, and which alone, of 
 his hundred volumes, continue his memory. Loveday's Letters 
 were printed only once ; those of Herbert and Suckling 
 are hardly known. Mrs. Phillips's [Orinda's] are equally 
 neglected. And those of Walsh seem written as exercises, 
 and were never sent to any living mistress or friend. Pope's 
 epistolary excellence had an open field ; he had no English 
 rival living or dead. 
 
 Pope is seen in this collection as connected with the other 
 contemporary wits, and certainly suffers no disgrace in the 
 comparison ; but it must be remembered that he had the 
 power of favoring himself ; he might have originally had publi- 
 cation in his mind, and have written with care, or have after- 
 wards Selected those which he had most happily conceived or 
 most diligently labored ; and I know not whether there does 
 not appear something more studied and artificial in his produc- 
 tions than the rest, except one long letter by Bolingbroke, com- 
 posed with the skill and industry of a professed author. It is 
 indeed not easy to distinguish affectation from habit ; he that 
 has once studiously formed a style rarely writes afterwards 
 with complete ease. Pope may be said to write always with 
 his reputation in his head ; Swift, perhaps, like a man who 
 remembered he was writing to Pope ; but Arbuthnot, like one 
 who lets though.ts drop from his pen as they rise into his mind. 
 
 Before these Letters appeared, he published the first 
 part of what he persuaded himself to think a system of ethics, 
 under the title of " An Essay on Man ;" which, if his letter to 
 Swift (of September 14, 1725) be rightly explained by the com- 
 mentator, had been eight years under his consideration, and of 
 which he seems to have desired the success with great solici- 
 tude. He had now many open and doubtless many secret ene- 
 mies. The " Dunces" were yet smarting with the war,; and 
 the superiority which he publicly arrogated disposed the world 
 to wish his humiliation. 
 
 All this he knew, and against all this he provided. His 
 own name, and that of his friend to whom the work is in- 
 scribed, were in the first editions carefully suppressed ; and the 
 poem, being of a new kind, was ascribed to one or another, as 
 favor determined or conjecture wandered : it was given, says 
 Warburton, to every man, except him only who could write it. 
 Those who like only when they like the author, and who are 
 under the dominion of a name, condemned it ; and thosei ad- 
 mired it who are willing to scatter praise at random, which, 
 
262 DR. SAMUEL JOHHSON ON 
 
 while it is unappropriated, excites no envy. Those fnends of 
 Pope that were trusted with the secret went about lavishing 
 honors on the new-born poet, and hinting that Pope was never 
 so much in danger from any former rival. 
 
 To those authors whom he had personally offended, and to 
 those whose opinion the world considered as decisive, and 
 whom he suspected of envy or malevolence, he sent his essay 
 as a present before publication, that they might defeat their 
 own enmity by praises which they could not afterwards de- 
 cently retract. 
 
 With these precautions (1733) was published the first part 
 of the ' ' .gssay on_Man. ' ' There had been for some time a 
 report thatT'ope'was^busy on a system of morality ; but this 
 design was not discovered in the new poem, which had a form 
 and a title with which its readers were unacquainted. Its 
 reception was not uniform ; some thought it a very imperfect 
 piece, though not without good lines. When the author was 
 unknown, some, as will always happen, favored him as an ad- 
 venturer, and some censured him as an intruder ; but all 
 thought him above neglect ; the sale increased and editions 
 were multiplied. 
 
 The subsequent editions of the first epistle exhibited two 
 memorable corrections. At first the poet and his friend 
 
 " Expatiate freely o'er the scene of man, 
 A mighty maze of walks without a plan :" 
 
 for which he wrote afterwards, 
 
 " A mighty maze, 6ut not without a plan ;" 
 
 for if there were no plan it were in vain to describe or to trace 
 the maze. 
 
 The other alteration was of these lines : 
 
 " And spite of pride, and in thy reason's spite. 
 One truth is clear, whatever is, is right ;" 
 
 but having afterwards discovered, or been shown, that the 
 "truth" which subsisted " in spite of reason " could not be 
 very "clear," he substituted 
 
 " And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite." 
 
 To such oversights will the most vigorous mind be liable 
 when it is employed at once upon argument and poetry. 
 
 The second and third epistles were published, and Pope 
 was, I believe, more and more suspected of writing them • at 
 last, in 1734, he avowed the fourth, and claimed the honor of 
 a moral poet. 
 
POPE. 263 
 
 In the conclusion it is sufficiently acknowledged that the 
 doctrine of the " Essay on Man" was received from Boling- 
 broke, who is said to have ridiculed Pope, among those who 
 enjoyed his confidence, as having adopted and advanced prin- 
 ciples of which he did not perceive the consequence, and as 
 blindly propagating opinions contrary to his own. That those 
 communications had been consolidated into a scheme regularly 
 drawn, and delivered to Pope, from whom it returned only 
 transformed from prose to verse, has been reported, but can 
 hardly be true. The Essay plainly appears the fabric of a 
 poet ; what Bolingbroke supplied could be only the first princi- 
 ples ; the order, illustration, and embellishments must all be 
 Pope's. 
 
 These principles it is not my business to clear from obscu- 
 rity, dogmatism, or falsehood ; but they were not immediately 
 examined ; philosophy and poetry have not often the same 
 readers ; and the Essay abounded in splendid amplifications 
 and sparkling sentences, which were read and admired with no 
 great attention to their ultimate purpose ; its flowers caught the 
 eye, which did not see what the gay foliage concealed, and for 
 a time flourished in the sunshine of universal approbation. So 
 little was any evil tendency discovered, that, as innocence is 
 unsuspicious, many read it for a manual of piety. 
 
 Its reputation soon invited a translator. It was first turned 
 into French prose, and afterwards by Resnel into verse. Both 
 translations fell into the hands of Crousaz, who first, when he 
 had the version in prose, wrote a general censure, and after- 
 wards reprinted Resnel's version, with particular remarks upon 
 every paragraph. 
 
 Crousaz was a professor of Switzerland, eminent for his 
 treatise of Logic and his " Examen de Pyrrhonisme ;" and, 
 however little known or regarded here, was no mean antago- 
 nist. His mind was one of those in which philosophy and 
 piety are happily united. He was accustomed to argument 
 and disquisition, and perhaps was grown too desirous of detect- 
 ing faults ; but his intentions were always right, his opinions 
 were solid, and his religion pure. 
 
 His incessant vigilance for the promotion of piety disposed 
 him to look with distrust upon all metaphysical systems of the- 
 ology, and all schemes of virtue and happiness purely rational ; 
 and therefore it was not long before he was persuaded that the 
 positions of Pope, as they terminated for the most part in natural 
 religion, were intended to draw mankind away from revelation, 
 and to represent the whole course of things as a necessary con- 
 catenation of indissoluble fatality ; and it is undeniable that 
 
264 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 in many passages a religious eye may easily discover expres- 
 sions not very favorable to morals or to liberty. 
 
 About this time Warburton began to make his appearance 
 in the first ranks of learning. He was a man of vigorous fac- 
 ulties, a mind fervid and vehement, supplied by incessant and 
 unlimited inquiry, with wonderful extent and variety of knowl- 
 edge, which yet had not oppressed his imagination nor cloud- 
 ed his perspicacity. To every work he brought a memory full 
 -fraught, together with a fancy fertile of original combinations, 
 an^at once exerted the powers of the scholar, the reasoner, and 
 the wit. But his knowledge was too multifarious to be always 
 exact, and his pursuits too eager to be always cautious. His 
 abilities gave him an haughty confidence, which he disdained 
 to conceal or mollify ; and his impatience of opposition dis- 
 posed him to treat his adversaries with such contemptuous su- 
 periority as made his readers commonly his enemies, and ex- 
 cited against the advocate the wishes of some who favored the 
 cause. He seems to have adopted the Roman emperor's de- 
 termination, oderint dum metuant ; he used no allurements of 
 gentle language, but wished to compel rather than persuade. 
 
 His style is copious without selection, and forcible without 
 neatness ; he took the words that presented themselves ; his 
 diction is coarse and impure, and his sentences are unmeas- 
 ured. 
 
 He had in the early part of his life pleased himself with 
 the notice of inferior wits, and corresponded with the enemies 
 of Pope. A letter was produced, when he had perhaps him- 
 self forgotten it, in which he tells Concanen, ' ' Dryden, I ob- 
 serve, borrows for want of leisure, and Pope for want of ge- 
 nius ; Milton out of pride, and Addison out of modesty. ' ' And 
 when Theobald published " Shakespeare," in opposition to 
 Pope, the best notes were supplied by Warburton. 
 
 But the time was now come when Warburton was to change 
 his opinion, and Pope was to find a defender in him who haid 
 contributed so much to the exaltation of his rival. 
 
 The arrogance of Warburton excited against him every ar- 
 tifice of offence, and therefore it may be supposed that his 
 union with Pope was censured as hypocritical inconstancy ; but 
 surely to think differently, at different times, of poetical merit, 
 may be easily allowed. Such opinions are often admitted, and 
 dismissed, without nice examination. Who is there that has not 
 found reason for changing his mind about questions of greater 
 importance ? 
 
 Warburton, whatever was his motive, undertook, without 
 solicitation, to rescue Pope from the talons of Crousaz, by freeing 
 
POPE. 265 
 
 him from the imputation of favoring fatality, or rejecting rev- 
 elation, and from month to month continued a vindication of 
 the " Essay on Man" in the literary journal of that time, call- 
 ed " The Republic of Letters." 
 
 Pope, who probably began to doubt the tendency of his 
 own work, was glad that the positions, of which he perceived 
 himself not to know the full meaning, could by any mode of 
 interpretation be made to mean well. How much he was 
 pleased with his gratuitous defender, the following letter evi- 
 dently shows : 
 
 " April II, 1732. 
 " Sir, 
 
 " I have just received from Mr. R. two more of your let- 
 ters. It is in the greatest hurry imaginable that I write this ; 
 but I cannot help thanking you in particular for your third let- 
 ter, which is so extremely clear, short, and full, that I think 
 Mr. Crousaz ought never to have another answer, and deserved 
 not so good an one. I can only say, you do him too much 
 honor, and me too much right, so odd as the expression 
 seems ; for you have made my system as clear as I ought to 
 have done, and could not. It is indeed the same system as 
 mine, but illustrated with a ray of your own, as they say our 
 natural body is the same still when it is glorified. I am sure I 
 like it better than I did before, and so will every man else. I 
 know I meant just what you explain ; but I did not explain my 
 own meaning so well as you. You understand me as well as I 
 do myself ; but you express me better than I could express 
 myself. Pray accept the sincerest acknowledgments. I can- 
 not but wish these letters were put together in one book, and 
 intend (with your leave) to procure a translation of part at 
 least, or of all of them, into French ; but I shall not proceed a 
 step without your consent and opinion," etc. 
 
 By this fond and eager acceptance of an exculpatory com- 
 ment. Pope testified that, whatever might be the seeming or 
 real import of the principles which he had received from Bol- 
 ingbroke, he had not intentionally attacked religion ; and Bol- 
 ingbroke, if he meant to make him, without his own consent, 
 an instrument of mischief, found him now engaged, with his 
 eyes open, on the side of truth. 
 
 It is known that Bolingbroke concealed from Pope his real 
 opinions. He once discovered them to Mr. Hooke, who re- 
 lated them again to Pope, and was told by him that he must 
 have mistaken the meaning of what he heard ; and Boling- 
 broke, when Pope's uneasiness incited him to desire an explana- 
 tion, declared that Hooke had misunderstood him. 
 
266 DR. SAMUEL yOHNSON ON 
 
 Bolingbroke hated Warburton, who had drawn his pupil 
 from him ; and a little before Pope's death they had a dispute, 
 from which they parted with mutual aversion. 
 
 From this time Pope lived in the closest intimacy with his 
 commentator, and amply rewarded his kindness and his zeal, 
 for he introduced him to Mr. Murray, by whose interest he 
 became preacher at Lincoln' s-Inn ; and to Mr. Allen, who 
 gave him his niece and his estate, and by consequence a bishop- 
 ric. When he died he left him the property of his works, a 
 legacy which may be reasonably estimated at four thousand 
 pounds. 
 
 Pope's fondness for the " Essay on Man" appeared by his 
 desire of its propagation. Dobson, who had gained reputation 
 by his version of Prior's " Solomon," was employed by him to 
 translate it into Latin verse, and was for that purpose some 
 time at Twickenham ; but he left his work, whatever was the 
 reason, unfinished, and, by Benson's invitation, undertook the 
 longer task of ' ' Paradise Lost. ' ' Pope then desired his friend 
 to find a scholar who should turn his Essay into Latin prose ; 
 but no such performance has ever appeared. 
 
 Pope lived at this time among the great, with that reception 
 and respect to which his works entitled him, and which he had 
 not impaired by any private misconduct or factious partiality. 
 Though Bolingbroke was his friend, Walpole was not his ene- 
 my ; but treated him with so much consideration, as, at his re- 
 quest, to solicit and obtain from the French minister an abbey 
 for Mr. Southcot, whom he considered himself as obliged to 
 reward, by this exertion of his interest, for the benefit which 
 he had received from his attendance in a long illness. 
 
 It was said that when the court was at Richmond, Queen 
 Caroline had declared her intention to visit him. This may 
 have been only a careless effusion, thought on no more : the 
 report of such notice, however, was soon in many mouths ; 
 and, if I do not forget or misapprehend Savage's account, 
 Pope, pretending to decline what was not yet offered, left his 
 house for a time, not, I suppose, for any other, reason than lest 
 he should be thought to stay at home in expectation of an honor 
 which would not be conferred. He was therefore angry at 
 Swift, who represents him as ' ' refusing the visits of a queen, ' ' 
 because he knew that what had never been offered had never 
 been refused. 
 
 Besides the general system of morality supposed to be 
 contained in the " Essay on Man," it was his intention to 
 write distinct poems upon the different duties oi- conditions of 
 life ; one of which is the epistle to Lord Bathurst (1733) " On 
 
POPE. 267 
 
 the Use of Riches, ' ' a piece on which he declared great labor 
 to have been bestowed. 
 
 Into this poem some hints are historically thrown, and 
 some known characters are introduced, with others of which it 
 is difficult to say how far they are real or fictitious ; but the, 
 praise of Kyrl, the Man of Ross, deserves particular examina- 
 tion, who, aTter a long and pompous enumeration of his public 
 works and private charities, is said to have diffused all those 
 blessings ixonx five hundred a year. Wonders are willingly told 
 and willingly heard. The truth is, that Kyrl was a man of 
 known integrity and active benevolence, by whose solicitation 
 the wealthy were persuaded to pay contributions to his charita- 
 ble schemes ; this influence he obtained by an example of lib- 
 erality exerted to the utmost extent of his power, and was thus 
 enabled to give more than he had. This account Mr. Vic- 
 tor received from the minister of the place ; and I have pre- 
 served it that the praise of a good man, being made more credi- 
 ble, may be more solid. Narrations of romantic and imprac- 
 ticable virtue will be read with wonder, but that which is unat- 
 tainable is recommended in vain ; that good may be endeav- 
 ored, it must be shown to be possible. 
 
 This is the only piece in which the author has given a hint 
 of his religion, by ridiculing the ceremony of burning the 
 pope, and by mentioning with some indignation the inscription 
 on the Monument. 
 
 When this poem was first published, the dialogue, having 
 no letters of direction, was perplexed and obscure. Pope 
 seems to have written with no very distinct idea ; for he calls' 
 that an " Epistle to Bathurst" in which Bathurst is intro-^ 
 duced as speaking. 
 
 He afterwards (1734) inscribed to Lord Co bham his 
 ' ' Characters of Men, ' ' written with close attention to the opera- 
 tions of the mind and modifications of life. In this poem he 
 has endeavored to establish and exemplify his favorite the- 
 ory of the ruling passion, by which he means an original direc- 
 tion of desire to some particular object ; an innate affection, 
 which gives all action a determinate and invariable tendency, 
 and operates upon the whole system of life, either openly or 
 more secretly by the intervention of some accidental or subor- 
 dinate propension. 
 
 Of any passion thus innate and irresistible the existence 
 may reasonably be doubted. Human characters are by no 
 means constant ; men change by change of place, of fortune, 
 of acquaintance ; he who is at one time a lover of pleasure is 
 at another a lover of money. Those indeed who attain any ex- 
 
268 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 cellence commonly spend life in one pursuit ; for excellence is 
 not often gained upon easier terms. But to the particular 
 species of excellence men are directed not by an ascendant 
 planet or predominating humor, but by the first book which 
 they read, some early conversation which they heard, or some 
 accident which excited ardor and emulation. 
 
 It must at least be allowed that this ruling passion, antece- 
 dent to reason and observation, must have an object indepen- 
 dent of human contrivance ; for there can be no natural desire 
 of artificial good. No man therefore can be born, in the strict 
 acceptation, a lover of money ; for he may be born where 
 money does not exist : nor can he be born, in a moral sense, a 
 lover of his country ; for society, politically regulated, is a 
 state contradistinguished from a state of nature ; and any at- 
 tention to that coalition of interests which makes the happiness 
 of a country is possible only to those whom inquiry and reflec- 
 tion have enabled to comprehend it. 
 
 This doctrine is in itself pernicious as well as false ; its 
 tendency is to produce the belief of a kind of moral predestina- 
 tion or overruling principle which cannot be resisted ; he that 
 admits it is prepared to comply with every desire that caprice or 
 opportunity shall excite, and to flatter himself that he submits 
 only to the lawful dominion of Nature in obeying the resistless 
 authority of his ruling passion. 
 
 Pope has formed his theory with so little skill, that in the 
 examples by which he illustrates and confirms it he has con- 
 founded passions, appetites, and habits. 
 
 To the " Characters of Men," he added soon after, in an 
 e pistl e supposed to have been addressed to Ma.rtha Blount, but 
 . which the last edition has taken from her, the " Characters of 
 Women." This poem, which was labored with great dili- 
 gence, and in the author's opinion with great success, was neg- 
 lected at its first publication, as the commentator supposes, 
 because the public was informed by an advertisement that it 
 contained no character drawn from the life; an assertion which 
 Pope probably did not expect, nor wish to have been believed, 
 and which he soon gave his readers sufficient reason to distrust 
 by telling them in a note that the work was imperfect, because 
 part of his subject was vice too high to be yet exposed. 
 
 The time, however, soon came in which it was safe to dis- 
 play the Duchess of Marlborough under the name of AJo^a ; 
 and her character was inserted with no great honor to the 
 writer's gratitude. 
 
 He published from time to time (between 1730 and 1740) 
 imitations of different poems of Horace, generally with his 
 
POPE. 269 
 
 flame, and once, as was suspected, without it. What he was 
 upon moral principles ashamed to own, he ought to have sup- 
 pressed. Of these pieces it is useless to settle the dates, as they 
 had seldom much relation to the times, and perhaps had been 
 long in his hands. / 
 
 This mode of imitation, in which the ancients are familiar- 
 ized by adapting their sentiments to modern topics, by making 
 Horace say of Shakespeare what he originally said of Ennius, 
 and accommodating his satires on Pantolabus and Nomentanus 
 to the flatterers and prodigals of our own time, was first prac- 
 tised in the reign of Charles the Second by Oldham and Roch- 
 ester ; at least I remember no instances more ancient. It is a 
 kind of middle composition between translation and original 
 design, which pleases when the thoughts are unexpectedly ap- 
 plicable and the parallels lucky. It seems to have been Pope's 
 favorite amusement, for he has carried it further than any former 
 poet. 
 
 He published likewise a revival, in smoother numbers, of 
 Dr. Donne's " Satires," which was recommeded to him by the 
 Duke of Shrewsbury and the. Earl of Oxford: They made no 
 great impression on the public. Pope seems to have known 
 their imbecility, and therefore suppressed them while he was 
 yet contending to rise in reputation, but ventured them when 
 he thought their deficiencies more likely to be imputed to 
 Donne than to himself. 
 
 The eg^le^to Dr . Arb uthnot, which seems to be derived in 
 its first design from Boileau's "Address a son Esprit, " was 
 published in January, 1735, about a month before the death of 
 him to whom it is inscribed. It is to be regretted that 
 either honor or pleasure should have been missed by Arbuth- 
 not, a man estimable for his learning, amiable for his life, and 
 venerable for his piety. 
 
 Arbuthnot was a man of great comprehension, skilful in his 
 profession, versed in the sciences, acquainted with ancient lit- 
 erature, and able to animate his mass of knowledge by a bright 
 and active imagination ; a scholar with great brilliance of wit ; 
 a wit who, in the crowd of life, retained and discovered i no- 
 ble ardor of religious zeal. — 
 
 In this poem Pope seems to reckon with the public. He 
 vindicates himself from censures, and with dignity rather than 
 arrogance enforces his own claims to kindness and respect. _^._ 
 
 Into this poem are interwoven several paragraphs which had 
 been before printed as a fragment, and among them the satirical 
 lines upon Addison, of which the last couplet has been twice 
 corrected- It was ^t first, 
 
270 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 ' ' Who would not smile if such a man there be ? 
 Who would not laugh if Addison were he ?' ' 
 Then, 
 
 " Who would not grieve if such a man there be? 
 Who would not laugh if Addison were he ?" 
 At last it is, 
 
 ' ' Who but must laugh if such a man there be ? 
 Who would not weep if Atticus were he ?' ' 
 
 He was at this time at open war with Lord Hervey, who 
 had distinguished himself as a steady adherent to the ministry ; 
 and, being offended with a contemptuous answer to one of his 
 pamphlets, had summoned Pnlteney to a duel. Whether he 
 or Pope made the first attack, perhaps cannot now be easily 
 known : he had written an invective against Pope, whom he 
 calls " Hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure,." and 
 hints that his father was a hatter. To this Pope wrote a reply 
 in verse and prose ; the verses are in this poem, and the 
 prose, though it was never sent, is printed among his letters, 
 but to a cool readei' of the present time exhibits nothing but te- 
 dious malignity. 
 
 His last satires of the general kind were two dialogues, 
 named, from the year in which they were published, " Seven- 
 teen Hundred and Thirty-eight. ' ' In these poems many are 
 praised and many reproached. Pope was then entangled in the 
 opposition, a follower of the Prince of Wales, who dined at 
 his house, and the friend of many who obstructed and censured 
 the conduct of the ministers. His political partiality was too 
 plainly shown ; he forgot the prudence with which he passed, 
 in his earlier years, uninjured and unoffending, through much 
 more violent conflicts of faction. 
 
 In the first dialogue, having an opportunity of praising 
 Allen of Bath, he asked his leave to mention him as a man not 
 illustrious by any merit of his ancestors, and called him in his 
 verses ' ' low-born Allen. ' ' Men are seldom satisfied with praise 
 introduced or followed by any mention or defect. Allen seems 
 not to have taken any pleasure in his epithet, which was after- 
 wards softened into ' ' humble Allen. ' ' 
 
 In the second dialogue he took some liberty with one of 
 the Foxes, among others, which Fox, in a reply to Lyttleton, 
 took an opportunity of repaying by reproaching him with the 
 friendship of a lampooner, who scattered his ink without fear 
 or decency, and against whom he hoped the resentment of the 
 legislature would quickly be discharged. 
 
 About this time Paul Whitehead, a small poet, was sum- 
 moned before the Lords for a poem called ' ' Manners, ' ' to- 
 
POPE. 271 
 
 gether with Dodsley his pubHsher. Whitehead, who hung 
 loose upon society, skulked and escaped ; but Dodsley's sho^ 
 and family made his appearance necessary. He was, however, 
 soon dismissed, and the whole process was probably intended 
 rather to intimidate Pope than to punish Whitehead. 
 
 Pope never afterwards attempted to join the patriot with 
 the poet, nor drew his pen upon statesmen. That he desisted 
 from his attempts of reformation is imputed by his commenta- 
 tor to his despair of prevailing over the corruption of the 
 time. He was not likely to have been ever of opinion that the 
 dread of his satire would countervail the love of power or of 
 money ; he pleased himself with being important and formida- 
 ble, and gratified sometimes his pride, and sometimes his re- 
 sentment, till at last he began to think he should be more 
 safe if he were less busy. 
 
 The ' ' Memoirs of Scriblerus, ' ' published about this time, 
 extend only to the first book of a work projected in concert by 
 Pope, Swift, and Arbuthnot, who used to meet in the time of 
 Queen Anne, and denominated themselves the " Scriblerus 
 Club. " Their purpose was to censure the abuses of learning by 
 a fictitious Ufe of an infatuated scholar. They were dispersed, 
 the design was never completed, and Warburton laments its 
 miscarriage as an event very disastrous to polite lett^s. 
 
 If the whole may be estimated by this specin^, which 
 seems to be the production of Arbuthnot, with a few touches 
 perhaps by Pope, the want of more will not be much lamented ; 
 for the follies which the writer ridicules are so little practised 
 that they are not known ; nor can the satire be understood but 
 by the learned: he raises phantoms of absurdity and then 
 drives them away. He cures diseases that were never felt. 
 
 For this reason this joint production of three great writers 
 has never obtained any notice from mankind ; it has been little 
 read, or when read has been forgotten, as no man could be 
 wiser, better, or merrier by remembering it. 
 
 The design cannot boast of much originality ; for besides 
 its general resemblance to " Don Quixote," there will be found 
 in it particular imitations of the " History of Mr. Ouffle." 
 
 Swift carried so much of it into Ireland as supplied him 
 with hints for his " Travels," and with those the world might 
 have been contented though the rest had been suppressed. 
 
 Pope had sought for images and sentiments in a region not 
 known to have been explored by many other of the Englislj 
 writers ; he had consulted the modern writers of Latin poetry) 
 a class of authors whom Boileau endeavored to bring into 
 contempt, and who are too generally neglected. Pope, how- 
 
272 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 ever, was not ashamed of their acquaintance, nor ungrateful 
 for the advantages which he might have derived from it. A 
 small selection from the Italians who wrote in Latin had been 
 published at London, about the latter end of the last century, 
 by a man who concealed his name, but whom his preface shows 
 to have been well qualified for his undertaking. This collection 
 Pope amplified by more than half, and (1740) published it in 
 two volumes, but injuriously omitted his predecessor's preface. 
 To these books, which had nothing but the mere text, no re- 
 gard was paid ; the authors were still neglected, and the editor 
 was neither praised nor censured. 
 
 He did not sink into idleness ; he had planned a work, 
 which he considered as subsequent to his ' ' Essay on Man, ' ' of 
 which he has given this account to Dr. Swift : 
 
 " March 25, 1736. 
 ' ' If ever I write any more epistles in verse, one of them 
 shall be addressed to you. I have long concerted it, and be- 
 gun it ; but I would make what bears your name as finished as 
 my last work ought to be, that is to say, more finished than 
 any of the rest. The subject is large, and will divide into four 
 epistles, which naturally follow the ' Essay on Man,' viz., i. Of 
 the Extent and Limits of Human Reason and Science. 2. A 
 View of the useful and therefore attainable, and of the un- 
 Tiseful and therefore unattainable, Arts. 3. Of the Nature, 
 Ends, Application, and Use of different Capacities. 4. Of the 
 Use of Learning, of the Science of the World, and of Wit. It 
 will conclude with a satire against the misapplication of all 
 these, exemplified by pictures, characters, and examples. ' ' 
 
 This work, in its full extent, being now afflicted with an 
 asthma, and finding the powers of life gradually declining, he 
 had no longer courage to undertake ; but from the materials 
 which he had provided, he added, at Warburton's request, an- 
 other book to the ' ' Dunciad, ' ' of which the design is to ridi- 
 cule such studies as are either hopeless or useless, as either 
 pursue what is unattainable, or what, if it be attained, is of no 
 use. 
 
 When this book was printed (1742) the laurel had been for 
 some time upon the head of Gibber, a man whom it cannot 
 be supposed that Pope could regard with much kindness or 
 esteem, though in one of the imitations of Horace he has liber- 
 ally enough praised the ' ' Careless Husband. " In the " Dun- 
 ciad," among other worthless scribblers, he had mentioned 
 Cibber, who, in his " Apology," complains of the great poet's 
 
POPE. 
 
 273 
 
 unkindness as more injurious "because," says he, "I never 
 have offended him." 
 
 It might have been expected that Pope should have been, 
 in some degree, mollified by this submissive gentleness, but 
 no such consequence appeared. Though he condescended to 
 commend Gibber once, he mentioned him afterwards contemptu- 
 ously in one of his satires, and again in his epistle to Arbuth- 
 not ; and in the fourth book of the " Dunciad " attacked him 
 with acrimony, to which the provocation is not easily discover- 
 able. Perhaps he imagined that in ridiculing the laureate, he 
 satirized those by whom the laurel had been given, and grati- 
 fied that ambitious petulance with which he affected to insult 
 the great. 
 
 The severity of this satire left Gibber no longer any pa- 
 tience. He had confidence enough in his own powers to believe 
 that he could disturb the quiet of his adversary, and doubtless 
 did not want instigators, who, without any care about the vic- 
 tory, desired to amuse themselves by looking on the contest. 
 He therefore gave the town a pamphlet, in which he declares 
 his resolution from that time never to bear another blow with- 
 out returning it, and to tire out his adversary by perseverance, 
 if he cannot conquer him by strength. 
 
 The incessant and unappeasable malignity of Pope he im- 
 putes to a very distant cause. After the ' ' Three Hours after 
 Marriage" had been driven off the stage, by the offence which 
 the mummy and crocodile gave the audience, while the ex- 
 ploded scene was yet fresh in memory, it happened that Gibber 
 played Bayes in the " Rehearsal ;" and as it had been usual to 
 enliven the part by the mention of any recent theatrical trans- 
 actions, he said that he once thought to have introduced his 
 lovers disguised in a mummy and a crocodile. ' ' This, ' ' says 
 he, " was received with loud claps, which indicated contempt 
 of the play. ' ' Pope, who was behind the scenes, meeting hini 
 as he left the stage, " attacked him," as he says, " with all the 
 virulence of a wit out of his senses ;" to which he replied, 
 " That he would take no other notice of what was said by so 
 particular a man, than to declare that as often as he played 
 that part he would repeat the same provocation." 
 
 He shows his opinion to be that Pope was one of the 
 authors of the play which he so zealously defended ; and adds 
 an idle story of Pope's behavior at a tavern. 
 
 The pamphlet was written with little power of thought or 
 language, and if suffered to remain without notice would have 
 been very soon forgotten. Pope had now been enough ac- 
 quainted with human life to know, if his passion had not been 
 
2 74 ^^- SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 too powerful for his understanding, that, from a contention 
 like his with Gibber, the world seeks nothing but diversion, 
 which is given at the expense of the higher character. When 
 Gibber lampooned Pope, curiosity was excited ; what Pope 
 could say of Gibber nobody inquired, but in hope that Pope's 
 asperity might betray his pain and lessen his dignity. 
 
 He should therefore have suffered the pamphlet to flutter 
 and die, without confessing that it stung him. The dishonor 
 of being shown as Gibber's antagonist could never be compen- 
 sated by the victory. Gibber had nothing to lose ; when Pope 
 had exhausted all his malignity upon him, he would rise in the 
 esteem both of his friends and his enemies. Silence only 
 could have made him despicable ; the blow which did not 
 appear to be felt would have been struck in vain. 
 
 But Pope's irascibility prevailed, and he resolved to tell the 
 whole English world that he was at war with Gibber ; and to 
 show that he thought him no common adversary, he prepared 
 no common vengeance ; he published a new edition of the 
 ' ' Dunciad, ' ' in which he degraded Theobald from his painful 
 pre-eminence and enthroned Gibber in his stead. Unhappily 
 the two heroes were of opposite characters, and Pope was un- 
 willing to lose what he had already written ; he has therefore 
 depraved his poem by giving to Gibber the old books, the old 
 pedantry, and the sluggish pertinacity of Theobald. 
 , Pope was ignorant enough of his own interest to make an- 
 other change, and introduced O sbor ne contending for the prize 
 among the booksellers. Osborne was a man entirely destitute 
 of shame, without sense of any disgrace but that of poverty. 
 He told me, when he was doing that which raised Pope's 
 resentment, that he should be put into the " Dunciad ;" but 
 he had the fate of "^^ Gassandra."**-- I gave no credit to his 
 prediction till in time I saw it accomplished. The shafts of 
 satire were directed equally in vain against Gibber and Os- 
 borne, being repelled by the impenetrable impudence of one, 
 and deadened by the impassive dulness of the other. Pope 
 confessed his own pain by his anger ; but he gave no pain to 
 those who had provoked him. He was able to hurt none but 
 himself ; by transferring the same ridicule from one to another, 
 he reduced himself to the insignificance of his own magpie, 
 who from his cage calls cuckold at a venture. 
 
 Gibber, according to his engagement, repaid the " Dun- 
 ciad ' ' with another pamphlet, which Pope said ' ' would be as 
 good as a dose of hartshorn to him ;" but his tongue and his 
 heart were at variance. I have heard Mr. Richardson relate 
 that he attended his father, the painter, on a visit when one of 
 
POPE. 275 
 
 Gibber's pamphlets came into the hands of Pope, who said, 
 " These things are my diversion." They sat by him while he 
 perused it, and saw his features writhing with anguish ; and 
 young Richardson said to his father, when they returned, that 
 he hoped to be preserved from such diversion as had been that 
 day the lot of Pope. 
 
 From this time, finding his diseases more oppressive, and 
 his vital powers gradually declining, be no longer strained his 
 faculties with any original composition, nor proposed any other 
 employment for his remaining life than the revisal and correc- 
 tion of his former works, in which he received advice and 
 assistance from Warburton, whom he appears to have trusted 
 and honored in the highest degree. 
 
 He laid aside his epic poem, perhaps without much loss to 
 mankind ; for his hero was Brutus the Trojan, who, according 
 to a ridiculous fiction, established a colony in Britain. The 
 subject therefore was of the fabulous age ; the actors were a 
 race upon whom imagination has been exhausted and attention 
 wearied, and to whom the mind will not easily be recalled 
 when it is invited in blank verse, which Pope had adopted with 
 great imprudence, and, I think, without due consideration of 
 the nature of our language. The sketch is, at least in part, 
 preserved by Ruffhead, by which it appears that Pope was 
 thoughtless enough to model the names of his heroes with ter- 
 minations not consistent with the time or country in which he 
 places them. 
 
 He lingered through the next year, but perceived himself, 
 as he expresses it, " going down the hill." He had for at least 
 five years been afflicted with an asthma and other disorders 
 which his physicians were unable to relieve. Towards the end 
 of his life he consulted Dr. Thomson, a man who had, by large 
 promises and free censures of the common practice of physic, 
 forced himself up into sudden reputation. Thomson declared 
 his distemper to be a dropsy, and evacuated part of the water 
 by tincture of jalap, but confessed that his belly did not sub- 
 side. Thomson had many enemies, and Pope was persuaded 
 to dismiss him. 
 
 While he was yet capable of amusement and conversation, 
 as he was one day sitting in the air with Lord Bolingbroke and 
 Lord Marchmont, he saw his favorite, Martha Blount, at the 
 bottom of the terrace, and asked Lord Bolingbroke to go and 
 hand her up. Bolingbroke, not liking his errand, crossed his 
 legs and sat still ; but Lord Marchmont, who was younger and 
 less captious, waited on the lady, who, when he came to her, 
 asked, " What, is he not dead yet ?" She is said to have neg- 
 
276 DR. SAMUEL yOHNSON ON 
 
 lected him with shameful unkindness in the latter time of his 
 decay ; yet of the little which he had to leave she had a very 
 great part. Their acquaintance began early ; the life of each 
 was pictured on the other's mind ; their conversation therefore 
 was endearing, for when they met there was an immediate 
 coalition of congenial notions. Perhaps he considered her un- 
 willingness to approach the chamber of sickness as female 
 weakness or human frailty ; perhaps he was conscious to him- 
 self of peevishness and impatience, or, though he was offended 
 by her inattention, might yet consider her merit as overbalanc- 
 ing her fa.ult ; and if he had suffered his heart to be alienated 
 from her, he could have found nothing that might fill her 
 place ; he could have only shrunk within himself ; it was too 
 late to transfer his confidence or fondness. 
 
 In May, 1744, his death was approaching ; on the 6th he 
 was all day delirious, which he mentioned four days afterwards 
 as a sufficient humiliation of the vanity of man ; he afterwards 
 complained of seeing things as through a curtain and in false 
 colors, and one day, in the presence of Dodsley, asked what 
 arm it was that came out from the wall. He said that his 
 greatest inconvenience was inability to think. 
 
 Bolingbroke sometimes wept over him in this state of help- 
 less decay ; and being told by Spence that Pope, at the inter- 
 mission of his deliriousness, was always saying something kind 
 either of his present or absent friends, and that his humanity 
 seemed to have survived his understanding, answered, " It has 
 so ;" and added, " I never in my life knew a man that had so 
 tender a heart for his particular friends, or more general friend- 
 ship for mankind. ' ' At another time he said, ' ' I have known 
 Pope these thirty years, and value myself more in his friend- 
 ship than — " His grief then suppressed his voice. 
 
 Pope expressed undoubting confidence of a future state. 
 Being asked by his friend Mr. Hooke, a papist, whether he 
 would not die like his father and mother, and whether a priest 
 should not be called, he answered, " I do not think \K is 
 essential, but it will be very right, and I thank you for putting 
 me in mind of it. " 
 
 In the morning after the priest had given him the last sacra- 
 ments, he said, ' ' There is nothing that is meritorious but virtue 
 and friendship, and indeed friendship itself is only a part of vir- 
 tue. " 
 
 He died in the evening of the 30th day of May, 1744, so 
 placidly that the attendants did not discern the exact time of 
 his expiration. He was buried at Twickenham, near his father 
 
POPE. 
 
 ^77 
 
 and mother, where a monument has been erected to him by his 
 commentator the Bishop of Gloucester. 
 
 He left the care of his papers to his executors ; first to 
 Lord Bolingbroke, and, if he should not be living, to the Earl 
 of Marchmont, undoubtedly expecting them to be proud of the 
 trust and eager to extend his fame. But let no man dream of 
 influence beyond his life. After a decent time, Dodsley the 
 bookseller went to solicit preference as the publisher, and was 
 told that the parcel had not been yet inspected ; and, whatevt;r 
 was the reason, the world has been disappointed of what M'as 
 ' ' reserved for the next age. ' ' 
 
 He lost, indeed, the favor of Bolingbroke by a kind of 
 posthumous offence. The political pamphlet called " The 
 Patriot King" had been put into his hands that he might pro- 
 cure the impression of a very few copies, to be distributed, ac- 
 cording to the author's direction, among his friends, and Pope 
 assured him that no more had been printed than were allowed ; 
 but, soon after his death, the printer brought and resigned a 
 complete edition of fifteen hundred copies, which Pope had 
 ordered him to print and retain in secret. He kept, as was 
 observed, his engagement to Pope, better than Pope had kept 
 it to his friend ; and nothing was known of the transaction 
 till, upon the death of his employer, he thought himself obliged 
 to dehver the books to the right owner, who, with great indig- 
 nation, made a fire in his yard and delivered the whole impres- 
 sion to the flames. 
 
 Hitherto nothing had been done which was not naturally 
 dictated by resentment of violated faith ; resentment more 
 acrimonious as the violator had been more loved or more 
 trusted. But here the anger might have stopped ; the injury 
 was private, and there was little danger from the example. 
 
 Bolingbroke, however, was not yet satisfied ; his thirst of 
 vengeance incited him to blast the memory of the man over 
 whom he had wept in his last struggles ; and he employed Mal- 
 let, another friend of Pope, to tell the tale to the public with 
 all its aggravations. Warburton, whose heart was warm with 
 his legacy, and tender by the recent separation, thought it 
 proper for him to interpose ; and undertook, not indeed to 
 vindicate the action, for breach of trust has always something 
 criminal, but to extenuate it by an apology. Having advanced 
 what cannot be denied, that moral obliquity is made more or 
 less excusable by the motives that produce it, he inquires what 
 evil purpose could have induced Pope to break his promise. 
 He could not delight his vanity by usurping the work, which, 
 though not sold in shops, had been shown to a number more 
 
278 DX. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 than sufficent to preserve the author's claim; he could not 
 gratify his avarice, for he could not sell his plunder till Boling- 
 broke was dead ; and even then, if the copy was left to another 
 his fraud would be defeated, and if left to himself, would be 
 useless. 
 
 Warburton therefore supposes, with great appearance of 
 reason, that the irregularity of his conduct proceeded wholly 
 from his zeal for Bolingbroke, who might perhaps have de- 
 stroyed the pamphlet which Pope thought it his duty to pre- 
 seive, even without its author's approbation. To this apology 
 an answer was written in " A Letter to the most impudent Man 
 Living. ' ' 
 
 He brought some reproach upon his own memory by the 
 petulant and contemptuous mention made in his will of Mr. 
 Allen, and an affected repayment of his benefactions. Mrs. 
 Blount, as the known friend and favorite of Pope, had been 
 invited to the house of Allen, where she comported herself with 
 such indecent arrogance that she parted from Mrs. Allen in a 
 state of irreconcilable dislike, and the door was forever barred 
 against her. This exclusion she resented with so much bitter- 
 ness as to refuse any legacy from Pope, unless he left the world 
 with a disavowal of obligation to Allen. Having been long 
 under her dominion, now tottering in the decline of life, and 
 unable to resist the violence of her temper, or, perhaps, with 
 the prejudice of a lover, persuaded that she had suffered im- 
 proper treatment, he complied with her demand, and polluted 
 his will with female resentment. Allen accepted the legacy, 
 which he gave to the hospital at Bath, observing that Pope 
 was always a bad accountant, and that if to 150/. he had put a 
 cipher more, he had come nearer to the truth. 
 
 The person of Pope is well known not to have been formed 
 by the nicest model. He has, in his account of the " Little 
 Qub," compared himself to a spider, and by another is de- 
 scribed as protuberant behind and before. He is said to have 
 been beautiful in his infancy ; but he was of a constitution 
 originally feeble and weak ; and as bodies of a tender frame 
 are easily distorted, his deformity was probably in part the 
 effect of his application. His stature was so low that, to bring 
 him to a level with common tables, it was necessary to raise his 
 seat. But his face was not displeasing, and his eyes were ani- 
 mated and vivid. 
 
 By natural deformity or accidental distortion his vital 
 functions were so much disordered that his life was a ' ' long 
 disease." His most frequent assailment was the headache 
 
POPE. 2yq 
 
 which he used to relieve by inhaling the steam of coffee, which 
 he very frequently required. 
 
 Most of what can be told concerning his petty peculiarities 
 was communicated by a female domestic of the Earl of Ox- 
 ford, who knew him perhaps after the middle of life. He was 
 then so weak as to stand in perpetual need of female attend- 
 ance ; extremely sensible of cold, so that he wore a kind of fur 
 doublet under a shirt of a very coarse warm linen with fine 
 sleeves. When he rose, he was invested in bodices made of 
 stiff canvas, being scarcely able to hold himself erect till they 
 were laced, and he then put on a flannel waistcoat. One side 
 was contracted. His legs were so slender that he enlarged 
 their bulk with three pair of stockings, which were drawn on 
 and off by the maid ; for he was not able to dress or undress 
 himself, and neither went to bed nor rose without help. His 
 weakness made it very difficult for him to be clean. 
 
 His hair had fallen almost all away ; and he used to dine 
 sometimes with Lord Oxford, privately, in a velvet cap. His 
 dress of ceremony was black, with a tie-wig and a little sword. 
 
 The indulgence and accommodation which his sickness 
 required had taught him all the unpleasing and unsocial quali- 
 ties of a valetudinary man. He expected that every thing 
 should give way to his ease or humor, as a child, whose 
 parents will not hear her cry, has an unresisted dominion in 
 the nursery. 
 
 " C'est que V enfant toujours est homme, 
 Cest que Fkomme est toujours enfant. ' ' 
 
 When he wanted to sleep, he " nodded in company ;" and once 
 slumbered at his own table while the Prince of Wales was talk- 
 ing of poetry. 
 
 The reputation which his friendship gave ' procured him 
 many invitations ; but he was a very troublesome inmate. He 
 brought no servant, and had so many wants that a numerous 
 attendance was scarcely able to supply them. Wherever he 
 was, he left no room for another, because he exacted the atten- 
 tion and employed the activity of tRe whole family. His 
 errands were so frequent and frivolous, that the footmen in 
 time avoided and neglected him ; and the Earl of Oxford dis- 
 charged some of the servants for their resolute refusal of his 
 messages. The maids, when they had neglected their business, 
 alleged that they had been employed by Mr. Pope. One of his 
 constant demands was for coffee in the night, and to the woman 
 that waited on him in his chamber he was very burdensome ; 
 but he was careful to recompense her want of sleep ; and 
 
28o DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 Lord Oxford's servant declared that in the house where her 
 business was to answer his call she would not ask for wages. 
 
 He had another fault, easily incident to those who, suffer- 
 ing much pain, think themselves entitled to whatever pleasures 
 they can snatch. He was too indulgent to his appetite : he 
 loved meat highly seasoned and of strong taste ; and at the in- 
 tervals of the table amused himself with biscuits and dry con- 
 serves. If he sat down to a variety of dishes, he would op- 
 press his stomach with repletion ; and though he seeined 
 angry when a dram was offered him, did not forbear to drink 
 it. His friends, who knew the avenues to his heart, pampered 
 him with presents of luxury, which he did not suffer to stand 
 neglected. The death of great men is not always proportioned 
 to the lustre of their lives. Hannibal, says Juvenal, did not 
 perish by the javelin or the sword ; the slaughters of Can- 
 nae were revenged by a ring. The death of Pope was imputed 
 by some of his friends to a silver saucepan, in which it was his 
 delight to heat potted lampreys. 
 
 That he loved too well to eat is certain ; but that his sen- 
 suality shortened his life will not be hastily concluded, when it 
 is remembered that a conformation so irregular lasted six-and- 
 fifty years, notwithstanding such pertinacious diligence of study 
 and meditation. 
 
 In all his intercourse with mankind he had great delight in 
 fertifice, and endeavored to attain all his purposes by indirect 
 knd unsuspected methods. " He hardly drank tea without a 
 ptratagem." If at the house of his friends he wanted any 
 accommodation, he was not willing to ask for it in plain 
 terms ; but would mention it remotely as something conveni- 
 ent ; though, when it was procured, he soon made it appear for 
 whose sake it had been recommended. Thus he teased Lord 
 Orrery till he obtained a screen. He practised his arts on 
 such small occasions that Lady Bolingbroke used to say, in a 
 French phrase, that ' ' he played the politician about cabbages 
 and turnips." His unjustifiable impression of " The Patriot 
 King," as it can be imputed to no particular motive, must have 
 proceeded from his general habit of secrecy and cunning : he 
 caught an opportunity of a sly trick, and pleased himself with 
 the thought of outwitting Bolingbroke. 
 
 In familiar or convivial conversation it does not appear 
 that he excelled. He may be said to have resembled Dryden, 
 as being not one that was distinguished by vivacity in com- 
 pany. It is remarkable that so near his time so much should 
 be known of what he has written, and so little of what he has 
 said : traditional memory retains no sallies of raillery nor sen- 
 
POPE. 281 
 
 tences of observation ; nothing either pointed or solid, eithei 
 wise or merry. One apothegm only stands upon record! 
 When an objection, raised against his inscription forShakei 
 speare, was defended by the authority of ■^Patrickj''^he replied, 
 — " horresco referens" — that "he would allow the publisher! 
 of a dictionary to know the meaning of a single word, but not ' 
 of two words put together. " , 
 
 He was fretful and easily displeased, and allowed himself to 
 be capriciously resentful. He would sometimes leave Lord 
 Oxford silently, no one could tell why, and was to be courted 
 back by more letters and messages than the footmen were will- 
 ing to carry. The table was indeed infested by Lady Mary 
 Wqrtley, who was the friend of Lady Oxford, and who, knowing 
 his peevishness, could by no entreaties be restrained from con- 
 tradicting him, till their disputes were sharpened to such asper- 
 ity that one or the other quitted the house. 
 
 He sometimes condescended to be jocular with servants or 
 inferiors ; but by no merriment, either of others or his own, 
 was he ever seen excited to laughter. 
 
 Of his domestic character frugality was a part eminently 
 remarkable. Having determined not to be dependent, he de- 
 termined not to be in want, and therefore wisely and magnani- 
 mously rejected all temptations to expense unsuitable to his 
 fortune. This general care must be universally approved ; but 
 it sometimes appeared in petty artifices of parsimony, such as 
 the practice of writing his compositions on the back of letters, 
 as may be seen in the remaining copy of the ' ' Iliad, ' ' by which 
 perhaps in five years five shillings were saved ; or in a nig- 
 gardly reception of his friends and scantiness of entertain- 
 ment, as, when he had two guests in his house, he would set at 
 supper a single pint upon the table, and having himself taken 
 two small glasses, would retire and say, " Gentlemen, I leave 
 you to your wine. ' ' Yet he tells his friends that ' ' he has a 
 heart for all, a house for all, and, whatever they may think, a 
 fortune for all." 
 
 He sometimes, however, made a splendid dinner, and is 
 said to have wanted no part of the skill or elegance which such 
 performances require. That this magnificence should be often 
 displayed, that obstinate prudence with which he conducted his 
 affairs would not permit, for his revenue, certain and casual, 
 amounted only to about eight hundred pounds a year, of which, 
 however, he declares himself able to assign one hundred to 
 charity. 
 
 Of this fortune, which, as it arose from public approbation, 
 was very honorably obtained, his imagination seems to have 
 
282 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 been too full ; it would be hard to find a man so well entitled 
 to notice by his wit that ever delighted so much in talking of his 
 money. In his letters and his poems, his garden and his 
 grotto, his quincunx and his vines, or some hints of his opu- 
 lence, are always to be found. The great topic of his ridicule 
 is poverty ; the crimes with which he reproaches his antagonists 
 are their debts, their habitation in the Mint, and their want of 
 a dinner. He seems to be of an opinion, not very uncommon 
 In the world, that to want money is to want every thing. 
 
 Next to the pleasure of contemplating his possessions 
 seems to be that of enumerating the men of high rank with 
 whom he was acquainted, and whose notice he loudly pro- 
 claims not to have been obtained by any practices of meanness 
 or servility ; a boast which was never denied to be true, and to 
 which very few poets have ever aspired. Pope never set his 
 genius to sale, he never flattered those whom he did not love, 
 or praised those whom he did not esteem. Savage, however, 
 remarked that he began a little to relax his dignity when he 
 wrote a distich for his " Hig hness 's Dog." 
 
 His admiration of the great seems to have increased in the 
 advance of life. He passed over peers and statesmen to in- 
 scribe his " Iliad " to Congreve, with a magnanimity of which 
 the praise had been complete had his friend's virtue been 
 equal to his wit. Why he was chosen for so great an honor it 
 is not now possible to know ; there is no trace in literary his- 
 tory of any particular intimacy between them. The name of 
 Congreve appears in the letters among those of his other 
 friends, but without any observable distinction or consequence. 
 
 To his latter works, however, he took care to annex names 
 dignified with titles, but was not very happy in his choice ; for 
 except Lord Bathurst none of his noble friends were such as 
 that a good man would wish to have his intimacy with them 
 known to posterity ; he can derive little honor from the notice 
 of Cobham, Burlington, or Bolingbroke. 
 
 Of his social qualities, if an estimate be made from his let- 
 ters, an opinion too favorable cannot easily be formed ; they 
 exhibit a perpetual and unclouded effulgence of general benev- 
 olence and particular fondness. There is nothing but liberal- 
 ity, gratitude, constancy, and tenderness. It has been so long 
 said as to be commonly believed that the true characters of 
 men may be found in their letters, and that he who writes to 
 his friend lays his heart open before him. But the truth is, 
 that such were the simple friendships of the Golden Age, and 
 are now the friendships only of children. Very few can boast 
 of hearts ' which they dare lay open to themselves, and of 
 
POPE. 283 
 
 which, by whatever accident exposed, they do not shun a dis- 
 tinct and continued view ; and certainly what we hide from 
 ourselves we do not show to our friends. There is, indeed, 
 no transaction which offers stronger temptations to fallacy an<i, 
 sophistication than epistolary intercourse. In the eagerness of 
 conversation the first emotions of the mind often burst out be- 
 fore they are considered ; in the tumult of business, interest 
 and passion have their genuine effect ; but a friendly letter is a 
 ' calm and deliberate performance in the cool of leisure, in the 
 stillness of solitude, and surely no man sits down to depreciate 
 by design his own character. 
 
 Friendship has no tendency to secure veracity ; for by whom 
 can a man so much wish to be thought better than he is as by 
 him whose kindness he desires to gain or keep ! Even in writ- 
 ing to the world there is less constraint ; the author is not con- 
 fronted with his reader, and takes his chance of approbation 
 among the different dispositions of mankind ; but a letter is ad- 
 dressed to a single mind, of which the prejudices and partiali- 
 ties are known, and must therefore please, if not by favoring 
 them, by forbearing to oppose them. 
 
 To charge those favorable representations which men give of 
 their own minds with the guilt of hypocritical falsehood would 
 show more severity than knowledge. The writer commonly 
 believes himself. Almost every man's thoughts, while they are 
 general, are right ; and most hearts are pure while temptation 
 is away. It is easy to awaken generous sentiments in privacy ; 
 to despise death when there is no danger ; to glow with benev- 
 olence when there is nothing to be given. While such ideas 
 are formed they are felt ; and self-love does not suspect the 
 gleam of virtue to be the meteor of fancy. 
 
 If the letters of Pope are considered merely as compositions, 
 they seem to be premeditated and artificial. It is one thing to 
 write, because there is something which the mind wishes to dis- 
 charge ; and another to solicit the imagination, because cere- 
 mony or vanity requires something to be written. Pope con- 
 fesses his early letters to be vitiated with affectation and am- 
 bition J to know whether he disentangled himself from these per- 
 verters of epistolary integrity, his book and his life must be set 
 in comparison. 
 
 G One of his favorite topics is contempt of his own poetry. ' 
 For this, if it had been real, he would deserve no commenda- 
 tion ; and in this he was certainly not sincere, for his high 
 value of himself was sufficiently observed ; and of what could 
 he be proud but of his poetry ? He writes, he says, when ' ' he 
 has just nothing else to do ;" yet Swift complains that he was 
 
284 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 never at leisure for conversation, because he had " always 
 some poetical scheme in his head. ' ' It was punctually required 
 that his writing-box should be set upon his bed before he 
 rose ; and Lord Oxford's domestic related that in the dreadful 
 winter of forty she was called from her bed by him four times 
 in one nighty to supply him with paper, lest he should lose a 
 thought. 
 
 j). He pretends insensibility to censure and criticism, though it 
 was observed by all who knew him that every pamphlet dis- 
 turbed his quiet, and that his extreme irritability laid him 
 open to perpetual vexation ; but he wished to despise his 
 critics, and therefore hoped that he did despise them. 
 
 2 Ashe happened to live in two reigns when the court paid lit- 
 tle attention to poetry, he nursed in his mind a foolish dises- 
 teem of kings, and proclaims that ' ' he never sees courts. ' ' 
 Yet a little regard shown him by the Prince of Wales melted 
 his obduracy ; and he had not much to say when he was asked 
 by his Royal Highness, ' ' how he could love a prince while he 
 dkjiked kings ?' ' 
 
 ,'/ He very frequently professes contempt of the world, and rep- 
 resents himself as looking on mankind sometimes with gay 
 indifference, as on emmets of a hillock, below his serious atten- 
 tion, and sometimes with gloomy indignation, as on monsters 
 ;more worthy of hatred than of pity. These were dispositions 
 ^apparently counterfeited. How could he despise those whom 
 he lived by pleasing, and on whose approbation his esteem of 
 himself was superstructed ? Why should he hate those to 
 whose favor he owed his honor and his ease ? Of things that 
 terminate in human life the world is the proper judge ; to despise. 
 jits sentence, if it were possible, is not just ; and if it were just, 
 is not possible. Pope was far enough from this unreasonable 
 temper : he was sufficiently a fool to fame, and his fault was 
 that he pretended to neglect it. His levity and his suUeniiess 
 were only in his letters ; he passed through common life some- 
 times vexed and sometimes pleased with the natural emotions 
 of common men. 
 
 ( 'His scorn of the great is too often repeated to be real ; no 
 rrian thinks much of that which he despises ; and as falsehood 
 is always in danger of inconsistency, he makes it his boast at 
 another time that he lives among them. 
 
 It is evident that his own importance swells often in his 
 mind. He is afraid of writing, lest the clerks at the post-office 
 should know his £,ecrets ; he has many enemies ; he considers 
 himself as surrounded by universal jealousy ; " after many 
 deaths and many dispersions, two or three of us," says he, 
 
POPE. 285 
 
 " may still be brought together, not to plot, but to divert 
 ourselves, and the world too if it pleases ;" and they can 
 live together and ' ' show what friends wits may be, in spite of 
 all the fools in the world." All this while it was likely that the 
 clerks did not know his hand ; he certainly had no more ene- 
 mies than a public character like his inevitably excites ; and 
 with what degree of friendship the wits might live, very few 
 were so much fools as ever to inquire. 
 
 Some part of this pretended discontent he learned from 
 Swift, and expresses it, I think, most frequently in his corre- 
 spondence with him. Swift's resentment was unreasonable, but 
 it was sincere ; Pope's was the mimicry of his friend, a fictitious 
 part which he began to play before it became him. When he 
 was only twenty-five years old, he related that " a glut of study 
 and retirement had thrown him on the world, ' ' and that there 
 was danger lest ' ' a glut of the world should throw him back 
 upon study and retirement." To this Swift answered with 
 great propriety that Pope had not yet acted or suffered enough 
 in the world to have become weary of it. And indeed it 
 must have been some very powerful reason that can drive back 
 to solitude him who has once enjoyed the pleasures of society. 
 
 In the letters both of Swift and Pope there appears such 
 narrowness of mind as makes them insensible of any excellence 
 that has not some affinity with their own, and confines their 
 esteem and approbation to so small a number, that whoever 
 should form his opinion of the age from their representation 
 would suppose them to have lived amidst ignorance and bar- 
 barity, unable to find among their contemporaries either virtue 
 or intelligence, and persecuted by those that could not uhder- 
 stand them. 
 
 When Pope murmurs at the world, when he professes con- 1 
 tempt of fame, when he speaks of riches and poverty, of suc- 
 cess and disappointment, with negligent indifference, he cer-' 
 tainly does not express his habitual and settled sentiments, but 
 either wilfully disguises his own character, or, what is more 
 likely, invests himself with temporary qualities, and sallies out 
 in the colors of the present moment. His hopes and fears, his 
 joys and sorrows, acted strongly upon his mind ; and if he 
 differed from others it was not by carelessness ; he was irrita- 
 ble and resentful. His malignity to Philips, whom he had first 
 made ridiculous, and then hated for being angry, continued too 
 long. Of his vain desire to make Bentley contemptible, I 
 never heard any adequate reason. He was sometimes wanton 
 in his attacks ; and before Chandos, Lady Wortley, and Hill 
 was mean in his retreat. 
 
286 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 Xhe virtues_which__seein to have had most of his affection 
 were TTberahty and fidelity of friendship, in which it does not 
 appear that he was other than he describes himself. His for- 
 tune did not suffer his charity to be splendid and conspicuous ; 
 but he assisted Dodsley with a hundred pounds that he might 
 open a shop, and of the subscription of forty pounds a year 
 that he raised for Savage, twenty were paid by himself. He 
 was accused of loving money ; but his love was eagerness to 
 gain, not solicitude to keep it. 
 
 _Ln the duties of friendship he was zealous and constant ; 
 his early~matirnty of mind commonly united him with men 
 older than himself, and therefore, without attaining any con- 
 siderable length of life, he saw many companions of his youth 
 sink into the grave ; but it does not appear that he lost a single 
 friend by coldness or by injury ; those who loved him once 
 continued their kindness. His ungrateful mention of Allen in 
 his will was the effect of his adherence to one whom he had 
 known much longer, and whom he naturally loved with greater 
 fondness. His violation of the trust reposed in him by Boling- 
 broke could have no motive inconsistent with the warmest 
 affection ; he either thought the action so near to indifferent 
 that he forgot it, or so laudable that he expected his friend to 
 approve it. 
 
 It was reported with such confidence as almost to enforce 
 belief, that in the papers intrusted to his executors was found 
 a defamatory life of Swift, which he had prepared as an instru- 
 ment of vengeance, to be used if any provocation should be 
 ever given. About this I inquired of the Earl of March- 
 mont, who assured me that no such piece was among his re- 
 mains. 
 
 The religion in which he lived and died was that of the 
 Church of Rome, to which, in his correspondence with Racine, 
 he professes himself a sincere adherent. That he was not 
 scrupulously pious in some part of his life is known by many 
 idle and indecent applications of sentences taken from the 
 Scriptures, a mode of merriment which a good man dreads for 
 its profaneness, and a witty man disdains for its easiness and 
 vulgarity. But to whatever levities he has been betrayed, it 
 does not appear that his principles were ever corrupted, or that 
 he ever lost his belief of revelation. The positions which he 
 transmitted from Bolingbroke he seems not to have under- 
 stood, and was pleased with an interpretation that made them 
 orthodox. 
 
 A man of such exalted superiority and so little modera- 
 fion would ijatyrally have all his delinquencies observed and 
 
POPE. 287 
 
 aggravated ; those who could not deny that he was excellent 
 would rejoice to find that he was not perfect. 
 
 Perhaps it may be imputed to the unwillingness with which 
 the same man is allowed to possess many advantages that his 
 learning has been depreciated. He certainly was, in his early 
 life, a man of great literary curiosity ; and when he wrote his 
 " Essay on Criticism" had, for his age, a very wide acquaint- 
 ance with books. When he entered into the living world it 
 seems to have happened to him, as to many others, that he was 
 less attentive to dead masters ; he studied in the academy of 
 Paracelsus, and made the universe his favorite volume. He 
 gathered his notions fresh from reality, not from the copies of 
 authors, but the originals of nature. Yet there is no reason to 
 believe that literature ever lost his esteem ; he always professed 
 to love reading ; and Dobson, who spent some time at his 
 house translating his " Essay on Man," when I asked him 
 what learning he found him to possess, answered, ' ' More than 
 I expected." His frequent references to history, his allusions 
 to various kinds of knowledge, and his images selected from 
 art and nature, with his observations on the operations of the 
 mind and the modes of life, show an intelligence perpetually 
 on the wing, excursive, vigorous, and diligent, eager to pursue 
 knowledge and attentive to retain it. 
 
 From this curiosity arose the desire of travelling, to which 
 he alludes in his verses to Jervas, and which, though he never 
 found an opportunity to gratify it, did not leave him till his life 
 
 declined. 
 
 Of his intellectual character ! the constituent and fundamen- 
 tal principle was good sense, a prompt and intuitive perception 
 of consonance and propriety. He saw immediately, of his 
 own conceptions, what was to be chosen and what to be ^re- 
 jected, and in the works of others what was to be shunned 
 and what was to be copied. 
 
 But good sense alone is a sedate and quiescent quality, 
 which manages its possessions well, but does not increase 
 them ; it collects few materials for its own operations, and 
 preserves safety, but never gains supremacy. Pope had likewise 
 genius ; a mind active, ambitious, and adventurous, always in- 
 vestigating, always aspiring ; in its widest searches still longing 
 to go forward, in its highest flights still wishing to be higher ; 
 always imagining something greater than it knows, always 
 endeavoring more than it can do. 
 
 To assist these powers he is said to have had great 
 strength and exactness of memory. That which he had heard 
 or read was not easily losTTand he had before him not only 
 
288 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 what his own meditation suggested, but what he had found in 
 other writers that might be accommodated to his present pur- 
 pose. 
 
 These benefits of nature he improved by incessant and un- 
 wearied diligence ; he had recourse to every source of intelli- 
 gence, and lost no opportunity of information ; he consulted 
 the living as well as the dead ; he read his compositions to his 
 friends, and was never contented with mediocrity when excel- 
 lence could be attained. He considered poetry as the business 
 of his life ; and however he might seem to lament his occupa- 
 tion, he followed it with constancy ; to make verses was his 
 first labor, and to mend them was his last. 
 
 From his attention to poetry he was never diverted. If 
 conversation offered any thing that could be improved, he 
 committed it to paper ; if a thought, or perhaps an expression 
 more happy than was common, rose to his mind, he was care- 
 ful to write it ; an independent distich was preserved for an 
 opportunity of insertion ; and some little fragments have been 
 found containing lines, or parts of lines, to be wrought upon at 
 some other time. 
 
 He was one of those few whose labor is their pleasure : he 
 was never elevated to negligence nor wearied to impatience ; he 
 never passed a fault unamended by indifference, nor quitted it 
 by despair. He labored his works, first to gain reputation, 
 and afterwards to keep it. 
 
 Of composition there are different methods. Some employ 
 at once memory and invention, and, with little intermediate use 
 of the pen, form and polish large masses by continued medita- 
 tion, and write their productions only when, in their own opin- 
 ion, they have completed them. It is related of Virgil that 
 his custom was to pour out a great number of verses in the 
 morning, and pass the day in retrenching exuberances and 
 correcting inaccuracies. The method of Pope, as may be col- 
 lected from his translation, was to write his first thoughts in 
 his first words, and gradually to amplify, decorate, rectify, and 
 refine them. 
 
 With such faculties and such dispositions he excelled every 
 other writer in poetical prudence : he wrote in such a manner 
 as might expose him to few hazards. He used almost always 
 the same fabric of verse ; and indeed by those few essays 
 which he made of any other he did not enlarge his reputation. 
 Of this uniformity the certain consequence was readiness and 
 dexterity. By perpetual practice language had, in his mind, a 
 systematical arrangement ; having always the same use for 
 wprds, he had words so selected and combined as to be ready at 
 
POPE. 289 
 
 his call. This increase of facility he confessed himself to have 
 perceived in the progress of his translation. 
 
 But what was yet of more importance, his effusions were 
 always voluntary, and his subjects chosen by himself. His in- 
 dependence secured him from drudging at a task and laboring 
 upon a barren topic ; he never exchanged praise for money, 
 nor opened a shop of condolence or congratulation. His 
 poems, therefore, were scarcely ever temporary. He suffered 
 coronations and royal marriages to pass without a song ; 
 and derived no opportunities from recent events, or any 
 popularity from the accidental disposition of his readers. He 
 was never reduced to the necessity of soliciting the sun to 
 shine upon a birthday, of calling the Graces and Virtues to a 
 wedding, or of saying what multitudes have said before him. 
 When he could produce nothing new he was at liberty to be 
 silent. -^ 
 
 His publications were, for the same reason, never hasty. He 
 is said to have sent nothing to the press till it had lain two 
 years under his inspection ; it is at least certain that he ven- 
 tured nothing without nice examination. He suffered the tu- 
 mult of imagination to subside, and the novelties of invention 
 to grow familiar. He knew that the mind is always enamoured 
 of its own productions, and did not trust his first fondness. 
 He consulted his friends, and listened with great willingness to 
 criticism ; and, what was of more importance, he consulted 
 himself, and let nothing pass against his own judgment. _ 
 
 He professed to have learned his poetry from Dryden,i 
 whom, whenever an opportunity was presented, he praised 
 through his whole life with unvaried liberality ; and perhaps^ 
 his character may receive some illustration if he be compared 
 with his master. 
 
 Integrity of understanding and nicety of discernment were 
 not allotted in a less proportion to Dryden than to Pope. 
 The rectitude of Dryden's mind was suflficiently shown by the 
 dismission of his poetical prejudices, and the rejection of un- 
 natural thoughts and rugged numbers. But Dryden never de- 
 sired to apply all the judgment that he had. He wrote, and 
 professed to write, merely for the people ; and when he 
 pleased others he contented himself. He spent no time in 
 struggles to rouse latent powers ; he never attempted to make 
 that better which was already good, nor often to mend what he 
 must have known to be faulty. He wrote, as he tells us, with 
 vfery little consideration ; when occasion or necessity called 
 upon him he poured out what the present moment happened 
 to supply, and when once it had passed the press ejected it 
 
'290 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 from his mind ; for when he had no pecuniary interest he had 
 no further solicitude. 
 
 Pope was not content to satisfy, he desired to excel ; and 
 therefore always endeavored to do his best ; he did not court 
 Ithe candor, but dared the judgment of his reader, amd expect- 
 ling no indulgence from others, he showed none to himself. 
 iHe examined lines and words with minute and punctilious ob- 
 servation, and retouched every part with indefatigable dili- 
 gence till he had left nothing to be forgiven. 
 ' For this reason he kept his pieces very long in his hands 
 while he considered and reconsidered them. The only poems 
 which can be supposed to have been written with such regard 
 to the times as might hasten their publication were the two 
 satires of " Thi rty-e ight ;" of which Dodsley told me that they 
 were brought to mm by the author that they might be fairly 
 copied. ' ' Almost every line, ' ' he said, ' ' was then written 
 twice over ; I gave him a clean transcript, which he sent some 
 time afterwards to me for the press with almost every line 
 written twice over a second time. ' ' 
 
 His declaration that his care for his works ceased at their 
 publication was not strictly true. His parental attention never 
 abandoned them ; what he found amiss in the first edition he 
 silently corrected in those that followed. He appears to have 
 revised the " Iliad," and freed it from some of its imperfec- 
 tions ; and the " Essay on Criticism" received many improve- 
 ments after its first appearance. It will seldom be found that 
 he altered without adding clearness, elegance, or vigor. Pope 
 had perhaps the judgment of Dryden ; but Dryden certainly 
 wanted the diligence of Pope. 
 
 In acquired knowledge the superiority must be allowed to 
 Dryden, whose education was more scholastic, and who, before 
 he became an author, had been allowed more time for study, 
 with better means of information. His mind has a larger 
 range, and he collects his images and illustrations from a more 
 extensive circumference of science. Dryden knew more of 
 man in his general nature, and Pope in his local manners. 
 The notions of Dryden were formed by comprehensive specu- 
 lation, and those of Pope by minute attention. There is more 
 dignity in the knowledge of Dryden, and more certainty in 
 that of Pope. 
 
 Poetry was not the sole praise of either ; for both excelled 
 likewise in prose ; but Pope did not borrow his prose from his 
 predecessor. The style of Dryden is capricious and varied ; 
 that of Pope is cautious and uniform. Dryden observes the 
 motions of his own mind ; Pope constrains his mind to his 
 
POPE. 291 
 
 own rules of composition. Dryden is sometimes vehement 
 and rapid ; Pope is always smooth, uniform, and gentle. 
 Dryden's page is a natural field, rising into inequalities, and 
 diversified by the varied exuberance of abundant vegetation ; 
 Pope's is a velvet lawn, shaven by the scythe and levelled by 
 the roller. 
 
 Of genius, that power which constitutes a poet ; that 
 quality without which judgment is cold and knowledge is inert ; 
 that energy which collects, combines, amplifies, and animates, 
 the superiority must, with some hesitation, be allowed to Dry- 
 den. It is not to be inferred that of this poetical vigor Pope 
 had only a little because Dryden had more ; for every other 
 writer since Milton must give place to Pope ; and even of Dry- 
 den it must be said that, if he has brighter paragraphs, he has 
 not better poems. Dryden's performances were always hasty, 
 either excited by some external occasion or extorted by do- 
 mestic necessity ; he composed without consideration, and pub- 
 lished without correction. What his mind could supply at 
 call, or gather in one excursion, was all that he sought and all 
 that he gave. The dilatory caution of Pope enabled him to 
 condense his sentiments, to multiply his images, and to accu- 
 mulate all that study might produce or chance might supply. 
 If the flights ol Dryden therefore are higher. Pope continues 
 longer on the wing. If of Dryden's fire the blaze is brighter, 
 of Pope's the heat is more regular and constant. Dryden often 
 surpasses expectation, and Pope never falls below it. Dryden 
 is read with frequent astonishment, and Pope with perpetual 
 delight. 
 
 This parallel will, I hope, when it is well considered, be 
 found just ; and if the reader should suspect me, as I suspect 
 myself, of some partial fondness for the memory of Dryden, let 
 him not too hastily condemn me ; for meditation and inquiry 
 may perhaps show him the reasonableness of my determination. 
 
 The works of Pope are now to be distinctly examined, not 
 so much with attention to slight faults or petty beauties, as to 
 the general character and effect of each performance. 
 
 It seems natural for a young poet to initiate himself by pas- 
 torals, which, not professing to imitate real life, require np ex- 
 perience ; and, exhibiting only the simple operation of unmin- 
 gled passions, admit no subtle reasoning or deep inquiry. 
 Pope's Pastorals are not, however, composed but with close 
 thought ; they have reference to the times of the day, the sea- 
 sons of the year, and the periods of human life. The last,' 
 that which turns the attention upon age and death, was the 
 
292 DR. SAMUML yOHNSOrf ON 
 
 author's favorite. To tell of disappbmtment and miselry, to 
 thicken the darkness of futurity, and perplex the labyrinth of 
 uncertainty has been always a delicious employment of the 
 poets. His preference was probably just. I wish, however, 
 that his fondness had not overlooked a line in which the 
 Zephyrs are made to lament in silence. 
 
 To charge these Pastorals with want of invention is to re- 
 quire what was never intended. The imitations are so am- 
 bitiously frequent that the writer evidently means rather to 
 show his literature than his wit. It is surely sufficient for an 
 author of sixteen not only to be able to copy the poems of an- 
 tiquity with judicious selection, but to have obtained sufficient 
 power of language and skill in metre to exhibit a series of 
 versification which had in English poetry no precedent, nor 
 has since had an imitation. 
 
 The design of ' ' Windsor Forest' ' is evidently derived from 
 "Cooper's Hill," with some attention to Waller's poem on 
 " The Park ;" but Pope cannot be denied to excel his masters 
 in variety and elegance, and the art of interchanging descrip- 
 tion, narrative, and morality. The objection made by Dennis 
 is the want of plan, of a regular subordination of parts termi- 
 nating in the principal and original design. There is this want 
 in most descriptive poems, because as the scenes which they 
 must exhibit successively are all subsisting at the same time, the 
 order in which they are shown must by necessity be arbitrary, 
 and more is not to be expected from the last part than from 
 .the first. The attention, therefore, which cannot be detained 
 by suspense must be excited by diversity, such as his poem 
 offers to its reader. 
 
 But the desire of diversity may be too much indulged ; the 
 parts of "Windsor Forest" which deserve least praise are 
 those which were added to enliven the stillness of the scene, 
 the appearance of Father Thames and the transformation of 
 Lodona. Addison had, in his " Campaign," derided the 
 rivers that "rise from their oozy beds" to tell stories of 
 heroes ; and it is therefore strange that Pope should adopt a 
 fiction not only unnatural but lately censured. The story of 
 Lodona is told with sweetness ; but a new metamorphosis is a 
 ready and puerile expedient ; nothing is easier than to tell how 
 a flower was once a blooming virgin, or a rock an obdurate 
 tyrant. 
 
 The " Temple of Fame" has, as Steele warmly declared, 
 "a thousand beauties." Every part is splendid; there is 
 great luxuriance of ornaments ; the original vision of Chaucer 
 was never denied to be much improved ; the allegory is very 
 
POP£. 
 
 293 
 
 skilfully continued, the imagery is properly Selected and learn- 
 edly displayed ; yet with all this comprehension of excellence, 
 as its scene is laid in remote ages, and its sentiments, if the 
 concluding paragraph be excepted, have little relation to gen- 
 eral manners or common life, it never obtained much notice, 
 but is turned silently over and seldom quoted or mentioned 
 with either praise or blame. 
 
 That " The Messiah" excels the " Polio" is no great 
 praise, if it be considered from what original the improve- 
 ments are derived. 
 
 The " Verses on an Unfortunate Lady" have drawn much 
 attention by the illaudable singularity of treating suicide with 
 respect ; and they must be allowed to be written in some parts 
 with vigorous animation, and in others with gentle tenderness ; 
 nor has Pope produced any poem in which the sense predomi- 
 nates more over the diction. But the tale is not skilfully told ; 
 it is not easy to discover the character of either the Lady or 
 her Guardian. History relates that she was about to disparage 
 herself by a marriage with an inferior ; Pope praises her for the 
 dignity of ambition, and yet condemns the uncle to detestation 
 for his pride ; the ambitious love of a niece may be opposed 
 by the interest, malice, or envy of an uncle, but never by his 
 pride. On such an occasion a poet may be allowed to be ob- 
 scure, but inconsistency never can be right. 
 
 The " Ode for St. Cecilia's Day" was undertaken at the 
 desire of Steele. In this the author is generally confessed to 
 have miscarried ; yet he has miscarried only as compared with 
 Dryden, for he has far outgone other competitors. Dryden'j^ 
 plan is better chosen ; history will always take stronger hold of 
 the attention than fable : the passions excited by Dryden are 
 the pleasures and pains of real life ; the scene of Pope is laid 
 in imaginary existence ; Pope is read with calm acquiescence, 
 Dryden with turbulent delight ; Pope hangs upon the ear, and^i 
 Dryden finds the passes of the mind. "" 
 
 Both the odes want the essential constitutent of metrical 
 compositions, the stated recurrence of settled numbers. It 
 may be alleged that Pindar is said by Horace to have written 
 numeris lege solutis ; but as no such lax performances have 
 been transmitted to us, the meaning of that expression cannot 
 be fixed ; and perhaps the like return might properly be made 
 to a modern Pindarist, as Mr. Cobb received from Bentley, 
 \vho, when he found his criticisms upon a Greek Exercise, 
 which Cobb had presented, refuted one after another by Pin- 
 dar's authority, cried out at last, " Pindar was a bold fellow, 
 but thou art an impudent one." 
 
294 ^^- S-^^UEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 If Pope's ode be particularly inspected, it will be found 
 that the first stanza consists of sounds, well chosen indeed, but 
 only sounds. 
 
 The second consists of hyperbolical commonplaces, easily 
 to be found, and perhaps without much difficulty to be as well 
 expressed. 
 
 In the third, however, there are numbers, images, harmony, 
 and vigor not unworthy the antagonist of Dryden. Had all 
 been like this — ^but every part cannot be the best. 
 
 The next stanzas place and detain us in the dark and dis- 
 mal regions of mythology, where neither hope nor fear, neither 
 joy nor sorrow can be found : the poet, however, faithfully at- 
 tends us : we have all that can be performed by elegance of 
 diction or sweetness of versification ; but what can form avail 
 without better matter ? 
 
 The last stanza recurs again to commonplaces. The con- 
 clusion is too evidently modelled by that of Dryden ; and it 
 may be remarked that both end with the same fault ; the com- 
 parison of each is literal on one side and metaphorical on the 
 other. 
 
 Poets do not always express their own thoughts ; Pope, with 
 all this labor in the praise of Music, was ignorant of its princi- 
 ples and insensible of its effects. 
 
 / One of his greatest, though of his earliest works, is the 
 ^' Essay on Criticism ;" which, if he had written nothing else, 
 would have placed him among the first critics and the first 
 poets, as it exhibits every mode of excellence that can embel- 
 lish or dignify didactic composition: selection of matter, nov- 
 elty of arrangement, justness of precept, splendor of illustra- 
 tion, and propriety of digression. I know not whether it be 
 pleasing to consider that he produced this piece at twenty, and 
 never afterwards excelled it : he that delights himself with ob- 
 serving that such powers may be soon attained cannot but 
 grieve to think that life was ever at a stand. 
 
 To mention the particular beauties of the Essay would be 
 unprofitably tedious ; but I cannot forbear to observe that the 
 comparison of a student's progress in the sciences with the 
 journey of a traveller in the Alps, is perhaps the best that Eng- 
 lish poetry can show. A simile, to be perfect, must both illus- 
 trate and ennoble the subject ; must show it to the understand- 
 ing in a clearer view, and display it to the fancy with greater 
 dignity, but either of these qualities may be sufficient to rec- 
 ommend it. In didactic poetry, of which the great purpose is 
 instruction, a simile may be praised which illustrates, though it 
 does not ennoble ; in heroics, that may be admitted which en- 
 
fOPE. 295 
 
 nobles, though it does not illustrate. That it may be com- 
 plete it is required to exhibit, independently of its references, 
 a pleasing image ; for a simile is said to be a short episode. 
 To this antiquity was so attentive that circumstances were 
 sometimes added, which, having no parallels, served only to fill 
 the imagination and produced what Perrault ludicrously called 
 " comparisons with a long tail." In their similes the greatest 
 writers have sometimes failed ; the ship-race, compared with 
 the chariot-race, is neither illustrated not aggrandized ; land 
 and water make all the difference : when Apollo, running after 
 Daphne, is likened to a greyhound chasing a hare, there is 
 nothing gained ; the ideas of pursuit and flight are too plain to 
 be made plainer ; and a god, and the daughter of a god, are 
 not represented much to their advantage by a hare and dog. 
 The simile of the Alps has no useless parts, yet affords a strik- 
 ing picture by itself ; it makes the foregoing position better 
 understood, and enables it to take faster hold on the attention ; 
 it assists the apprehension and elevates the fancy. 
 
 Let me likewise dwell a little on the celebrated paragraph 
 in which it is directed that ' ' the sound should seem an echo to 
 the sense ;" a precept which Pope is allowed to have observed 
 beyond any other English poet. 
 
 This notion of representative metre, and the desire of dis- 
 covering frequent adaptations of the sound to the sense, have 
 produced, in my opinion, many wild conceits and imaginary 
 beauties. All that can furnish this representation are the 
 sounds of the words considered singly, and the time in which 
 they are pronounced. Every language has some words framed 
 to exhibit the noises which they express, as thump, rattle, 
 growl, hiss. These, however, are but few, and the poet can- 
 not make them more, nor can they be of any use but when 
 sound is to be mentioned. The time of pronunciation was in 
 the dactylic measures of the learned languages capable of con- 
 siderable variety ; but that variety could be accommodated only 
 to motion or duration, and different degrees of motion were 
 perhaps expressed by verses rapid or slow, without much at- 
 tention of the writer, when the image had full possession of his 
 fancy ; but our language having little flexibility, our verses can 
 differ very little in their cadence. The fancied resemblances, 
 I fear, arise sometimes merely from the ambiguity of words ; 
 there is supposed to be some relation between a soft line and a 
 soft couch, or between hard syllables and hard fortune. 
 
 Motion, however, may be in some sort exemplified ; and yet 
 it may be suspected that in such resemblances the mind often 
 governs the ear, and the sounds are estimated by their mean- 
 
296 DR. SAMUEL yoHNSOM ON 
 
 ing. One of their most successful attempts has been to describd 
 the labor of Sisyphus : 
 
 " With many a weary step, and many a groan. 
 
 Up a high hill he heaves a huge round stone ; 
 
 The huge round stone, resulting with a bound. 
 Thunders impetuous down, and smokes along the ground. 
 
 Who does not perceive the stone to move slowly upward, and 
 roll violently back ? But set the same numbers to another 
 sense : 
 
 ' ' While many a merry tale, and many a song, 
 Cheer'd the rough road, we wished the rough road long. 
 The roug.i road then, returning in a round, 
 
 Mock'd our impatient steps, for all was fairy ground." 
 
 We have now surely lost much of the delay and much of the 
 rapidity. 
 
 But to show how little the greatest master of numbers can 
 fix the principles of representative harmony, it will be suffi- 
 cient to remark that the poet who tells us that 
 
 " When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw. 
 The line too labors, and the words move slow : 
 Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain. 
 
 Flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main — " 
 
 when he had enjoyed for about thirty years the praise of Ca- 
 milla's lightness of foot, he tried another experiment upon 
 sound and time, and produced this memorable triplet : 
 
 ' Waller was smooth ; but Dryden taught to join 
 The varying verse, the full resounding line. 
 The long majestic march, and energy divine. 
 
 join ) 
 
 Here are the swiftness of the rapid race, and the march of 
 slow-paced majesty, exhibited by the same poet in the same 
 sequence of syllables, except that the exact prosodist will find 
 the line of swiftness by one time longer than that of tardiness. 
 
 Beauties of this kind are commonly fancied ; and when 
 real are technical and nugatory, not to be rejected and not to 
 be solicited. 
 
 To the praises which have been accumulated on " The 
 Rape of the Lock," by readers of every class, from the critic to 
 the waiting-maid, it is difficult to make any addition, Of that 
 which is universally allowed to be the most attractive of all lu- 
 dicrous compositions, let it rather be now inquired from what 
 sources the power of pleasing is derived. 
 
 Dr. Warburton, who excelled in critical perspicacity, has 
 remarked that the preternatural agents are very happily adapt- 
 
POPR. 297 
 
 fed to the purposes of the poem. The heathen deities can no 
 longer gain attention ; we should have turned away from a con- 
 test between Venus and Diana. The employment of allegori- 
 cal persons always excites conviction of its own absurdity ; 
 they may produce effects, but cannot conduct actions : when 
 the phantom is put in motion, it dissolves : thus Discord may 
 raise a mutiny ; but Discord cannot conduct a march nor be- 
 siege a town. Pope brought into view a new race of beings, 
 with powers and passions proportionate to their operation. 
 The Sylphs and Gnomes act at the toilet and the tea-table, 
 what more terrific and more powerful phantoms perform on the 
 stormy ocean or the field of battle ; they give their proper 
 help and do their proper mischief. 
 
 Pope is said, by an objector, not to have been the inventor 
 of this petty notion ; a charge which might with more justice 
 have been brought against the author of the " Iliad," who 
 doubtless adopted the religious system of his country ; for 
 what is there but the names of his agents which Pope has not 
 invented ? Has he not assigned them characters and opera- 
 tions never heard of before ? Has he not, at least, given them 
 their first poetical existence ? If this is not sufficient to de- 
 nominate his work original, nothing original ever can be written. 
 
 In this work are exhibited, in a very high degree, the two 
 most engaging powers of an author. New things are made fa- 
 miliar, and familiar things are made new. A race of aerial peo- 
 ple, never heard of before, is presented to us in a manner so 
 clear and easy that the reader seeks for no further informa- 
 tion, but immediately mingles with his new acquaintance, 
 adopts their interests, and attends their pursuits ; loves a 
 Sylph and detests a Gnome. 
 
 That familiar things are made new, every paragraph will 
 prove. The subject of the poem is an event below the com- 
 mon incidents of common life ; nothing real is introduced that 
 is not seen so often as to be no longer regarded ; yet the whole 
 detail of a female day is here brought before us, invested with 
 so much art of decoration that, though nothing is disguised, 
 every thing is striking, and we feel all the appetite of curiosity 
 for that from which we have a thousand times turned fastidi-.- 
 ously away. 
 
 The purpose of the poet is, as he tells us, to laugh at ' ' the 
 little unguarded follies of the female sex." It is therefore 
 without justice that Dennis charges " The Rape of the Lock " 
 with the want of a moral, and for that reason sets it below the 
 " Lutrin," which exposes the pride and discord of the clergy. 
 Perhaps neither Pope nor Boileau has made the world much 
 
298 DR. SAMUEL yoffNSONf Off 
 
 better than he found it ; but if they had both succeeded, h 
 were easy to tell who would have deserved most from pub- 
 lic gratitude. The freaks and humors, and spleen and van- 
 ity of women, as they embroil families in discord, and fill 
 houses with disquiet, do more to obstruct the happiness of life 
 in a year than the ambition of the clergy in many centuries. It 
 has been well observed that the misery of man proceeds not 
 from any single crush of overwhelming evil, but from small 
 -vexations continually repeated. 
 
 It is remarked by Dennis, likewise, that the machinery is 
 superfluous ; that by all the bustle of preternatural operation 
 the main event is neither hastened nor retarded. To this charge 
 an efficacious answer is not easily made. The Sylphs cannot 
 be said to help or to oppose ; and it must be allowed to imply 
 some want of art that their power has not been sufficiently in- 
 termingled with the action. Other parts may likewise be 
 charged with want of connection : the game at ombre might be 
 spared ; but if the lady had lost her hair while she was intent 
 upon her cards, it might have been inferred that those who are 
 too fond of play will be in danger of neglecting more important 
 interests. Those perhaps are faults ; but what are such faults 
 to so much excellence ! 
 
 The Epistle of ' ' Eloisa to Abelard ' ' is one of the most happy 
 productions of human wit : the subject is so judiciously chosen 
 that it would be difficult, in turning over the annals of the 
 world, to find another which so many circumstances concur to 
 recommend. We regularly interest ourselves most in the for- 
 tune of those who most deserve our notice. Abelard and 
 Eloise were conspicuous in their days for eminence of merit. 
 The heart naturally loves truth. The adventures and misfor- 
 tunes of this illustrious pair are known from undisputed his- 
 tory. Their fate does not leave the mind in hopeless dejec- 
 tion ; for they both found quiet and consolation in retirement 
 and piety. So new and so affecting is their story that it su- 
 persedes invention ; and imagination ranges at full liberty without 
 straggling into scenes of fable. 
 
 The story, thus skilfully adopted, has been diligently im- 
 proved. Pope has left nothing behind him which seems more 
 the effect of studious perseverance and laborious revisal. 
 Here is particularly observable the curiosa felicitas, a fruitful 
 soil and careful cultivation. Here is no crudeness of sense 
 nor asperity of language. 
 
 The sources from which sentiments which have so much 
 vigor and efficacy have been drawn are shown to be the mystic 
 writers by the learned author of the ' ' Essay on the Life and 
 
POPE.. 
 
 299 
 
 Writings of Pope," a book which teaches how the brow of 
 Criticism may be smoothed, and how she may be enabled, with 
 all her severity, to attract and to delight. 
 
 The train of my disquisition has now conducted me to that 
 poetical wonder, the translation of the ' ' Iliad, ' ' a performance 
 which no age or nation can pretend to equal. To the Greeks 
 translation was almost unknown ; it was totally unknown to the 
 inhabitants of Greece. They had no recourse to the barbarians 
 for poetical beauties, but sought for every thing in Homer, 
 where, indeed, there is but little which they might not find. 
 
 The Italians have been very diligent translators ; but I can 
 hear of no version, unless perhaps Anguilara's Ovid may be 
 excepted, which is read with eagerness. The " Iliad " of Sal- 
 vini every reader may discover to be punctiliously exact ; but 
 it seems to be the work of a linguist skilfully pedantic ; and his 
 countrymen, the proper judges of its power to please, reject it 
 with disgust. 
 
 Their predecessors, the Romans, have left some specimens of 
 translations behind them, and that employment must have had 
 some credit in which TuUy and Germanicus engaged ; but un- 
 less we suppose, what is perhaps true, that the plays of Ter- 
 ence were versions of Menander, nothing translated seems ever 
 to have risen to high reputation. The French, in the meridian 
 hour of their learning, were very laudably industrious to enrich 
 their own language with the wisdom of the ancients ; but found 
 themselves reduced, by whatever necessity, to turn the Greek 
 and Roman poetry into prose. Whoever could read an author 
 could translate him. From such rivals little can be feared. 
 
 The chief help of Pope in this arduous undertaking was 
 drawn from the versions of Dryden. Virgil had borrowed 
 much of his imagery from Homer, and part of the debt was 
 now paid by his translator. Pope searched the pages of Dry- 
 den for happy combinations of heroic diction ; but it will ndjt 
 be denied that he added much to what he found. He cultivat- 
 ed our language with so much diligence and art that he hab 
 left in his Homer a treasure of poetical elegances to posterity^ - 
 His version may be said to have tuned the English tongue ; for 
 since its appearance no writer, however deficient in other pow- 
 ers, has wanted melody. Such a series of lines, so elaborately 
 corrected and so sweetly modulated, took possession of the 
 public ear ; the vulgar was enamoured of the poem, and the 
 learned wondered at the translation. 
 
 But in the most general applause discordant voices will al- 
 ways be heard. It has been objected by some, who wish to be 
 numbered among the sons of learning, that Pope's version ot 
 
.300 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 .Homer is not Homerical ; that it exhibits no resemblance of 
 the original and characteristic manner of the Father of Poetry, 
 as it wants his awful simplicity, his artless grandeur, his un- 
 affected majesty. This cannot be totally denied ; but it must 
 be remembered that necessitas quod cogit defendit, that may be 
 lawfully done which cannot be forborne. Time and place will 
 always enforce regard. In estimating this translation consid- 
 eration must be had of the nature of our language, the form of 
 our language, the form of our metre, and, above all, of the 
 change which two thousand years have made in the modes of 
 [life and the habits of thought. Virgil wrote in a language of 
 the same general fabric with that of Homer, in verses of the 
 same measure, and in an age nearer to Homer's time by eight- 
 een hundred years ; yet he found, even then, the state of the 
 world so much altered, and the demand for elegance so in- 
 creased, that mere nature would be endured no longer ; and 
 perhaps in the multitude of borrowed passages very few can 
 be shown which he has not embellished. 
 
 There is a time when nations, emerging from barbarity, and 
 falling into regular subordination, gain leisure to grow wise, 
 and feel the shame of ignorance and. the craving pain of unsat- 
 isfied curiosity. To this hunger of the mind plain sense is 
 grateful ; that which fills the void removes uneasiness, and to 
 be free from pain for a while is pleasure ; but repletion gene- 
 rates fastidiousness ; a saturated intellect soon becomes luxuri- 
 ous, and knowledge finds no willing reception till it is recom- 
 mended by artificial diction. Thus it will be found in the 
 progress of learning that in all nations the first writers are 
 simple, and that every age improves in elegance. One refine- 
 ment always makes way for another, and what was expedient 
 to Virgil was necessary to Pope. 
 
 I suppose many readers of the English " Iliad," when they 
 have been touched with some unexpected beauty of the lighter 
 kind, have tried to enjoy it in the original, where, alas ! it was 
 not to be found. Homer doubtless owes to his translator 
 many Ovidian graces not exactly suitable to his character ; but 
 to have added can be no great crime, if nothing be taken away. 
 Elegance is surely to be desired, if it be not gained at the ex- 
 pense of dignity. A hero would wish to be loved as well as 
 to be reverenced. 
 
 To a thousand cavils one answer is sufficient ; the purpose 
 of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy 
 the power of pleasing must be blown aside. Pope wrote for 
 his own age and his own nation : he knew that it was necessary 
 to golor the images and point the sentiments pf his author ; 
 
POPE. 30 1 
 
 he therefore made him graceful, but lost him some of his sub- 
 limity. 
 
 The copious notes with which the version is accompanied, 
 and by which it is recommended to many readers, though they 
 were undoubtedly written to swell the volumes, ought not to 
 pass without praise ; commentaries which attract the reader by 
 the pleasure of perusal have not often appeared ; the notes of 
 others are read to clear difficulties, those of Pope to vary en- 
 tertainment. 
 
 It has, however, been objected with sufficient reason that 
 there is in the commentary too much of unseasonable levity 
 and affected gayety ; that too many appeals are made to the 
 ladies, and the ease which is so carefully preserved is some- 
 times the ease of a trifler. Every art has its terms, and every 
 kind of instruction its proper style ; the gravity of common 
 critics may be tedious, but is less despicable than childish 
 merriment./ 
 
 Of the ' ' Odyssey ' ' nothing remains to be observed ; 
 the same general phrase may be given to both translations, and 
 a particular examination of either would require a large vol- 
 ume. The notes were written by Broome, who endeavored, 
 not unsuccessfully, to imitate his master. 
 
 Of the ' ' Dunciad ' ' the hint is confessedly taken from Dry^ 
 den's " Mac Flecknoe ;" but the plan is so enlarged and diver- 
 sified as justly to claim the praise of an original and affords\ 
 the best specimen that has yet appeared of personal satire ludi- 
 crously pompous. 
 
 That the design was moral, whatever the author might tell 
 either his readers or himself, I am not convinced. The first mo- 
 tive was the desire of revenging the contempt with which The- 
 obald had treated his Shakespeare, and regaining the honor 
 which he had lost, by crushing his opponent. Theobald was not 
 of bulk enough to fill a poem, and therefore it was necessary 
 to find other enemies with other names at whose expense he 
 might divert the public. 
 
 In this design there was petulance and malignity enough ; 
 but I cannot think it very criminal. An author places himself 
 uncalled before the tribunal of criticism, and solicits fame at 
 the hazard of disgrace. Dulness or deformity are not culpable 
 in themselves, but may be very justly reproached when they 
 pretend to the honor of wit or the influence of beauty. If 
 bad writers were to pass without reprehension, what should re- 
 strain them ? impune diem consumpscrit ingens Telephus ; and 
 upon bad writers only will gensure h^v? much effect, The §a- 
 
302 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 tire which brought Theobald and Moore into contempt drop- 
 ped impotent from Bentley like the javelin of Priam. 
 
 All truth is valuable, and satirical criticism may be consid- 
 ered as useful when it rectifies error and improves judgment : 
 he that refines the public taste is a public benefactor. 
 
 The beauties of this poem are well known ; its chief fault is 
 the grossness of its images. Pope and Swift had an unnatural 
 delight in ideas physically impure, such as every other tongue 
 utters with unwillingness, and of which every ear shrinks from 
 the mention. 
 
 But even this fault, offensive as it is, may be forgiven for 
 the excellence of other passages ; such as the formation and 
 dissolution of Moore, the account of the traveller, the misfor- 
 tune of the florist, and the crowded thoughts and stately num- 
 bers which dignify the concluding paragraph. 
 
 The alterations which have been made in the ' ' Dunciad, ' ' 
 not always for the better, require that it should be published 
 with all its variations. 
 
 The ' ' Essay on Man ' ' was a work of great labor and long 
 consideration, but certainly not the happiest of Pope's perform- 
 ances. The subject is perhaps not very proper for poetry, 
 and the poet- was not sufficiently master, of his-,sn.bj.ect ; meta- 
 physical morality was to him a new study : he was proud of his 
 .acquisitions, and, supposing himself master of great secrets, 
 was in haste to teach what he had not learned. Thus he tells 
 us, in the first epistle, that from the nature of the Supreme Be- 
 ing may be deduced an order of beings such as mankind, be- 
 cause infinite excellence can do only what is best. He finds 
 out that these beings must be "somewhere ;" and that " all the 
 question is, whether man be in a wrong place." Surely if, 
 according to the poet's Leibnitian reasoning, we may infer that 
 man ought to be, only because he is, we may allow that his 
 place is the right place, because he has it. Supreme Wisdom 
 is not less infallible in disposing than in creating. But what is 
 meant by somewhere and place, and wrong place, it had been 
 vain to ask Pope, who probably had never asked himself. 
 
 Having exalted himself into the chair of wisdom, he tells us 
 much that every man knows, and much that he does not know 
 himself ; that we see but little, and that the order of the uni- 
 verse is beyond our comprehesion ; an opinion not very un- 
 common ; and that there is a chain of subordinate beings 
 ' ' from infinite to nothing, ' ' of which himself and his readers 
 are equally ignorant. But he gives us one comfort, which 
 without his help he supposes unattainable, in the position 
 "' that though we are fools yet God is wise. ' ' 
 
POPE. 
 
 303 
 
 This Essay affords an egregious instance of the predomi- 
 nance of genius, the dazzUng splendor of imagery, and the se- 
 ductive powers of eloquence. Never were penury of knowl- 
 edge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised. The 
 reader feels his mind full, though he learns nothing ; and, 
 when he meets it in its new array, no longer knows the talk of 
 his mother and his nurse. When these wonder-working sounds 
 sink into sense, and the doctrine of the Essay, disrobed of its 
 ornaments, is left to the powers of its naked excellence, what 
 shall we discover ? That we are, in comparison with our Crea- 
 tor, very weak and ignorant ; that we do not uphold the chain 
 of existence ; and that we could not make one another with 
 more skill than we are made. We may learn yet more ; that 
 the arts of human life were copied from the instinctive opera- 
 tions of other animals ; that, if the world be made for man, it 
 may be said that man was made for geese. To these profound 
 principles of natural knowledge are added some moral instruc- 
 tions equally new ; that self-interest well understood will pro- 
 duce social concord ; that men are mutual gainers by mutual 
 benefits ; that evil is sometimes balanced by good ; that human 
 advantages are unstable and fallacious, of uncertain duration 
 and doubtful effect ; that our true honor is, not to have a 
 great part, but to act it well ; that virtue only is our own ; and 
 that hapiness is always in our power. 
 
 Surely a man of no very comprehensive search may venture 
 to say that he has heard all this before ; butit_jwas_nev€t-till 
 now recommended iy such- aJaiaze-of .emhfiIIaihments.or_g.uch 
 sweetness of melody. The vigorous contraction of some 
 thbtrghtsTtfieTuxuriant amplification of others, the incidental 
 illustrations, and sometimes the dignity, sometimes the soft- 
 ness of the verses, enchain philosophy, suspend criticism, and 
 oppress judgment by overpowering pleasure. 
 
 This is true of many paragraphs ; yet, if I had undertaken 
 to exemplify Pope's felicity of composition before a rigid 
 critic, I should not select the ' ' Essay on Man, ' ' for it contains 
 more lines unsuccessfully labored, more harshness of diction, 
 more thoughts imperfectly expressed, more levity without ele- 
 gance, and more heaviness without strength than will easily be 
 found in all his other works. 
 
 The Characters of Men and Women are the product of dili- 
 gent speculation upon human life ; much labor has been be- 
 stowed upon them, and Pope very seldom labored in vain. 
 That his excellence may be properly estimated I recommend a 
 comparison of his Characters of Women with Boileau's satire ; 
 it will then be seen with how much more perspicacity femalq 
 
304 I^R- SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 nature is investigated and female excellence selected ; and he 
 surely is no mean writer to whom Boileau should be found in- 
 ferior. The Characters of Men, however, are written with more, 
 if not with deeper, thought, and exhibit many passages exqui- 
 sitely beautiful. The " Gem and the Flower " will not easily 
 be equalled. In the women's part are some defects ; the char- 
 acter of Atossa is not so neatly finished as that of Clodio ; and 
 some of the female characters may be found perhaps more fre- 
 quently among men ; what is said of Philomede was true of 
 Prior. 
 
 In the Epistles to Lord Bathurst and Lord BurUngton, Dr. 
 Warburton has endeavored to find a train of thought which 
 was never in the writer's head, and to support his hypothesis 
 has printed that first which was published last. In one, the 
 most valuable passage is perhaps the Elegy on " Good Sense ;" 
 and the other the ' ' End of the Duke of Buckingham. ' ' 
 
 The epistle to Arbuthnot, now arbitrarily called ' ' The Pro- 
 logue to the Satires, " is a performance consisting, as it seems, of 
 many fragments wrought into one design, which by this union of 
 scattered beauties contains more striking paragraphs than could 
 probably have been brought together into an occasional work. 
 As there is no stronger motive to exertion than self-defence, no 
 part has more elegance, spirit, or dignity than the poet's vin- 
 dication of his own character. The meanest passage is the 
 satire upon Sporus. 
 
 Of the two poems which derived their names from the year, 
 and which are called " The Epilogue to the Satires," it was 
 very justly remarked by Savage that the second was in the 
 whole more strongly conceived and more equally supported, 
 but that it had no single passage equal to the contention in the 
 first for the dignity of vice and the celebration of the triumph 
 of corruption. 
 
 The imitations of Horace seem to have been written as re- 
 laxations of his genius. This employment became his favorite 
 by its facility ; the plan was ready to his hand, and nothing was 
 required but to accommodate as he could the sentiments of an 
 old author to recent facts or familiar images ; but what is easy 
 is seldom excellent ; such imitations cannot give pleasure to 
 common readers : the man of learning may be sometimes sur- 
 prised and delighted by an unexpected parallel ; but the com- 
 parison requires knowledge of the original, which will likewise 
 often detect strained applications. Between Roman images and 
 English manners there will be an irreconcilable dissimilitude, 
 and the work will be generally uncouth and party-colored, 
 neither original nor translated, neither ancient nor modern. 
 
POPE. 305 
 
 Pope had, in proportions very nicely adjusted to each 
 other, all the qualities that constitute genius. He had inven- 
 tion, by which new trains of events are formed and new scenes 
 of imagery displayed, as in the " Rape of the Lock ;" and by 
 which extrinsic and adventitious embellishments and illustra- 
 tions are connected with a known subject, as in the " Essay on 
 Criticism." He had «/«a^?«aA'o«, which strongly impresses on 
 the writer's mind and enables him to convey to the reader the 
 various forms of nature, incidents of life, and energies of pas- 
 sion, as in his " Eloisa," " Windsor Forest," and the " Ethic 
 Epistles." He haA judgment, which selects from life or nature 
 what the present purpose requires, and, by separating the es- 
 sence of things from its concomitants, often makes the repre- 
 sentation more powerful than the reality ; and he had colors 
 of language always before him, ready to decorate his matter 
 with every grace of elegant expression, as when he accommo- 
 dates his diction to the wonderful multiplicity of Homer's sen- 
 timents and descriptions. 
 
 Poetical expression includes sound as well as meaning : 
 " Music," says Dryden, " is inarticulate poetry ;" among the 
 excellences of Pope, therefore, must be mentioned the melody 
 of his metre. By perusing the works of Dryden he discovered 
 the most perfect fabric of English verse, and habituated him- 
 self to that only which he found the best ; in consequence of 
 which restraint his poetry has been censured as too uniformly 
 musical, and as glutting the ear with unvaried sweetness. I 
 suspect this objection to be the cant of those who judge by prin- 
 ciples rather than perception ; and who would even themselves 
 have less pleasure in his works if he had tried to relieve atten- 
 tion by studied discords, or affected to break his lines and vary 
 his pauses. 
 
 But though he was thus careful of his versification, he did 
 not oppress his powers with superfluous rigor. He seems to 
 have thought with Boileau. that the practice of writing might 
 be refined till the difficulty should overbalance the advantage. 
 The construction of his language is not always strictly gramma- 
 tical : with those rhymes which prescription had conjoined he 
 contented himself, without regard to Swift's remonstrances, 
 though there was no striking consonance ; nor was he very 
 careful to vary his terminations, or to refuse admission, at a 
 small distance, to the same rhymes. 
 
 To Swift's edict for the exclusion of Alexandrines and trip- 
 lets he paid little regard : he admitted them, but, in the opin- 
 ion of Fenton, too rarely ; he uses them more liberally in the 
 translations than his poems. 
 
306 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 He has a few double rhymes, and always, I think, unsuc- 
 cessfully, except once in the " Rape of the Lock." 
 
 Expletives he very early ejected from his verses ; but he 
 now and then admits an epithet rather commodious than im- 
 portant. Each of the six first lines of "Iliad" might lose 
 two syllables with very little diminution of the meaning ; and 
 sometimes, after all his art and labor, one verse seems to be made 
 for the sake of another. In his latter productions the dic- 
 tion is sometimes vitiated by French idioms, with which Boling- 
 broke had perhaps infected him. 
 
 I have been told that the couplet by which he declared his 
 own ear to be most gratified was this : 
 
 ' ' Lo, where Mseotis sleeps, and hardly flows 
 The freezing Tanais through a waste of snows." 
 
 But the reason of this preference I cannot discover. 
 
 It is remarked by Watts that there is scarcely a happy com- 
 bination of words, or a phrase poetically elegant in the English 
 language, which Pope has not inserted into his version of Ho- 
 mer. How he obtained possession of so many beauties of 
 speech it were desirable to know. That he gleaned from au- 
 thors, .obscure as well as eminent, what he thought brilliant or 
 useful, and preserved it all in a regular collection, is not un- 
 likely. When, in his last years. Hall's Satires were shown 
 him, he wished that he had seen them sooner. New senti- 
 ments and new images others may produce ; but to attempt 
 any further improvement of versification will be dangerous. 
 Art and diligence have now done their best, and what shall be 
 added will be the effort of tedious toil and needless curiosity. 
 
 After all this, it is surely superfluous to answer the question 
 that has once been asked. Whether Pope was a poet ? other- 
 wise than by asking, in return, If Pope be not a poet, where is 
 poetry to be found ? To circumscribe poetry by a definition 
 will only show the narrowness of the definer, though a defini- 
 tion which shall exclude Pope will not easily be made. Let us 
 look round upon the present time, and back upon the past ; 
 let us inquire to whom the voice of mankind has decreed the 
 wreath of poetry ; let their productions be examined and their 
 claims stated, and the pretensions of Pope will be no more dis- 
 puted. Had he given the world only his version, the name of 
 poet must have been allowed him ; if the writer of the " Iliad " 
 were to class his successors, he would assign a very high place 
 to his translator, without requiring any other evidence of genius. 
 
 The following letter, of which the original is in the hands 
 
POPE. 307 
 
 of Lord Hardwicke, was communicated to me by the kindness 
 of Mr. Jodrell : 
 
 " To Mr. Bridges, at the Bishop of London's, at Fulham. 
 " Sir, 
 
 " The favor of your letter, with your remark, can never be 
 enough acknowledged ; and the speed with which you dis- 
 charged so troublesome a task doubles the obligation. 
 
 " I must own you have pleased me very much by com- 
 mendation so ill bestowed upon me ; but, I assure you, much 
 more by the frankness of your censure, which I ought to take 
 the more kindly of the two, as it is more advantageous to a 
 scribbler to be improved in his judgment than to be soothed in 
 his vanity. The greater part of those deviations from the 
 Greek which you have observed, I was led into by Chapman 
 and Hobbes ; who are, it seems, as much celebrated for their 
 knowledge of the original as they are decried for the badness 
 of their translations. Chapman pretends to have restored the 
 genuine sense of the author, from the mistakes of all former 
 explainers, in several hundred places ; and the Cambridge edi- 
 tors of the large Homer, in Greek and Latin, attributed so 
 much to Hobbes that they confess they have corrected the old 
 Latin interpretation very often by his version. For my part, I 
 generally took the author's meaning to be as you have ex- 
 plained it ; yet their authority, joined to the knowledge of my 
 own imperfectness in the language, overruled me. However, 
 sir, you may be confident I think you in the right, because you 
 happen to be of my opinion ; for men (let them say what they 
 will) never approve any other's sense but as it squares with 
 their own. But you have made me much more proud of and 
 positive in my judgment, since it is strengthened by yours. I 
 think your criticisms which regard the expression very just, 
 and shall make my profit of them ; to give you some proof that 
 I am in earnest, I will alter three verses on your bare objec- 
 tion, though I have Mr. Dryden's example for each of them. 
 And this, I hope, you' will account no small piece of obedience 
 from one who values the authority of one true poet above that 
 of twenty critics or commentators. But, though I speak thus 
 of commentators, I will continue to read carefully all I can 
 procure, to make up, that way, for my own want of critical un- 
 derstanding in the original beauties of Homer. Though the 
 greatest of them are certainly those of invention and design, 
 which are not at all confined to the language ; for the distin- 
 guishing excellences of Homer are (by the consent of the best 
 critics of all nations) first in the manners (which include all the 
 
3o8 DK. SAMUEL yOHMSON OM 
 
 speeches, as being no other than the representations of each 
 person's manners by his words), and then in that rapture and 
 fire which carries you away with him, with that wonderful 
 force that no man who has a true poetical spirit is master of 
 himself while he reads him. Homer makes you interested 
 and concerned before you are aware, all at once, whereas Vir- 
 gil does it by soft degrees. This, I believe, is what a transla- 
 tor of Homer ought principally to imitate ; and it is very hard 
 for any translator to come up to it, because the chief reason 
 why all translations fall short of their originals is that the very 
 constraint they are obliged to renders them heavy and dis- 
 pirited. 
 
 " The great beauty of Homer's language, as I take it, con- 
 sists in that noble simplicity which runs through all his works 
 (and yet his diction, contrary to what one would imagine con- 
 sistent with simplicity, is at the same time very copious). I 
 don't know how I have run into this pedantry in a letter, but I 
 find I have said too much, as well as spoken too inconsider- 
 ately : what further thoughts I have upon this subject I shall be 
 glad to communicate to you (for my own improvement) when 
 we meet, which is a happiness I very earnestly desire, as I 
 do likewise some opportunity of proving how much I think 
 myself obliged to your friendship, and how truly I am, sir, 
 " Your most faithful, humble servant, 
 
 "A. Pope." 
 
 The criticism upon Pope's Epitaphs, which was printed in 
 " The Universal Visitor," is placed here, being too minute and 
 particular to be inserted in the Life : 
 
 Every art is best taught by example. Nothing contributes 
 more to the cultivation of propriety than remarks on the works 
 of those who have most excelled. I shall therefore endeavor, 
 at this visit, to entertain the young students in poetry with an 
 examination of Pope's Epitaphs. 
 
 To define an epitaph is useless ; every one knows that it is 
 an inscription on a tomb. An epitaph, therefore, implies no 
 particular character of writing, but may be composed in verse 
 or prose. It is indeed commonly panegyrical ; because we are 
 seldom distinguished with a stone but by our friends ; but it 
 has no rule to restrain or modify it, except this, that it ought 
 not to be longer than common beholders may be expected to 
 have leisure and patience to peruse. 
 
POPE. 309 
 
 I. 
 
 On Charles £arl 0/ T)os.swr, in the Church of Wythyham in Sa.sex, 
 
 Dorset, the grace of courts, the muse's pride, 
 
 Patron of arts, and judge of nature, died — 
 
 The scourge of pride, though sanctified or great ; 
 
 Of fops in learning, and of knaves in state ; 
 
 Yet soft in nature, though severe his lay. 
 
 His anger moral, and his wisdom gay. 
 
 Blest satirist ! who touch'd the means so true, 
 
 As show'd Vice had his hate and pity too. 
 
 Blest courtier ! who could king and country please, 
 
 Yet sacred kept his friendships and his ease. 
 
 Blest peer ! his great forefather's every grace 
 
 Reflecting, and reflected on his race ; 
 
 Where other Buckhursts, other Dorsets shine. 
 
 And patriots still, or poets, deck the line. 
 
 The first distich of this epitaph contains a kind of informa- 
 tion which few would want, that the man for whom the tomb 
 was erected died. There are indeed some qualities worthy of 
 praise ascribed to the dead, but none that were likely to ex- 
 empt him from the lot of man, or incline us much to wonder 
 that he should die. What is meant by " judge of nature" is 
 not easy to say. Nature is not the object of human judgment ; 
 for it is vain to judge where we cannot alter. If by nature is 
 meant what is commonly called nature by the critics, a just rep- 
 resentation of things really existing and actions really per- 
 formed, nature cannot be properly opposed to art ; nature 
 being, in this sense, only the best effect of art. 
 
 The scourge of pride — 
 
 Of this couplet the second line is not what is intended, an 
 illustration of the former. Pride in the great is indeed well 
 enough connected with knaves in state, though knaves is a word 
 rather too ludicrous and light ; but the mention of sanctifiea 
 pride will not lead the thoughts to fops in learning, but rather to 
 some species of tyranny or oppression, something more gloomy 
 and more formidable than foppery. 
 
 Yet soft his nature — 
 
 This is a high compliment, but was not first bestowed on 
 Dorset by Pope. The next verse is extremely beautiful. 
 
 Blest satirist ! — 
 
 In this distich is another line of which Pope was not the 
 author. I do not mean to blame these imitations with much 
 harshness ; in long performances they are scarcely to be 
 
3IO DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 avoided, and in shorter they may be indulged, because the 
 train of the composition may naturally involve them, or the 
 scantiness of the subject allow little choice. However, what is 
 borrowed is not to be enjoyed as our own ; and it is the busi- 
 ness of critical justice to give every bird of the muses his proper 
 feather. 
 
 Blest courtier ! — 
 
 Whether a courtier can properly be commended for keep- 
 ing his ease sacred may perhaps be disputable. To please king 
 and country, without sacrificing friendship to any change of 
 times, was a very uncommon instance of prudence or felicity, 
 and deserved to be kept separate from so poor a commenda- 
 tion as care of his ease. I wish our poets would attend a little 
 more accurately to the use of the word sacred, which surely 
 should never be applied in a serious composition .but where 
 some reference may be made to a higher Being, or where some 
 duty is exacted or implied. A man may keep his friendship 
 sacred, because promises of friendship are very awful ties ; but 
 methinks he cannot, but in a burlesque sense, be said to keep 
 his ease sacred. 
 
 Blest peer ! — i 
 
 The blessing ascribed to the peer has no connection with 
 his peerage ; they might happen to any other man whose an- 
 cestors were remembered, or whose posterity are likely to be 
 regarded. 
 
 I know not whether this epitaph be worthy either of the 
 writer or the man entombed. 
 
 11. 
 On Sir William Trumbull, one of the principal Secretaries oj Slate to 
 King William III., who, having resigned his ilace, died in his retirement 
 at Easthamstead in Berkshire, 1716. 
 
 A pleasing form ; a firm, yet cautious mind ; 
 
 Sincere, though prudent, constant, yet resign'd ; 
 
 Honor unchang'd, a principle protest, 
 
 Fix'd to one side, but moderate to the rest ; 
 
 An honest courtier, yet a patriot too ; 
 
 Just to his prince, and to his country true ; 
 
 Fill'd with the sense of age, the fire of youth, 
 
 A scorn of wrangling, yet a zeal for truth ; 
 
 A generous faith, from superstition free ; 
 
 A love to peace, and hate of tyranny ; 
 
 Such this man was ; who, now from earth remov'd, 
 
 At length enjoys that liberty he lov'd. 
 
 In this epitaph, as in many others, there appears, at the 
 first view, a fault which I think scarcely any beauty can com- 
 
POPE. 3 1 1 
 
 pensate. The name is omitted. The end of an epitaph is to 
 convey some account of the dead ; and to what purpose is any- 
 thing told of him whose name is concealed ? An epitaph and 
 a history of a nameless hero are equally absurd, since the vir- 
 tues and qualities so recounted in either are scattered at the 
 mercy of fortune to be appropriated by guess. The name, it is 
 true, may be read upon the stone ; but what obUgation has it 
 to the poet, whose verses wander over the earth and leave their 
 subject behind them, and who is forced, like an unskilful paint- 
 er, to make his purpose known by adventitious help ? 
 
 This epitaph is wholly without elevation, and contains 
 nothing striking or particular ; but the poet is not to be 
 blamed for the defects of his subject. He said, perhaps, the 
 best that could be said. There are, however, some defects 
 which were not made necessary by the character in which he was 
 employed. There is no opposition between an honest courtier 
 and a patriot ; for an honest courtier cannot but be a patriot. 
 
 It was unsuitable to the nicety required in short compositions 
 to close his verse with the word too : every rhyme should be a 
 word of emphasis ; nor can this rule be safely neglected, ex- 
 cept where the length of the poem makes slight inaccuracies 
 excusable, or allows room for beauties sufficient to overpower 
 the effects of petty faults. 
 
 At the beginning of the seventh line the word filled is weak 
 and prosaic, having no particular adaptation to any of the 
 words that follow it. 
 
 The thought in the last line is impertinent, having no con- 
 nection with the foregoing character, nor with the condition of 
 the man described. Had the epitaph been written on the poor 
 conspirator' who died lately in prison, after a confinement of 
 more than forty years, without any crime proved against him, 
 the sentiment had been just and pathetical ; but why should 
 Trumbull be congratulated upon his liberty, who had nevei 
 known restraint ? 
 
 III. 
 
 ^n the Han. Simon H arcourt, only son of the Lord Chancellor Harcourt, 
 at the Church of Stanton- Harcourt in Oxfordshire, 1720. 
 
 To this sad shrine, whoe'er thou art, draw near ; 
 Here lies the friend most lov'd, the son most dear. 
 Who ne'er knew joy, but friendship might divide, 
 Or gave his father grief but when he died. 
 
 How vain is reason ! eloquence how weak ! 
 If Pope must tell what Harcourt cannot speak. 
 Oh ! let thy once-lov'd friend inscribe thy s'tone, 
 And with a father's sorrows mix his own ! 
 1 Bernadi. 
 
312 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 This epitaph is principally remarkable for the artful intro- 
 duction of the name, which is inserted with a peculiar felicity, 
 to which chance must concur with genius, which no man can 
 hope to attain twice, and which cannot be copied but with ser- 
 vile imitation. 
 
 I cannot but wish that of this inscription the two last lines 
 had been omitted, as they take away from the energy what 
 they do not add to the sense. 
 
 IV. 
 
 On James Craggs, Esq. 
 
 In Westminster-Abbey. 
 
 Jacobvs Craggs, 
 
 REGI MAGN^ BRITANNIA A SECRETIS 
 
 ET CONSILIIS SANCTIORIBVS, 
 
 PRINCIPIS PARITER AC POPVLI AMOR ET DELICIiB. 
 
 VIXIT TITVLIS ET INVIDIA MAJOR 
 
 ANNOS HEV PAVCOS, XXXV. 
 
 OB. FEB. XVI. MDCCXX. 
 
 Statesman, yet friend to truth ! of soul sincere. 
 
 In action faithful, and in honor clear ! 
 
 Who broke no promise, serv'd no private end. 
 
 Who gain'd no title, and who lost no friend ! 
 
 Ennobled by himself, by all approv'd, 
 
 Prais'd, wept, and honor'd, by the Muse he lov'd ! 
 
 The lines on Craggs were not originally intended for an 
 epitaph ; and therefore some faults are to be imputed to the 
 violence with which they are torn from the poem that first con- 
 tained them. We may, however, observe some defects. There 
 is a redundancy of words in the first couplet : it is superfluous 
 to tell of him who was sincere, true, and faithful, that he was 
 in honor clear. 
 
 There seems to be an opposition intended in the fourth 
 line, which is not very obvious ; where is the relation between 
 the two positions, that \\q gained no title, and lost no friend ? 
 
 It may be proper here to remark the absurdity of joining in 
 the same inscription Latin and English, or verse and prose. 
 If either language be preferable to the other, let that only be 
 used ; for no reason can be given why part of the information 
 should be given in one tongue and part in another, on a tomb 
 more than in any other place or any other occasion ; and to 
 tell all that can be conveniently told in Verse^ and then to call 
 in the help of prose, has always the appearance of a very artless 
 expedient, or of an attempt unaccomDlished. Such an epitaph 
 
POPE. 313 
 
 resembles the fconversation of a foreigner, who tells part of hia 
 meaning by words, and conveys part by signs. 
 
 V. 
 
 Intended for Mr. RowE. 
 In Westminster- Abbey. 
 
 Thy relics, Rowe, to this fair urn we trust, 
 And, sacred, place by Dryden's awful dust ; 
 Beneath a rude and nameless stone he lies, 
 To which thy tomb shall guide inquiring eyes. 
 Peace to thy gentle shade, and endless rest ! 
 Blest in thy genius, in thy love too blest ! 
 One grateful woman to thy fame supplies 
 What a whole thankless land to his denies. 
 
 Of this inscription the chief fault is, that it belongs less to 
 Rowe, for whom it is written, than to Dryden, who was buried 
 near him ; and indeed gives very Httle information concerning 
 either. 
 
 To wish Peace to thy shade is too mythological to be ad- 
 mitted into a Christian temple : the ancient worship has in- 
 fected almost all our other compositions, and might therefore 
 be contented to spare our epitaphs. Let fiction at least cease 
 with life, and let us be serious over the grave. 
 
 VI. 
 
 On Mrs. Corbet, 
 Who died of a Cancer in her Breast. 
 
 Here rests a woman, good without pretence. 
 Blest with plain reason and with sober sense ; 
 No conquest she, but o'er herself, desir'd : 
 No arts essay'd, but not to be admir'd. 
 Passion and pride were to her soul unknown, 
 Convinc'd that virtue only is our own. 
 So unaffected, so compos'd a mind. 
 So firm, yet soft, so strong, yet so refin'd. 
 Heaven, as its purest gold, by tortures tried ; 
 The saint sustain'd it, but the woman died. 
 
 I have always considered this as the most valuable of all 
 Pope's epitaphs ; the subject of it is a character not discrimi- 
 nated by any shining or eminent peculiarities ; yet that which 
 really makes, though not the splendor, the felicity of life, and 
 that which every wise man will choose for his final and lasting 
 companion in the languor of age, in the quiet of privacy, when 
 he departs weary and disgusted from the ostentatious, the vola- 
 tile, and the vain. Of such a character, which the dull over- 
 
314 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 look and the gay despise, it was fit that the value should be 
 made known and the dignity established. Domestic virtue, 
 as it is exerted without great occasions, or conspicuous conse- 
 quences, in an even unnoted tenor, required the genius of Pope 
 to display it in such a manner as might attract regard and en- 
 force reverence. Who can forbear to lament that this amiable 
 woman has no name in the verses ? 
 
 If the particular lines of this inscription be examined, it 
 will appear less faulty than the rest. There is scarcely one 
 line taken from commonplaces, unless it be that in which 09ily 
 virtue is said to be our own. I once heard a lady of great 
 beauty and elegance object to the fourth line, that it contained 
 an unnatural and incredible panegyric. , Of this let the ladies 
 judge. 
 
 VII. 
 
 On the Monument of the Hon. Robert Digby, and of his Sister Mary, 
 erected by their Father, the Lord Digby, in the Church of Sherborne in 
 Dorsetshire, 1727. 
 
 Go ! fair example of untainted youth. 
 
 Of modest wisdom and pacific truth : 
 
 Compos'd in sufferings, and in joy sedate. 
 
 Good without noise, without pretension great : 
 
 Just of thy word, in every thought sincere. 
 
 Who knew no wish but what the world might hear : 
 
 Of softest manners, unaffected mind, 
 
 Lover of peace, and friend of human kind : 
 
 Go, live ! for heaven's eternal year is thine. 
 
 Go, and exalt thy moral to divine. 
 
 And thou, blest maid ! attendant on his doom. 
 Pensive has foUow'd to the silent tomb ; 
 Steer' d the same course to the same quiet shore. 
 Not parted long, and now to part no more ! 
 Go, then, where only bliss sincere is known ! 
 Go, where to love and to enjoy are one ! 
 
 Yet take these tears, Mortality's relief. 
 And, till we share your joys, forgive our grief : 
 These little rites, a stone, a verse receive, 
 'Tis all a father, all a friend can give ! 
 
 This epitaph contains of the brother only a general indis- 
 criminate character, and of the sister tells nothing but that she 
 died. The difficulty in writing epitaphs is to give a particular 
 and appropriate praise. This, however, is not always to be 
 performed, whatever be the diligence or ability of the writer ; 
 for the greater part of mankind have no character at all, have 
 little that distinguishes them from others equally good or bad 
 and therefore nothing can be said of them which may not be 
 apphed with equal propriety to a thousand more. It is indeed 
 
POPE. 315 
 
 no great panegyric that there is inclosed in this tomb one who 
 was born in one year and died in another ; yet many useful 
 and amiable lives have been spent which yet leave little mate- 
 rials for any other memorial. These are, however, not the prop- 
 er subjects of poetry ; and whenever friendship or any other 
 motive obliges a poet to write on such subjects, he must be 
 forgiven if he sometimes wanders in generalities and utters the 
 same praises over different tombs. 
 
 The scantiness of human praises can scarcely be made 
 more apparent than by remarking how often Pope has, in the 
 few epitaphs which he composed, found it necessary to borrow 
 from Jiimself. The fourteen epitaphs which he has written 
 comprise about a hundred and forty lines, in which there are 
 more repetitions than will easily be found in all the rest of his 
 works. In the eight lines which make the character of Digby 
 there is scarce any thought or word which may not be found 
 in the other epitaphs. 
 
 The ninth line, which is far the strongest and most elegant, 
 is borrowed from Dryden. The conclusion is the same with 
 that on Harcourt, but is here more elegant and better con- 
 nected. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 On Sir Godfrey Kneller. 
 In Westminster- Abbey , 1723. 
 
 Kneller, by Heaven, and not a master taught, 
 Whose art was nature and whose pictures thought, 
 Now for two ages, having snatch'd from fate 
 Whate'er was beauteous or whate'er was great, 
 Lies crown'd with prince's honors, poet's lays, 
 Due to his merit and brave thirst of praise. 
 
 Living, great Nature fear'd he might outvie 
 Her works ; and dying, fears herself may die. 
 
 Of this epitaph the first couplet is good, the second not 
 bad, the third is deformed with a broken metaphor, the word 
 crowned not being applicable to the honors or the lays ; and the 
 fourth is not only borrowed from the epitaph on Raphael, but 
 of a very harsh construction. 
 
 IX. 
 
 On General Henrv WITHERS. 
 In Westminster-Abbey, 1729. 
 
 Here, Withers, rest ! thou bravest, gentlest mind ! 
 Thy country's friend, but more of human kind. 
 .0 ! born to arms ! O ! worth in youth approv'd ! 
 O I soft humanity in age belov'd ! 
 
3l6 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 For thee the hardy veteran drops a tear, 
 And the gay courtier feels the sigh sincere. 
 
 Withers, adieu ! yet not with thee remove 
 Thy martial spirit or thy social love ! 
 Amidst corruption, luxury, and rage. 
 Still leave some ancient virtues to our age ; 
 Nor let us say (those English glories gone) 
 The last true Briton lies beneath this stone. 
 
 The epitaph on Withers affords another instance of com- 
 monplaces, though somewhat diversified by mingled qualities 
 and his peculiarity of a profession. 
 
 The second couplet is abrupt, general, and unpleasing ; ex- 
 clamation seldom succeeds in our language ; and, I think, it 
 may be observed that the particle O ! used at the beginning of 
 the sentence always offends. 
 
 The third couplet is more happy ; the value expressed for 
 him by different sorts of men raises him to esteem : there is 
 yet something of the common cant of superficial satirists who 
 suppose that the insincerity of a courtier destroys all his sensa- 
 tions, and that he is equally a dissembler to the living and the 
 dead. 
 
 At the third couplet I should wish the epitaph to close, but 
 that I should be unwilling to lose the two next lines, which yet 
 are dearly bought if they cannot be retained without the four 
 that follow them. 
 
 X. 
 
 On Mr. Elijah Fenton. 
 At Easthamstead in Berkshire, 1730. 
 
 This modest stone, what few vain marbles can, 
 May truly say, Here lies an honest man : 
 A poet, blest beyond the poet's fate. 
 Whom Heaven kept sacred from the proud and great : 
 Foe to loud praise, and friend to learned ease. 
 Content with science in the vale of peace. 
 Calmly he look'd on either life, and here 
 Saw nothing to regret, or there to fear ; 
 From Nature's temperate feast rose satisfied, 
 Thank'd Heaven that he liv'd, and that he died. 
 
 The first couplet of this epitaph is borrowed from Crashaw. 
 The four next lines contain a species of praise peculiar, original, 
 and just. Here, therefore, the inscription should have ended, 
 the latter part containing nothing but what is common to every 
 man who is wise and good. The character of Fenton was so 
 amiable that I cannot forbear to wish for some poet or biog- 
 rapher to display it more fully for the advantage of posterity. 
 If he did not stand in the first rank of genius he may claim a 
 
POPE. 3 1 7 
 
 place in the second ; and whatever criticism may object to his 
 writings, censure could find very little to blame in his life. 
 
 XI. 
 
 On Mr. Gay. 
 In Westminster- Abbey, 1732. 
 
 Of manners gentle, of affections mild ; 
 In wit, a man ; simplicity, a child ; 
 With native humor tempering virtuous rage, 
 Form'd to delight at once and lash the age : 
 Above temptation in a low estate, 
 And uncorrupted, ev'n among the great ; 
 A safe companion and an easy friend, 
 Unblam'd through life, lamented in thy end, 
 These are thy honors ! not that here thy bust 
 Is mix'd with heroes, or with kings thy dust ; 
 But that the worthy and the good shall say. 
 Striking their pensive bosoms — Here lies Gay ! 
 
 As Gay was the favorite of our author this epitaph was 
 probably written with an uncommon degree of attention ; yet 
 it is not more successfully executed than the rest, for it will not 
 always happen that the success of a poet is proportionate to 
 his labor. The same observation may be extended to all 
 works of imagination, which are often influenced by causes 
 wholly out of the performer's power, by hints of which he per- 
 ceives not the origin, by sudden elevations of mind which he 
 cannot produce in himself, and which sometimes rise when he 
 expects them least. 
 
 The two parts of the first line are only echoes of each 
 other ; gentle manners and mild affections, if they mean any 
 thing, must mean the same. 
 
 That Gay was a man in wit is a very frigid commendation ; 
 to have the wit of a man is not much for a poet. The wit of 
 man and the simplicity of a child make a poor and vulgar con- 
 trast, and raise no ideas of excellence either intellectual or 
 moral. 
 
 In the next couplet rage is less properly introduced after 
 the mention of mildness and gentleness, which are made the con- 
 stitutents of his character ; for a man so mild and gentle to tem- 
 per his rage was not difficult. 
 
 The next line is inharmonious in its sound and mean in its 
 conception ; the opposition is obvious, and the word lash, 
 used absolutely, and without any modification, is gross and im- 
 proper. 
 
 To be above temptation in poverty, and free from corruption 
 among the great, is indeed such a peculiarity as, 4.es^rve4 po- 
 
3l8 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 tice. But to be a safe companion is a praise merely negative, 
 arising not from possession of virtue, but the absence of vice, 
 and that one of the most odious. 
 
 As little can be added to his character by asserting that he 
 was lamented in his end. Every man that dies is, at least by 
 the writer of his epitaph, supposed to be lamented, and there- 
 fore this general lamentation does no honor to Gay. 
 
 The first eight lines have no grammar ; the adjectives are 
 without any substantive, and the epithets without a subject. 
 
 The thought in the last line, that Gay is buried in the 
 bosoms of the worthy and the good., who are distinguished only 
 to lengthen the line, is so dark that few understand it, and so 
 harsh when it is explained that still fewer approve. 
 
 XII. 
 
 Intended for Sir Isaac Newton. 
 
 In Westminster- Abbey. 
 
 ISAACUS NEWTONIUS : 
 
 Quern Immortalem 
 
 Testantur, Tempus, Natura, Ccelum . 
 
 Mortalem 
 
 Hoc marmor fatetur. 
 
 Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night, 
 God said, Let Newton be ! And all was light. 
 
 Of this epitaph, short as it is, the faults seem not to be 
 very few. Why part should be Latin and part English, it is 
 not feasy to discover. In the Latin the opposition of Immor- 
 talis and Mortalis is a mere sound or a mere quibble ; he is 
 not immortal in any sense contrary to that in which he is mor- 
 tal. 
 
 In the verses the thought is obvious, and the words night 
 and light sue too nearly allied. 
 
 XIII. 
 On Edmund Duie of Buckingham, who died in the i<)th Year of his Age, 
 
 1735- 
 
 If modest youth, with cool reflection crown'd, 
 And every opening virtue blooming round, 
 Could save a parent's justest pride from fate, 
 Or add one patriot to a sinking state ; 
 This weeping marble had not ask'd thy tear. 
 Or sadly told how many hopes lie here ! 
 The living virtue now had shone approv'd, 
 The senate heard him, and his country lov'd. 
 Yet softer homrs, and less noisy fame, 
 Atte:)4 the shade of gentle Buckingham ; 
 
POPE. 319 
 
 In whom a race, for courage fam'd and art, 
 Ends in the milder merit of the heart : 
 And, chiefs or sages long to Britain given. 
 Pays the last tribute of a saint to Heaven. 
 
 This epitaph Mr. Warburton prefers to the rest ; but I 
 know not for what reason. To crown with reflection is surely 
 a mode of speech approaching to nonsense. Opening virtues 
 blooming round is something like tautology : the six following 
 lines are poor and prosaic. Art is in another couplet used for 
 arts, that a rhyme may be had to fieart. The last six lines are 
 the best, but not excellent. 
 
 The rest of his sepulchral performances hardly deserve the 
 notice of criticism. The contemptible " Dialogue" between 
 He and She should have been suppressed for the author's 
 sake. 
 
 In his last epitaph on himself, in which he attempts to be 
 jocular upon one of the few things that make wise men serious, 
 he confounds the living man with the dead : 
 
 Under this stone, or under this sill. 
 Or under this turf, etc. 
 
 When a man is once buried, the question under what he is 
 buried is easily decided. He forgot that though he wrote the 
 epitaph in a state of uncertainty, yet it could not be laid over 
 him till his grave was made. Such is the folly of wit when it 
 is ill employed. 
 
 The world has but little new ; even this wretchedness 
 seems to have been borrowed from the following tuneless 
 lines : 
 
 Ludovici Areosti humantur ossa 
 
 Sub hoc marmore, vel sub hac humo, seu 
 
 Sub quicquid voluit benignus haeres 
 
 Sive harede benignior comes, seu 
 
 Opportunius incidens Viator : 
 
 Nam scire haud potuit futura, sed nee 
 
 Tanti erat vacuum sibi cadaver 
 
 Ut urnam cuperet parare vivens, 
 
 Vivens ista tamen sibi paravit. 
 
 Quae inscribi voluit suo sepulchro 
 
 Olim siquod haberet is sepulchrum. 
 
 Surely Ariosto did not venture to expect that his trifle 
 would have ever had such an illustrious imitator. 
 
DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON GRAY. 
 
 Thomas Gray, the son of Mr. Philip Gray, a scrivener of 
 London, was born in Comhill, November 26, 17 16. His 
 grammatical education he received at Eton, under the care of 
 Mr. Antrobus, his mother's brother, then assistant to Dr. 
 George, and when he left school, in 1734, entered a pensioner 
 at Peterhouse in Cambridge. 
 
 The transition from the school to the college is, to most 
 young scholars, the time from which they date their years of 
 manhood, liberty, and happiness ; but Gray seems to have been 
 very little delighted with academical qualifications ; he liked at 
 Cambridge neither the mode of life nor the fashion of study,, 
 and lived sullenly on to the time when his attendance on lec- 
 tures was no longer required. As he intended to profess the 
 common law he took no degree. 
 
 When he had been at Cambridge about five years, Mr. Hor- 
 ace Walpole, whose friendship he had gained at Eton, invited 
 him to travel with him as his companion. They wandered 
 through France into Italy ; and Gray's " Letters" contain a 
 very pleasing account of many parts of their journey. But un- 
 equal friendships are easily dissolved : at Florence they quar- 
 relled and parted ; and Mr. Walpole is now content to have it 
 told that it was by his fault. If we look, however, without 
 prejudice on the world, we shall find that men whose con- 
 sciousness of their own merit sets them above the compliances of 
 servility are apt enough in their association with superiors to 
 watch their own dignity with troublesome and punctilious jeal- 
 ousy, and in the fervor of independence to exact that attention 
 which they refuse to pay. Part they did, whatever was the 
 quarrel ; and the rest of their travels was doubtless more un- 
 pleasant to them both. Gray continued his journey in a man- 
 ner suitable to his own little fortune, with only an occasional 
 servant. 
 
 He returned to England in September, 1741, and in about 
 two months afterwards buried his father, who had, by an inju- 
 dicious waste of money upon a new house, so much lessened 
 his fortune that Gray thought himself too poor to study the 
 law. He therefore retired to Cambridge, where he soon after 
 became bachelor of civil law, and where, without liking the 
 place or its inhabitants, or professing to like them, he passed, 
 except a short residence at London, the rest of his life, 
 
322 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 About this time he was deprived of Mx.^^issi; the son of a 
 chancellor of Ireland, a friend on whom he appears to have set 
 a high value, and who deserved his esteem by the powers which 
 he shows in his letters, and in'thfe " Ode to May," which Mr. 
 Mason has preserved, as well as by the sincerity with wh ich, 
 when Gray sent him part of "Agrippina," a tragedy that he 
 had just begun, he gave an opinion which probably intercepted 
 the progress of the work, and which the judgment of every 
 reader will confirm. It was certainly no loss to the English 
 stage that " Agrippina" was never finished. 
 
 In this year (i742) _Gray seems to have applied himself seri- 
 ously to poetry ; for m this year were produced the ' ' Ode to 
 Spring," his " Prospect of Eton," and his " Ode to Adver- 
 sity." He began likewise a Latin poem, " De Principiis Cogi- 
 tandi." 
 
 It may be collected from the narrative of Mr. Mason that 
 his first ambition was to have excelled in Latin poetry : per- 
 haps it were reasonable to wish that he had prosecuted his de- 
 sign ; for, though there is at present some e.mbarrassi n£nt-4n 
 his phrase, and some harshness jn his lyric numbers, hi s copi- 
 ous ness of language is s uch as very few possess ; and his lines, 
 even when impertect, discover a writer whom practice would 
 have made skilful. 
 
 He now lived on at Peterhouse, very little solicitous what 
 others did or thought, and cultivated his mind and enlarged 
 his views without any other purpose than of improving and 
 amusing himself ; when Mr. Mason, being elected fellow of 
 Pembroke Hall, brought him a companion who was afterwards 
 to be his editor, and whose fondness and fidelity has kindled 
 in him a zeal of admiration which cannot be reasonably ex- 
 pected from the neutrality of a stranger and the coldness of a 
 critic. 
 
 In his retirement he wrote (1747) an ode on the " Death of 
 Mr. Walpole's Cat ;" and the year afterwards attempted a 
 poem of more importance, on " Government and Education," 
 of which the fragments which remain have many excellent 
 lines. 
 
 His next production (1750) was his far-famed " Elegy in 
 a Country Churchyard, ' ' which, finding its way into a magazine, 
 first, I believe, made him known to the public. 
 
 An invitation from Lady Cobham about this time gave oc- 
 casion to an odd composition called ' ' A Long Story, ' ' which 
 adds little to Gray's character. 
 
 Several of his pieces were published (1753) with designs by 
 Mr. Bentley : and that they might in some form or other make 
 
a book, only one side of each leaf was printed. I believe the 
 poems and the plates recommended each other so well that the 
 whole impression was soon bought. This year he lost his 
 mother. 
 
 Some time afterwards (1756) some young men of the college, 
 whose chambers were near his, diverted themselves with dis- 
 turbing him by frequent and troublesome noises, and, as is 
 said, by pranks yet more offensive and contemptuous. This 
 insolence, having endured it awhile, he represented to the gov- 
 ernors of the society, among whom perhaps he had no friends ; 
 and finding his complaint little regarded removed himself to 
 Pembroke Hall. 
 
 In 1757 he published "The Progress of Poetry," and 
 " The Bard," two compositions at which the readers of poetry 
 were at first content to gaze in mute amazement. Some that 
 tried them confessed their inability to understand them, though 
 Warburton said that they were understood as well as the works 
 of Milton and Shakespeare, which it is the fashion to admire. 
 Garrick wrote a few lines in their praise. Some hardy cham- 
 pions undertook to rescue them from neglect ; and in a short 
 time many were content to be shown beauties which they could 
 not see. 
 
 Gray's reputation was now so high that, after the death of 
 Gibber, he had the ' honor of refusing the laurel, which was 
 then bestowed on Mr. Whitehead. 
 
 His curiosity, not long after, drew him away from Cam- 
 bridge to a lodging near the Museum, where he resided near 
 three years, reading and transcribing ; and, so far as can be 
 discovered, very little affected by two odes on " Oblivion" 
 and ' ' Obscurity, ' ' in which his lyric performances were ridi- 
 culed with much contempt and much ingenuity. 
 
 When the professor of modern history at Cambridge died, 
 he was, as he says, ' ' cockered and spirited up, ' ' till he asked it 
 of Lord Bute, who sent him a civil refusal ; and the place was 
 given to Mr. Brocket, the tutor of Sir James Lowther. 
 
 His constitution was weak, and believing that his health 
 was promoted by exercise and change of place, he undertook 
 (1765) a journey into Scotland, of which his account, so far as 
 it extends, is very curious and elegant ; for, as his comprehen- 
 sion was ample, his curiosity extended to all the works of art, 
 all the appearances of nature, and all the monuments of past 
 events. He naturally contracted a friendship with Dr. Beat- 
 tie, whom he found a poet, a philosopher, and a good man. 
 The Mareschal College at Aberdeen offered him the degree of 
 
3^4 ^R- SAMUEL yOHNSON ON 
 
 doctor of laws, which, having omitted to take it at Cam- 
 bridge, he thought it decent to refuse. 
 
 What he had formerly solicited in vain was at last given 
 him without solicitation. The professorship of history became 
 again vacant, and he received (1768) an offer of it from the 
 Duke of Grafton. He accepted and retained it to his death, 
 always designing lectures, but never appearing reading them, 
 uneasy at his neglect of duty, and appeasing his uneasiness 
 with designs of reformation, and with a resolution which he be- 
 s lieved himself to have made of resigning the office if he found 
 ' himself unable to discharge it. 
 
 Ill health made another journey necessary, and he visited 
 (1769) Westmoreland and Cumberland. He that reads his 
 epistolary narration wishes that to travel, and to tell his 
 travels, had been more of his employment ; but it is by study- 
 ing at home that we must obtain the ability of travelling with 
 intelligence and improvement. 
 
 His travels and his studies were now near their end. The 
 gout, of which he had sustained many weak attacks, fell upon 
 his stomach, and, yielding to no medicines, produced strong 
 convulsions, which (July 30, 1771) terminated in death. 
 
 His character I am willing to adopt, as Mr. Mason has 
 done, from a letter written to my friend Mr. Boswell by the 
 Rev. Mr. Temple, rector of St. Gluvias in Cornwall, and am 
 as willing as his warmest well-wisher to believe it true. 
 
 ' ' Perhaps he was the most learned man in Europe. He 
 was equally acquainted with the elegant and profound parts of 
 science, and that not superficially, but thoroughly. He knew 
 every branch of history, both natural and civil ; had read all 
 the original historians of England, France, and Italy, and 
 was a great antiquarian. Criticism, metaphysics, morals, poli- 
 tics, made a principal part of his study ; voyages and travels of 
 all sorts were his favorite amusements ; and he had a fine 
 taste in painting, prints, architecture, and gardening. With such 
 a fund of knowledge his conversation must have been equally 
 instructing and entertaining ; but he was also a good man, a 
 man of virtue and humanity. There is no character without 
 some speck, some imperfection ; and I think the greatest de- 
 fect in his was an affectation in delicacy, or rather effeminacy, 
 and a visible fastidiousness, or contempt and disdain of his infe- 
 riors in science. He also had, in some degree, that weakness 
 which disgusted Voltaire so much in Mr. Congreve : though he 
 seemed to value others chiefly according to the progress that 
 they had made in knowledge, yet he could not bear to be con- 
 gidered merely as a man of letters ; and though without birth 
 
GRAY. 325 
 
 or fortune, or station, his desire was to be looked upon as a 
 private independent gentleman who read for his amusement. 
 Perhaps it may be said. What signifies so much knowledge 
 when it produced so little ? Is it worth taking so much pains 
 to leave no memorials but a few poems ? But let it be consid- 
 ered that Mr. Gray was to others at least innocently employed ; 
 to himself certainly beneficially. His time passed agreeably : 
 he was every day making some new acquisition in science ; his 
 mind was enlarged, his heart softened, his virtue strengthened ; 
 the world and mankind were shown to him without a mask ; 
 and he was taught to consider every thing as trifling, and un- 
 worthy of the attention of a wise man, except the pursuit of 
 knowledge and practice of virtue in that state wherein God 
 hath placed us." 
 
 To this character Mr. Mason has added a more particular 
 account of Gray's skill in zoology. He has remarked that 
 Gray's effeminacy was affected most " before those whom he 
 did not wish to please ;" and that he is unjustly charged with 
 making knowledge his sole reason of preference, as he paid his 
 esteem to none whom he did not likewise believe to be good. 
 
 What has occurred to me, from the slight inspection of his 
 Letters in which my undertaking has engaged me is, that his 
 mind had a large grasp, that his curiosity was unlimited, and 
 his judgment cultivated ; that he was a man likely to love 
 much where he loved at all ; but that he was fastidious and 
 hard to please. His contempt, however, is often employed 
 where I hope it will be approved, upon scepticism and infidel- 
 ity. His short account of Shaftesbury I will insert. 
 
 ' ' You say you cannot conceive how Lord Shaftesbury came 
 to be a philosopher in vogue ; I will tell you : first, he was a 
 lord ; secondly, he was as vain as any of his readers ; thirdly, 
 men are very prone to believe what they do not understand; 
 fourthly,_th^ will be lieve any thing _at„all, provided they are 
 under no oWigation to believe it ; fifthly, they love to take a 
 new road, even when that road leads nowhere ; sixthly, he 
 jataajieck oned a fine writer, and seems abscays. to mean more 
 tl}anlie~saHi Would you have any more reasons ? An inter- 
 val of above forty years has pretty well destroyed the charm. 
 A dead lord ranks with commoners ; vanity is no longer inter- 
 ested in the matter ; for a new road has become an old one." 
 
 Mr. Mason has added, from his own knowledge, that 
 though Gray was poor he was not eager of money ; and that 
 out of the little that he had he was very willing to help the ne- 
 cessitous. 
 
 As a writer he had this peculiarity, that he did not write his 
 
326 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON ON 
 
 pieces first rudely, and then correct them, but labored every 
 line as it arose in the train of composition ; and he had a no- 
 tion, not very peculiar, that he could not write but at certain 
 times or at happy moments ; a fantastic foppery, to which my 
 kindness for a man of learning and virtue wishes him to have 
 been superior. 
 
 Gray's poetry is now to be considered ; and I hope not to 
 I be looked on as an enemy to his name if I confess that I con- 
 I template it with less pleasure than his life. 
 
 His ode ' ' On Spring ' ' has something poetical both in the 
 language and the thought ; but the language is too luxuriant 
 and the thoughts have nothing new. There has of late arisen 
 a practice of giving to adjectives derived from substantives the 
 termination of participles ; such as the cultured plain, the 
 daisied bank ; but I was sorry to see, in the lines of a scholar 
 like Gray, the honied Spring. The morality is natural, but too 
 stale ; the conclusion is pretty. 
 
 The poem ' ' On the Cat ' ' was doubtless by its author con- 
 sidered as a trifle ; but it is not a happy trifle. In the first 
 stanza, " the azure flowers that blow" show resolutely a rhyme 
 is sometimes made when it cannot easily be found. Selima, 
 the Cat, is called a nymph, with some violence both to lan- 
 guage and sense ; but there is no good use made of it when it 
 is done ; for of the two lines, 
 
 ' ' What female heart can gold despise ? 
 What cat's averse to fish?" 
 
 the first relates merely to the nymph, and the second only to 
 the cat. The sixth stanza contains a melancholy truth, that 
 " a favorite has no friend ;" but the last ends in a pointed 
 sentence of no relation to the purpose ; if what glistered had 
 been gold, the cat would not have gone into the water ; and if 
 she had, would not less have been drowned. 
 
 The " Prospect of Eton College" suggests nothing to Gray 
 which evpry beholder does not equally think and feel. His sup- 
 plication to Father Thames, to tell him who drives the hoop or 
 tosses the ball, is useless and puerile. Father Thames has no 
 better means of knowing than himself .,, 'His epithet "buxom 
 health" is not elegant ; he seems not to understand the word. 
 Gray thought his language more poetical as it was more remote 
 from common use ; finding in Dryden ' ' honey redolent of 
 Spring, ' ' an expression that reaches the utmost limits of our 
 language, Gray drove it a little more beyond common appre- 
 hension by making "gales" to be "redolent of joy and 
 youth." 
 
GRAY. 327 
 
 Of the " Ode on Adversity" the hint was at first taken 
 from " O Diva, gratum quse regis Antium :" but Gray has ex- 
 celled his original by the variety of his sentiments and by their 
 moral application. Of this piece, at once poetical and ra- 
 tional, I will not by slight objections violate the dignity. 
 
 My process has now brought me to the wonderful " Won- 
 der of Wonders," the two Sister Odes, by which, though either 
 vulgar ignorance or common-sense at first universally rejected 
 them, many have been since persuaded to think themselves de- 
 lighted. I am one of those that are willing to be pleased, and 
 therefore would gladly find the meaning of the first stanza of 
 " The Progress of Poetry." 
 
 Gray seems in his rapture to confound the images of 
 "spreading sound and running water." A " stream of mu- 
 sic" may be allowed ; but where does " music," however 
 ' ' smooth and strong, ' ' after having visited the ' ' verdant vales, 
 roll down the steep amain," so as that "rocks and nodding 
 groves rebellow to the roar " ? If this be said of music, it is 
 nonsense ; if it be said of water, it is nothing to the purpose. 
 
 The second stanza, exhibiting Mars's car and Jove's eagle, 
 is unworthy of further notice. Criticism disdains to chase a 
 school-boy to his commonplaces. 
 
 To the third it may likewise be objected that it is drawn 
 from mythology, though such as may be more easily assimilated 
 to real life. Idalia's "velvet green" has something of cant. 
 An epithet or metaphor drawn from nature ennobles art ; an 
 epithet or metaphor drawn from art degrades nature. Gray 
 is too fond of words arbitrarily compounded. " Many-twin- 
 kling ' ' was formerly censured as not analogical ; we may say 
 " many spotted," but scarcely " many spotting." This stan- 
 za, however, has something pleasing. 
 
 Of the second ternary of stanzas, the first endeavors to 
 tell something, and would have told it, had it not been crossed 
 by Hyperion : the second describes well enough the universal 
 prevalence of poetry ; but I am afraid that the conclusion will 
 not arise from the premises. The caverns of the North and 
 the plains of Chili are not the residences of " Glory and gener- 
 ous Shame. ' ' But that Poetry and Virtue go always together is 
 an opinion so pleasing that I can forgive him who resolves to 
 think it true. 
 
 The third stanza sounds big with ' ' Delphi, ' ' and 
 "iEgean,"and " Ilissus," and "Meander," and "hallowed 
 fountains," and "solemn sounds;" but in all Gray's odes 
 there is a kind of cumbrous splendor which we wish away.j 
 His position is at last false : iirthe~Time of Dante and Pe- 
 
328 DJi. SAMUEL yoir^soN' ON 
 
 trarch, from whom we derive our first school of poetry, Italy was 
 overrun by "tyrant power," and "coward vice;" nor was 
 our state much better when we first borrowed the Italian arts. 
 Of the third ternary, the first gives us a mythological birth of 
 Shakespeare. What is said of that mighty genius is true ; but 
 it is not said happily : the real effects of this poetical power 
 , are put out of sight by the pomp of machinery. Where truth 
 ' is sufficient to fill the mind, fiction is worse than useless ; the 
 counterfeit debases the genuine. 
 
 His account of Milton's blindness, if we suppose it caused 
 by study in the formation of his poem, a supposition surely al- 
 lowable, is poetically true and happily imagined. But the car 
 of Dryden, with his two coursers, has nothing in it peculiar ; it 
 is a car in which any other rider may be placed. 
 
 ' ' The Bard ' ' appears, at the first view, to be, as Algarotti and 
 others have remarked, an imitation of the prophecy of Nereus. 
 Algarotti thinks it superior to its original ; and if preference 
 depends only on the imagery and animation of the two poems 
 his judgment is right. There is in " The Bard" more force, 
 more thought, and more variety. But to copy is less than to 
 invent, and the copy has been unhappily produced at a wrong 
 time. The fiction of Horace was to the Romans credible ; but 
 its revival disgusts us with apparent and unconquerable false- 
 hood. Incredulus odi. 
 
 To select a singular event, and swell it to a giant's bulk by 
 fabulous appendages of spectres and predictions, has little diffi- 
 culty ; for he that forsakes the probable may always find the 
 marvellous. And it has little use ;_we_ are affgcted only as we__ 
 believe ; we are improved only as we find something'to be Iniii- 
 tated or declined. I do not see that "The Bard" promotes 
 3ny truth, moral orpblitical.'" 
 
 TTIs stanzas are too long, especially his epodes ; the ode is 
 finished before the ear has learned its measures, and conse- 
 quently before it can receive pleasure from their consonance 
 and recurrence. 
 
 Of the first stanza the abrupt beginning has been celebrat- 
 ed ; but technical beauties can give praise only to the in- 
 ventor. It is in the power of any man to rush abruptly upon 
 his subject that has read the ballad " Johnny Armstrong," 
 
 " Is there ever a man in all Scotland — " 
 
 The initial resemblances, or alliterations, " ruin, ruthless, 
 helm or hauberk," are below the grandeur of a poem that en- 
 deavors at sublimity. 
 
 In the second stanza the Bard is well described : but in the 
 
GJiAy. 
 
 329 
 
 third we have the puerilities of obsolete mythology. When 
 we are told that " Cadwallo hush'd the stormy main," and 
 that " Modred made huge Plinlimmon bow his cloud-topp'd 
 head, ' ' attention recoils from the repetition of a tale that, even 
 when it was first heard, was heard with scorn. 
 
 The weaving of the winding sheet he borrowed, as he owns, 
 from the Northern Bards : but their texture, however, was very 
 properly the work of female powers, as the act of spinning the 
 thread of life is another mythology. Theft is always danger- 
 ous. Gray has made weavers of slaughtered bards by a fiction 
 outrageous and incongruous. They are then called upon to 
 " weave the warp and weave the woof," perhaps with no great 
 propriety ; for it is by crossing the woof with the warp that 
 men weave the web or piece ; and the first line was dearly 
 bought by the admission of its wretched correspondent, 
 " Give ample room and verge enough." He has, however, no 
 other line as bad. 
 
 The third stanza of the second ternary is commended, I 
 think, beyond its merit. The personification is indistinct. 
 Thirst and Hunger are not alike ; and their features, to make 
 the imagery perfect, should have been discriminated. We are 
 told in the same stanza how ' ' towers are fed. ' ' But I will 
 no longer look for particular faults ; yet let it be observed that 
 the ode might have been concluded with an action of better ex- 
 ample ; but suicide is always to be had without expense of 
 thought. 
 
 These odes are marked by glittering accumulations of- un- 
 graegfuLprnaments ; they strike rather than gleajfr; the im- 
 ages are magnified by affeclafion ; the^langiiage is .labored 
 into h arshness. The mind_of the writer seems to work with 
 ~unnaturaI~viorencer^T)'ouble,~doubTe7~toil and trouble." He 
 KaTa^mdrof strutting dignity, and is tall by walking on tiptoe. 
 His,art Mid his struggle are too visible, and there is too little 
 a,ppearanceof"egse andTiatu re . 
 
 T'o'say'fhat he had nO beauties would be unjust ; a man 
 like him, of great learning and great industry, could not but 
 produce something valuable. When he pleases least, it can 
 only be said that a good jJesigiiLwas ilLdirected. 
 
 His translations of Northern and Welsh Poetry deserve 
 praise ; the imagery is preserved, perhaps often improved ; but 
 the language is unlike the language of other poets. 
 
 In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the ' 
 common reader ; for by the common-sense of readers, uncor- 
 rupted,with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of sub- 
 tilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all 
 
330 DR. SAMUEL yontfSON ON GRAY. 
 
 claim to poetical honors. The " Churchyard " abounds with 
 images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments 
 to which every bosom returns an echo. The four stanzas be- 
 ginning, ' ' Yet even these bones, ' ' are to me original : I have 
 never seen the notions in any other place ; yet he that reads 
 ithem here persuades himself that he has always felt them. 
 Had Gray written often thus, it had been vain to blame and 
 useless to praise him. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 ESSAYS 
 
 ON 
 
 BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 
 
 BY 
 
 MACAULAY AND CARLYLE. 
 
MACAULAY ON BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 
 
 This work has greatly disappointed us.' Whatever faults 
 we may have been prepared to find in it, we fully expected that 
 it would be a valuable addition to English literature ; that it 
 would contain many curious facts and many judicious re- 
 marks ; that the style of the notes would be neat, clear,. and pre- 
 cise ; and that the typographical execution would be, as in new 
 editions of classical works it ought to be, almost faultless. (^We 
 are sorry to be obliged to say that the merits of Mr. Croker's 
 performance are on a par with those of a certain leg of mutton 
 on which Dr. Johnson dined, while travelling from London to 
 Oxford, and which he, with characteristic energy, pronounced 
 to be " as bad as bad could be ; ill fed, ill killed, ill kept, and 
 ill dressed. ' ' / This edition is ill compiled, ill arranged, ill writ- 
 ten, and ill printed. 
 
 Nothing in the work has astonished us so much as the igno- 
 rance or carelessness of Mr. Croker with respect to facts and 
 dates. Many of his blunders are such as we should be sur- 
 prised to hear any well-educated gentleman commit, even in 
 conversation. The notes absolutely swarm with misstatements 
 into which the editor never would have fallen, if he had taken 
 the slightest pains to investigate the truth of his assertions, or 
 if he had even been well acquainted with the book on which he 
 undertook to comment. We will give a few instances. 
 
 Mr. Croker tells us in a note that Derrick, who was master 
 of the ceremonies at Bath, died very poor in 1760.' We read 
 on ; and, a few pages later, we find Dr. Johnson and Boswell 
 talking of this same Derrick as still living and reigning, as hav^ 
 ing retrieved his character, as possessing so much power over 
 his subjects at Bath that his opposition might be fatal to Sheri- 
 dan's lectures on oratory.' And all this is in 1763. The fact 
 is, that Derrick died in 1769. 
 
 In one note we read that Sir Herbert Croft, the author of 
 that pompous and foolish account of Young which appears 
 among the " Lives of the Poets," died in 1805.' Another 
 
 ' " The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Including a Journal of a Tour 
 to the Hebrides, by James Boswell, Esq." A new edition, with numer- 
 ous Additions and Notes. By John Wilson Croker, LL.D., F.R.S. Five 
 volumes, 8vo. London, 1831. 
 
 ' I. 394. ' I- 4°4- ' iV. 3?l, 
 
334 MACAULAY ON 
 
 note in the same volume states that this same Sir Herbert Croft 
 died at Paris, after residing abroad for fifteen years, on the 
 27th of April, 1816.' 
 
 Mr. Croker informs us that Sir William Forbes, of Pitshgo, 
 the author of the "Life of Beattie," died in i8i6.» A Sir 
 William Forbes undoubtedly died in that year, but not the Sir 
 William Forbes in question, whose death took place in 1806. 
 It is notorious, indeed, that the biographer of Beattie lived just 
 long enough to complete the history of his friend. Eight or 
 nine years before the date which Mr. Croker has assigned for 
 Sir William's death. Sir Walter Scott lamented that event in 
 the introduction to the fourth canto of "Marmion." Every 
 school-girl knows the lines : 
 
 " Scarce had lamented Forbes paid 
 The tribute to his Minstrel's shade ; 
 The tale of friendship scarce was told, 
 Ere the narrator's heart was cold : 
 Pfer may we search before we find 
 A heart so manly and so kind !" 
 
 In one place we are told that Allan Ramsay, the painter, 
 was born in 1709, and died in 1784 ; ' in another, that he died 
 in 1784, in the seventy-first year of his age.* 
 
 In one place, Mr. Croker says that at the commencement 
 of the intimacy between Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, in 
 1765, the lady was twenty-five years old.° In other places he 
 says that Mrs. Thrales thirty-fifth year coincided with John- 
 son's seventieth.' Johnson was born in 1709. If, therefore, 
 Mrs. Thrale's thirty-fifth year coincided with Johnson's 
 seventieth, she could have been only twenty-one years old 
 in 1765. This is not all. Mr. Croker, in another place, 
 assigns the year 1777 as the date of the complimentary lines 
 which Johnson made on Mrs. Thrale's thirty-fifth birthday.' 
 If this date be correct, Mrs. Thrale must have been born in 
 1742, and could have been only twenty-three when her 
 acquaintance with Johnson commenced. Mr. Croker there- 
 fore gives us three different statements as to her age. Two of 
 the three must be incorrect. We will not decide between 
 them ; we will only say that the reasons which Mr. Croker 
 gives for thinking that Mrs. Thrale was exactly thirty-five 
 years old when Johnson was seventy, appear to us utterly 
 frivolous. 
 
 Again, Mr. Croker informs his readers that " Lord Mans- 
 
 ' IV. 428. " II. 262. 3 IV. 105. 4 V. 281. 
 
 5 I.^to. ' IV. 271, 322. ' III. 463. 
 
BOSWELVS LIFE OF JOHNSON. 335 
 
 field survived Johnson full ten years."' Lord Mansfield sur- 
 vived Dr. Johnson just eight years and a quarter. 
 
 Johnson found in the library of a French lady, whom he 
 visited during his short visit to Paris, some works which he re- 
 garded with great disdain. "I looked," says he, "into the 
 books in the lady's closet, and, in contempt, showed them to 
 Mr. Thrale. ' Prince Titi, ' ' Bibliotheque des Fees, ' and other 
 books." ° " ' The History of Prince Titi,' " observes Mr. Cro- 
 ker, " was said to be the autobiography of Frederick Prince of 
 Wales, but was probably written by Ralph his secretary. ' ' A 
 more absurd note never was penned. The ' ' History of Prince 
 Titi, ' ' to which Mr. Croker refers, whether written by Prince 
 Frederick or by Ralph, was certainly never published. If Mr. 
 Croker had taken the trouble to read with attention that very 
 passage in " Park's Royal and Noble Authors" which he cites 
 as his authority, he would have seen that the manuscript was 
 given up to the government. Even if this memoir had been 
 printed, it is not very likely to find its way into a French lady's 
 bookcase. And would any man in his senses speak contemp- 
 tuously of a French lady for having in her possession an Eng- 
 lish work, so curious and interesting as a " Life of Prince Fred- 
 erick," whether written by himself or by a confidential secre- 
 tary, must have been ? The history at which Johnson laughed 
 was a very proper companion to the ' ' Bibliotheque des F^es, ' ' 
 a fairy tale about good Prince Titi and naughty Prince Violent. 
 Mr. Croker may find it in the " Magasin des Enfans, " the first 
 French book which the little girls of England read to their gov- 
 ernesses. 
 
 Mr. Croker states that Mr. Henry Bate, who afterwards as- 
 sumed the name of Dudley, was proprietor of the Morning 
 Herald, and fought a duel with George Robinson Stoney, in 
 consequence of some attacks on Lady Strathmore which ap- 
 peared in that paper. ^ Now, Mr. Bate was then connected, not 
 with the Morning Herald, but with the Morning Post ; and the 
 dispute took place before the Morning Herald was in existence. 
 The duel was fought in January, 1777. The Chronicle of the 
 ' ' Annual Register' ' for that year contains an account of the 
 transaction, and distinctly states that Mr. Bate was editor of the 
 Morning Post. The Morning Herald, as any person may see 
 by looking at any number of it, was not established till some 
 years after this affair. For this blunder there is, we must ac- 
 knowledge, some excuse ; for it certainly seems almost incredi- 
 ble to a person living in our time that any human being should 
 ever have stooped to fight with a writer in the Morning Post. 
 
 » II. 151. » III. 271. ^ V. 196. 
 
336 MACAULAY ON 
 
 ' ' James de Duglas, ' ' says Mr. Croker, ' ' was requested by 
 King Robert Bruce, in his last hours, to repair with his heart to 
 Jerusalem, and humbly to deposit it at the sepulchre of our 
 Lord, which he did in 1329." ' Now, it is well known that he 
 did no such thing, and for a very sufficient reason, because he 
 was killed by the way. Nor was it in 1329 that be set out. 
 Robert Bruce died in 1329, and the expedition of Douglas 
 took place in the following year, ' ' Quand le printems vint et la 
 saison," says Froissart, in June 1330, says Lord Hailes, whom 
 Mr. Croker cites as the authority for his statement. 
 
 Mr. Croker tells us that the great Marquis of Montrose was 
 beheaded at Edinburgh in 1650." There is not a forward boy 
 at any school in England who does not know that the marquis 
 was hanged. The account of the execution is one of the finest 
 passages in Lord Clarendon's History. We can scarcely 
 suppose that Mr. Croker has never read that passage ; and yet 
 we can scarcely suppose that any person who has ever perused 
 so noble and pathetic a story can have utterly forgotten all its 
 most striking circumstances. 
 
 ' ' Lord Townshend, ' ' says Mr. Croker, ' ' was not secretary 
 of state till 1720.'" Can Mr. Croker possibly be ignorant 
 that Lord Townshend was made secretary of state at the acces- 
 sion of George L in 1714, that he continued to be secretary of 
 state till he was displaced by the intrigues of Sunderland and 
 Stanhope at the close of 17 16, and that he returned to the office 
 of secretary of state, not in 1720, but in 1721 ? 
 
 Mr. Croker, indeed, is generally unfortunate in his state- 
 ments respecting the Townshend family. He tells us that 
 Charles Townshend, the chancellor of the exchequer, was 
 ' ' nephew of the prime minister, and son of a peer who was 
 secretary of state, and leader of the House of Lords. ' ' * 
 Charles Townshend was not nephew, but grandnephew, of 
 the Duke of Newcastle, not son, but grandson, of the Lord 
 Townshend who was secretary of state, and leader of the House 
 of Lords. 
 
 " General Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga," says Mr. 
 Croker, "in March, 1778."^ General Burgoyne surrendered 
 on the 17th of October, 1777. 
 
 ' ' Nothing, ' ' says Mr. Croker, ' ' can be more unfounded 
 than the assertion that Byng fell a martyr to political party. 
 By a strange coincidence of circumstances, it happened that 
 there was a total change of administration between his con- 
 demnation and his death ; so that one party presided at his 
 
 ' IV. 29. « II. 526. " III. 52. 
 
 * III. 368. ' IV. 222. 
 
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 337 
 
 trial and another at his execution : there can be no stronger 
 proof that he was not a political martyr." ' Now, what will 
 our readers think of this writer when we assure them that this 
 statement, so confidently made respecting events so notorious, 
 is absolutely untrue ? One and the same administration was in 
 office when the court-martial on Byng commenced its sittings, 
 through the whole trial, at the condemnation and at the execu- 
 tion. In the month of November, 1756, the Duke of Newcastle 
 and Lord Hardwicke resigned ; the Duke of Devonshire be- 
 came first lord of the treasury, and Mr. Pitt secretary of state. 
 This administration lasted till the month of April, 1757. 
 Byng's court-martial began to sit on the 28th of December, 
 1756. He was shot on the 14th of March, 1757. There is 
 something at once diverting and provoking in the cool and au- 
 thoritative manner in which Mr. Croker makes these random 
 assertions. We do not suspect him of intentionally falsifying 
 history. But of this high literary misdemeanor we do without 
 hesitation accuse him, that he has no adequate sense of the 
 obligation which a writer, who professes to relate facts, owes to 
 the public. We accuse him of a negligence and an ignorance 
 analogous to that crassa negligentia and that crassa ignorantia, 
 on which the law animadverts in magistrates and surgeons, even 
 when malice and corruption are not imputed. We accuse him 
 of having undertaken a work which, if not performed with 
 strict accuracy, must be very much worse than useless, and of 
 having performed it as if the difference between an accurate 
 and an inaccurate statement was not worth the trouble of look- 
 ing into the most common book of reference. 
 
 But we must proceed. These volumes contain mistakes 
 more gross, if possible, than any that we have yet mentioned. 
 Boswell has recorded some observations made by Johnson on the 
 changes which had taken place in Gibbon's religious opinions. 
 That Gibbon when a lad at Oxford turned Catholic is well 
 known. " It is said," cried Johnson, laughing, " that he has 
 been a Mohammedan." " This sarcasm," says the editor, 
 " probably alludes to the tenderness with which Gibbon's ma- 
 levolence to Christianity induced him to treat Mohammedanism 
 in his history." Now, the sarcasm was uttered in 1776 ; and 
 that part of the " History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman 
 Empire" which relates to Mohammedanism was not published 
 till 1788, twelve years after the date of this conversation, and 
 near four years after the death of Johnson." 
 
 ' I. 298. 
 
 ' A defence of this blunder was attempted. That the celebrated chap- 
 ters in which Gibbon has traced the progress of Mohammedanism were 
 
338 MACAULAY ON 
 
 "It was in the year 1761," says Mr. Croker, " that Gold- 
 smith published his ' Vicar of Wakefield. ' This leads the editor 
 to observe a more serious inaccuracy of Mrs. Piozzi than Mr. 
 Boswell notices, when he says Johnson left her table to go and 
 sell the ' Vicar of Wakefield ' for Goldsmith. Now, Dr. John- 
 son was not acquainted with the Thrales till 1765, four years 
 after the book had been published. ' ' ' Mr. Croker, in repre- 
 hending the fancied inaccuracy of Mrs. Thrale, has himself 
 shown a degree of inaccuracy, or, to speak more properly, a de- 
 gree of ignorance, hardly credible. In the first place, Johnson 
 became acquainted with the Thrales, not in 1765, but in 1764, 
 and during the last weeks of 1764 dined with them every Thurs- 
 day, as is written in Mrs. Piozzi 's anecdotes. In the second 
 place. Goldsmith published the " Vicar of Wakefield," not in 
 1761, but in 1766. Mrs. Thrale does not pretend to remember 
 the precise date of the summons which called Johnson from her 
 table to the help of his friend. She says only that it was near 
 the beginning of her acquaintance with Johnson, and certainly 
 not later than 1766. Her accuracy is therefore completely vin- 
 dicated. It was probably after one of her Thursday dinners in 
 1764 that the celebrated scene of the landlady, the sheriff's 
 officer, and the bottle of Madeira, took place." 
 
 The very page which contains this monstrous blunder con- 
 tains another blunder, if possible, more monstrous still. Sir 
 Joseph Mawbey, a foolish member of Parliament, at whose 
 speeches and whose pigstyes the wits of Brookes's were, fifty 
 
 not written in 1776 could not be denied. But it was confidently asserted 
 that his partiality to Mohammedanism appeared in his first volume. This 
 assertion is untrue. No passage which can by any art be construed into 
 the faintest indication of the faintest partiality for Mohammedanism has 
 ever been quoted or ever will be quoted from the first volume of the 
 ' History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." 
 
 To what, then, it has been asked, could Johnson allude ? Possibly to 
 some anecdote or some conversation of which all trace is lost. One con 
 jecture may be offered, though with diffidence. Gibbon tells us in his 
 ' ' Memoirs, ' ' that at Oxford he took a fancy for studying Arabic, and was 
 prevented from doing so by the remonstrances of his tutor. Soon after 
 this the young man fell in with Bossuet's controversial writings, and was 
 speedily converted by them to the Roman Catholic faith. The apostasy 
 of a gentleman commoner would of course be for a time the chief subject 
 of conversation in the common room of Magdalene. His whim about 
 Arabic learning would naturally be mentioned, and would ' give occasion 
 to some jokes about the probability of his turning Mussulman. If such 
 jokes were made, Johnson, who frequently visited Oxford, was very likely 
 to hear of them. 
 
 ' V. 409. 
 
 ' This paragraph has been altered ; and a slight inaccuracy, immate- 
 rial to the argument, has been removed. 
 
SOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 339 
 
 years ago, in the habit of laughing most unmercifully, stated, 
 on the authority of Garrick, that Johnson, while sitting in a 
 coffee-house at Oxford, about the time of his Doctor's degree, 
 used some contemptuous expressions respecting Home's play 
 and Macpherson's " Ossian." " Many men," he said, " many 
 women, and many children, might have written Douglas." 
 Mr. Croker conceives that he has detected an inaccuracy, and 
 glories over poor Sir Joseph in a most characteristic manner. 
 " I have quoted this anecdote solely with the view of showing 
 to how little credit hearsay anecdotes are in general entitled. 
 Here is a story published by Sir Joseph Mawbey, a member 
 of the House of Commons, and a person every way worthy of 
 credit, who says he had it from Garrick. Now mark : John- 
 son's visit to Oxford, about the time of his Doctor's degree, 
 was in 1754, the first time he had been there since he left the uni-' 
 versity. But " Douglas" was not acted till 1756, and " Ossian" 
 not published till 1760. All, therefore, that is new in Sir Jo- 
 seph Mawbey 's story is false." ' Assuredly we need not go far 
 to find ample proof that a member of the House of Commons 
 may commit a very gross error. Now mark, say we, in the lan- 
 guage of Mr. Croker. The fact is, that Johnson took his Mas- 
 ter's degree in 1754,° and his Doctor's degree in 1775.' In the 
 spring of 1776* he paid a visit to Oxford, and at this visit a 
 conversation respecting the works of Home and Macpherson 
 might have taken place, and, in all probability, did take place. 
 The only real objection to the story Mr. Croker has" missed. 
 Boswell states, apparently on the best authority, that as early at 
 least as the year 1763, Johnson, in conversation with Blair, 
 used the same expressions respecting " Ossian" which Sir Jo- 
 seph represents him as having used respecting "Douglas."" 
 Sir Joseph or Garrick confounded, we suspect, the two stories. 
 But their error is venial, compared with that of Mr. Croker. 
 
 We will not multiply instances of this scandalous inac- 
 curacy. It is clear that a writer who, even when warned by 
 the text on which he is commenting, falls into such mistakes as 
 these, is entitled to no confidence whatever. Mr. Croker has 
 committed an error of five years with respect to the publication 
 of Goldsmith's novel, an error of twelve years with respect to 
 the publication of part of Gibbon's History, an error of twenty- 
 one years with respect to an event in Johnson's life so impor- 
 tant as the taking of the doctoral degree. Two of these three 
 errors he has committed, while ostentatiously displaying his 
 own accuracy, and correcting what he represents as the loose 
 
 ' V. 409. " I. 262. ' III. 205. 
 
 « III. 326 " I. 405. 
 
340 MACAULAY OX 
 
 assertions of others. How can his readers take on trust his 
 statements concerning the births, marriages, divorces, and 
 deaths of a crowd of people whose names are scarcely known to 
 this generation ? It is not likely that a person who is ignorant 
 of what almost every body knows can know that of which al- 
 most every body is ignorant. We did not open this book with 
 any wish to find blemishes in it. We have made no curious 
 researches. The work itself and a very common knowl- 
 edge of literary and political history have enabled us to de- 
 tect the mistakes which we have pointed out, and many other 
 mistakes of the same kind. We must say, and we say it with 
 regret, that we do not consider the authority of Mr. Croker, un- 
 supported by other evidence, as sufficient to justify any writer 
 who may follow him in relating a single anecdote or in assign- 
 ing a date to a single event. 
 
 Mr. Croker shows almost as much ignorance and heedless- 
 ness in his criticisms as in his statements concerning facts. Dr. 
 Johnson said, very reasonably as it appears to us, that some of 
 the satires of Juvenal are too gross for imitation. Mr. Croker, 
 who, by the way, is angry with Johnson for defending Prior's 
 tales against the charge of indecency, resents this aspersion on 
 Juvenal, and indeed refuses to believe that the doctor can have 
 said any thing so absurd. ' ' He probably said — %oxa.t. passages of 
 them — for there are none of Juvenal's satires to which the same 
 objection may be made as to one of Horace's, that it is alto- 
 gether gfoss and licentious. ' ' ' Surely Mr. Croker can never 
 have read the second and ninth satires of Juvenal. 
 
 Indeed, the decisions of this editor on points of classical 
 learning, though pronounced in a very authoritative tone, are 
 generally such that, if a schoolboy under our care were to utter 
 them, our soul assuredly should not spare for his crying. It is 
 no disgrace to a gentleman who has been engaged during near 
 thirty years in political life that he has forgotten his Greek and 
 Latin. But he becomes justly ridiculous if, when no longer 
 able to construe a plain sentence, he affects to sit in judgment 
 on the most delicate questions of style and metre. From one 
 blunder, a blunder which no good scholar would have made, 
 Mr. Croker was saved, as he informs us, by Sir Robert Peel, 
 who quoted a passage exactly in point from Horace. We heart- 
 ily wish that Sir Robert, whose classical attainments are well 
 known, had been more frequently consulted. Unhappily he 
 was not always at his friend's elbow ; and we have therefore a 
 rich abundance of the strangest errors. Boswell has preserved 
 a poor epigram by Johnson, inscribed ' ' Ad Lauram paritu- 
 
 ' I. 167. 
 
BO SWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. %\l 
 
 ram." Mr. Croker censures the poet for applying the word 
 puella to a lady in Laura's situation, and for talking of the 
 beauty of Lucina. ' ' Lucina, ' ' he says, ' ' was never famed for 
 her beauty." ' If Sir Robert Peel had seen this note, he prob- 
 ably would have again refuted Mr. Croker' s criticisms by an 
 appeal to Horace. In the secular ode, Lucina is used as one 
 of the names of Diana, and the beauty of Diana is extolled by 
 all the most orthodox doctors of the ancient mythology, from 
 Homer in his " Odyssey" to Claudian in his " Rape of Pros- 
 erpine. ' ' In another ode, Horace describes Diana as the god- 
 dess who assists the " laborantes utero puellas." But we are 
 ashamed to detain our readers with this fourth-form learning. 
 
 Boswell found, in his tour to the Hebrides, an , inscription 
 written by a Scotch minister. It runs thus : " Joannes Mac- 
 leod, &c., gentis suae Philarchus, &c.. Florae Macdonald ma- 
 trimoniali vinculo conjugatus turrem hanc Beganodunensem 
 proaevorum habitaculum longe vetustissimum, diu penitus la- 
 befactatam, anno aerae vulgaris mdclxxxvi. instauravit. " — 
 "The minister," says Mr. Croker, "seems to have been no 
 contemptible Latinist. Is not Philarchus a very happy term to 
 express the paternal and kindly authority of the head of a 
 clan ?" " The composition of this eminent Latinist, short as it 
 is, contains several words that are just as much Coptic as La- 
 tin, to say nothing of the incorrect structure of the sentence. 
 The word Philarchus, even if it were a happy term expressing 
 a paternal and kindly authority, would prove nothing for the 
 minister's Latin, iVhatever it might prove for his Greek. But 
 it is clear that the word Philarchus means, not a man who 
 rules by love, but a man who loves rule. The Attic writers of 
 the best age use the word cpiXapxoi in the sense which we assign 
 to it. Would Mr. Croker translate q)ikoaocpoi,z. man who ac- 
 quires wisdom by means of love, or cpiK.OKepSr)<i, a man who 
 makes money by means of love ? In fact, it requires no Bent- 
 ley or Casaubon to perceive that Philarchus is merely a false 
 spelling for Phylarchus, the chief of a tribe. 
 
 Mr. Croker has favored us with some Greek of his own. 
 "At the altar," says Dr. Johnson, "I recommended my 
 S'^J." "These letters," says the editor "(which Dr. Stra- 
 han seems not to have understood), probably mean Bvrjroi 
 qjiXoi, departed friends." * Johnson was not a first-rate Greek 
 
 'I. 133. "11.458. 
 
 ' IV. 251. An attempt was made to vindicate this blunder by quoting 
 a grossly corrupt passage from the 'lueTide; of Euripides : 
 
 ^d&L Koi avTiaaov ■yovdruv, Sttl x^^^^ ^akovca, 
 
 TEKVuv re -DvaTiiv nofiiaai. (5e//af. 
 
342 MACAULAY ON 
 
 scholar ; but he knew more Greek than most boys when they 
 leave school ; and no schoolboy could venture to use the word 
 Srvr/toi in the sense which Mr. Croker ascribes to it without 
 imminent danger of a flogging. 
 
 Mr. Croker has also given us a specimen of his skill in trans- 
 lating Latin. Johnson wrote a note in which he consulted his 
 friend, Dr. Lawrence, on the propriety of losing some blood. 
 The note contains these words : " Si per te licet, imperatur 
 nuncio Holderum ad me deducere. " Johnson should rather 
 have written " imperatum est." But the meaning of the 
 words is perfectly clear. ' ' If you say yes, the messenger has 
 orders to bring Holder to me." Mr. Croker translates the 
 words as follows : "If you consent, pray tell the messenger to 
 bring Holder to me. " ' If Mr. Croker is resolved to write on 
 points of classical learning, we would advise him to begin by 
 giving an hour every morning to our old friend Corderius. 
 
 Indeed, we cannot open any volume of this work in any 
 place, and turn it over for two minutes in any direction, without 
 lighting on a blunder. Johnson, in his Life of Tickell, stated 
 that a poem entitled the Royal Progress, which appears in the 
 last volume of the ' ' Spectator, ' ' was written on the accession of 
 George I. The word " arrival" was afterwards substituted 
 for " accession." " The reader will observe," says Mr. Cro- 
 ker, " that the Whig term accession, which might imply 
 legality, was altered into a statement of the simple fact of King 
 George's arrival.'" Now, Johnson, though a bigoted Tory, 
 was not quite such a fool as Mr. Croker here represents him 
 to be. In the Life of Granville, Lord Lansdowne, which 
 stands a very few pages from the Life of Tickell, mention is 
 made of the accession of Anne, and of the accession of George 
 I. The word arrival was used in the Life of Tickell for the 
 simplest of all reasons. It was used because the subject of the 
 poem called the Royal Progress was the arrival of the king, 
 and not his accession, which took place near two months be- 
 fore his arrival. 
 
 The editor's want of perspicacity is indeed very amusing. 
 He is perpetually telling us that he cannot understand some- 
 thing in the text which is as plain as language can make it. 
 "Mattaire," said Dr. Johnson, "wrote Latin verses from 
 time to time, and published a set in his old age, which he 
 
 The true reading, as every scholar knows, is, tekvuv TeKvscjruv KO/ihat 
 6e/ia(. Indeed, without this emendation it would not be easy to construe 
 the words, even if ^vardv could bear the meaning which Mr. Crokef 
 assigns to it. 
 
 ' V. 17. ' IV. 425- 
 
so SWELL'S LIFE OP yoHMSON. 343 
 
 called Senilia, in which he shows so little learning or taste in 
 writing as to make Carteret a dactyl." ' Hereupon we have 
 this note : " The editor does not understand this objection, 
 nor the following observation." The following observation, 
 which Mr. Croker cannot understand, is simply this : "In 
 matters of genealogy," says Johnson, "it is necessary to give 
 the bare names as they are. But in poetry and in prose of any 
 elegance in the writing, they require to have inflection given to 
 them. ' ' If Mr. Croker had told Johnson that this was unintel- 
 ligible, the doctor would probably have replied, as he replied 
 on another occasion, " I have found you a reason, sir ; I am 
 not bound to find you an understanding. ' ' Every body who 
 knows any thing of Latinity knows that, in genealogical tables, 
 Joannes Baro de Carteret, or Vicecomes de Carteret, may be 
 tolerated, but that in compositions which pretend to elegance, 
 Carteretus, or some other form which admits of inflection, 
 ought to be used. 
 
 All our readers have doubtless seen the two distichs of Sir 
 William Jones, respecting the division of the time of a lawyer. 
 One of the distichs is translated from some old Latin lines ; 
 the other is original. The former runs thus : 
 
 " Six hours to sleep, to law's grave study six. 
 Four spend in prayer, the rest on nature fix." 
 
 " Rather," says Sir William Jones, 
 
 " Six hours to law, to soothing slumbers seven, 
 Ten to the world allot, and all to heaven." 
 
 The second couplet puzzles Mr. Croker strangely. " Sir 
 William," says he, " has shortened his day to twenty-three 
 hours, and the general advice of ' all to heaven ' destroys the 
 peculiar appropriation of a certain period to religious exer- 
 cises." * Now, we did not think that it was in human dulness 
 to miss the meaning of the lines so completely. Sir William 
 distributes twenty-three hours among various employments. 
 One hour is thus left for devotion. The reader expects that the 
 verse will end with "and one to heaven." The whole point 
 of the lines consists in the unexpected substitution of " all " 
 for " one." The conceit is wretched enough ; but it is per- 
 fectly intelligible, and never, we will venture to say, perplexed 
 man, woman, or child before. 
 
 Poor Tom Davies, after failing in business, tried to live by 
 his pen. Johnson called him ' ' an author generated by the 
 corruption of a bookseller." This is a very obvious and even 
 
 ' IV. 335- ' V. 233. 
 
344 MACAULAY OU 
 
 a, commonplace allusion to the famous dogma of the old physi- 
 ologists. Dryden made a similar allusion to that dogma before 
 Johnson was born. Mr. Croker, however, is unable to under- 
 stand what the doctor meant. " The expression," he says, 
 ' ' seems not quite clear. ' ' And he proceeds to talk about the 
 generation of insects, about bursting into gaudier life, and 
 Heaven knows what.' 
 
 There is a still stranger instance of the editor's talent for 
 finding out difficulty in what is perfectly plain. " No man," 
 said Johnson, ' ' can now be made a bishop for his learning and 
 piety." " From this too just observation," says Boswell, 
 ' ' there are some eminent exceptions. ' ' Mr. Croker is puzzled 
 by Boswell's very natural and simple language. " That a gen- 
 eral observation should be pronounced too just, by the very per- 
 son who admits that it is not universally just, is not a little 
 odd."" 
 
 A very large proportion of the two thousand five hundred 
 notes which the editor boasts of having added to those of Bos- 
 well and Malone consists of the flattest and poorest reflections, 
 reflections such as the least intelligent reader is quite com- 
 petent to make for himself, and such as no intelligent reader 
 would think it worth while to utter aloud. They remind us of 
 nothing so much as of those profound and interesting annota- 
 tions which are pencilled by sempstresses and apothecaries' 
 boys on the dog-eared margins of novels borrowed from circu- 
 lating libraries : " How beautiful !" " Cursed prosy !" "I 
 don't like Sir Reginald Malcolm at all." " I think Pelham is 
 a sad dandy. " Mr. Croker is perpetually stopping us incur 
 progress through the most delightful narrative in the language, 
 to observe that really Dr. Johnson was very rude, that he 
 talked more for victory than for truth, that his taste for port 
 wine with capillaire in it was very odd, that Boswell was imper- 
 tinent, that it was foolish in Mrs. Thrale to marry the music- 
 master ; and so forth. 
 
 We cannot speak more favorably of the manner in which 
 the notes are written than of the matter of which they consist. 
 We find in every page words used in wrong senses, and con- 
 structions which violate the plainest rules of grammar. We 
 have the vulgarism of " mutual friend " for " common friend." 
 We have "fallacy" used as synonymous with " falsehood." 
 We have many such inextricable labyrinths of pronouns as that 
 which follows : " Lord Erskine was fond of this anecdote ; he 
 told it to the editor the first time that he had the honor of 
 
 • IV. 323. = III. 228. 
 
BOSWELVS LIFE OF JOHNSOl^. 345 
 
 being in his company." Lastly, we have a plentiful supply of 
 sentences resembling those which we subjoin. " Markland, 
 who, with Jortin and Thirlby, Johnson calls three contempo- 
 raries of great eminence. " ' " Warburton himself did not feel, 
 as Mr. Boswell was disposed to think he did, kindly or grate- 
 fully of Johnson." " "It was him that Horace Walpole called 
 a man who never made a bad figure but as an author. ' ' ' One 
 or two of these solecisms should perhaps be attributed to the 
 printer, who has certainly done his best to fill both the text 
 and the notes with all sorts of blunders. In truth, he and the 
 editor have between them made the book so bad that we do 
 not well see how it could have been worse. 
 
 When we turn from the commentary of Mr. Croker to the 
 work of our old friend Boswell, we find it not only worse 
 printed than in any other edition with which we are acquaint- 
 ed, but mangled in the most wanton manner. Much that Bos- 
 well inserted in his narrative is, without the shadow of a rea- 
 son, degraded to the appendix. The editor has also taken 
 upon himself to alter or omit passages which he considers as 
 indecorous. This prudery is quite unintelligible to us. There 
 is nothing immoral in Boswell' s book, nothing which tends to 
 inflame the passions. He sometimes uses plain words. But if 
 this be a taint which requires expurgation, it would be desira- 
 ble to begin by expurgating the morning and evening lessons. 
 The delicate office which Mr. Croker has undertaken he has 
 performed in the most capricious manner. One strong, old- 
 fashioned English word, familiar to all who read their Bibles, 
 is changed for a softer synonyme in some passages, and suf- 
 fered to stand unaltered in others. In one place a faint allu- 
 sion made by Johnson to an indelicate subject, an allusion so 
 faint that, till Mr. Croker's note pointed it out to us, we had 
 never noticed it, and of which we are quite sure that the mean- 
 ing would never be discovered by any of those for whose sake 
 books are expurgated, is altogether omitted. In another place, 
 a coarse and stupid jest of Dr. Taylor on the same subject, 
 expressed in the broadest language, almost the only passage, as 
 far as we remember, in all Boswell's book, which we should 
 have been inclined to leave out, is suffered to remain. 
 
 We complain, however, much more of the additions than of 
 the omissions. We have half of Mrs. Thrale's book, scraps of 
 Mr. Tyers, scraps of Mr. Murphy, scraps of Mr. Cradock, long 
 prosings of Sir John Hawkins, and connecting observations by 
 Mr Croker himself, inserted into the midst of Boswell's text, 
 
 ' IV. 377. ' IV. 415. = II. 461. 
 
346 MACAULAY ON 
 
 To this practice we most decidedly object. An editor might as 
 well publish Thucydides with extracts from Diodorus inter- 
 spersed, or incorporate the Lives of Suetonius with the History 
 and Annals of Tacitus. Mr. Croker tells us, indeed, that he 
 has done only what Boswell wished to do, and was prevented 
 from doing by the law of copyright. We doubt this greatly. 
 Boswell has studiously abstained from availing himself of the 
 information given by his rivals, on many occasions on which 
 he might have cited them without subjecting himself to the 
 charge of piracy. Mr. Croker has himself, on one occasion, 
 remarked very justly that Boswell was unwilling to owe any 
 obligation to Hawkins. But, be this as it may, if Boswell had 
 quoted from Sir John and from Mrs. Thrale, he would have 
 been guided by his own taste and judgment in selecting his 
 quotations. On what Boswell quoted he would have com- 
 mented with perfect freedom ; and the borrowed passages, so 
 selected, and accompanied by such comments, would have be- 
 come original. They would have dovetailed into the work. 
 No hitch, no crease, would have been discernible. The whole 
 would appear one and indivisible, 
 
 ' ' Ut per laeve severos 
 Efifundat junctura ungues. " 
 
 This is not the case with Mr. Croker's insertions. They 
 are not chosen as Boswell would have chosen them. They are 
 not introduced as Boswell would have introduced them. They 
 differ from the quotations scattered through the original ' ' Life 
 of Johnson, " as a withered bough stuck in the ground differs 
 from a tree skilfully transplanted with all its life about it. 
 
 Not only do these anecdotes disfigure Boswell 's book ; they 
 are themselves disfigured by being inserted in his book. The 
 charm of Mrs. Thrale's little volume is utterly destroyed. The 
 feminine quickness of observation, the feminine softness of 
 heart, the colloquial incorrectness and vivacity of style, the little 
 amusing airs of a half -learned lady, the delightful garrulity, the 
 " dear Doctor Johnson," the " it was so comical," all disappear 
 in Mr. Croker's quotations. The lady ceases to speak in the 
 first person ; and her anecdotes, in the process of transfusion, 
 become as flat as champagne in decanters, or Herodotus in 
 Beloe's version. Sir John Hawkins, it is true, loses nothing ; 
 and for the best of reasons : Sir John had nothing to lose. 
 
 The course which Mr. Croker ought to have taken is quite 
 clear. He should have reprinted Boswell's narrative precisely 
 as Boswell wrote it ; and in the notes or the appendix he 
 should have placed any anecdotes which he might have thought 
 
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 347 
 
 it advisable to quote from other writers. This would have 
 been a much more convenient course for the reader, who has 
 now constantly to keep his eye on the margin in order to see 
 whether he is perusing Boswell, Mrs. Thrale, Murphy, Haw- 
 kins, Tyers, Cradock, or Mr. Croker. We greatly doubt 
 whether even the " Tour to the Hebrides" ought to have been 
 inserted in the midst of the Life. There is one marked dis- 
 tinction between the two works. Most of the Tour was seen 
 by Johnson in manuscript. It does not appear that he ever 
 saw any part of the Life. 
 
 We love, we own, to read the great productions of the 
 human mind as they were written. We have this feeling even 
 about scientific treatises ; though we know that the sciences 
 are always in a state of progression, and that the alterations 
 made by a modern editor in an old book on any branch of nat- 
 ural or political philosophy are likely to be improvements. 
 Some errors have been detected by writers of this generation in 
 the speculations of Adam Smith. A short cut has been made to 
 much knowledge at which Sir Isaac Newton arrived through ar- 
 duous and circuitous paths. Yet we still look with peculiar ven- 
 eration on the "Wealth of Nations" and on the " Principia, " 
 and should regret to see either of those great works garbled even 
 by the ablest hands. But in works which owe much of their 
 interest to the character and situation of the writers the case 
 is infinitely stronger. What man of taste and feeling can en- 
 dure rifacimenti, harmonies, abridgments, expurgated editions ? 
 Who ever reads a stage copy of a play when he can procure 
 the original ? Who ever cut open Mrs. Siddons's Milton ? 
 Who ever got through ten pages of Mr. Gilpin's translation of 
 John Bunyan's Pilgrim into modern English ? Who would 
 lose, in the confusion of a Diatessaron, the peculiar charm 
 which belongs to the narrative of the disciple whom Jesus 
 loved ? The feeling of a reader who has become intimate with 
 any great original work is that which Adam expressed towards 
 his bride : 
 
 " Should God create another Eve, and I 
 
 Another rib afford, yet loss of thee 
 
 Would never from my heart. ' ' 
 
 No substitute, however exquisitely formed, will fill the void 
 left by the original. The second beauty may be equal or supe- 
 rior to the first ; but still it is not she. 
 
 The reasons which Mr. Croker has given for incorporating 
 passages from Sir John Hawkins and Mrs. Thrale with the 
 narrative of Boswell would vindicate the adulteration of half 
 the classical works in the language. If Pepys's Diary and Mrs. 
 
348 MACAULAY ON 
 
 Hutchinson's Memoirs had been published a hundred years 
 ago, no human being can doubt that Mr. Hume would have 
 made great use of those books in his ' ' History of England. 
 But would it, on that account, be judicious in a writer of our 
 own times to publish an edition of Hume's " History of Eng- 
 land," in which large extracts from Pepys and Mrs. Hutchin- 
 son should be incorporated with the original text ? Surely not. 
 Hume's history, be its faults what they may, is now one great 
 entire work, the production of one vigorous mind, working on 
 such materials as were within its reach. Additions made by 
 another hand may supply a particular deficiency, but would 
 grievously injure the general effect. With Boswell's book the 
 case is stronger. There is scarcely, in the whole compass of 
 literature, a book which bears interpolation so ill. We know 
 no production of the human mind which has so much of what 
 may be called the race, so much of the peculiar flavor of the 
 soil from which it sprang. The work could never have been 
 written if the writer had not been precisely what he was. His 
 character is displayed in every page, and this display of char- 
 acter gives a delightful interest to many passages which have 
 _no other interest. 
 
 The " Life of Johnson" is assuredly a great, a very great 
 work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, 
 Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, De- 
 mosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Bos- 
 well is the first of biographers. He has no second. He has 
 distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worth 
 while to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere. 
 
 We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the 
 human intellect so strange a phenomenon as this book. Many 
 of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. 
 Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he 
 has beaten them all. He was, if we are to give any credit to 
 his own account or to the united testimony of all who knew 
 him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. Johnson de- 
 scribed him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of im- 
 mortality by not having been alive when the " Dunciad " was 
 written. Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression 
 for a bore. He was the laughing-stock of the whole of that bril- 
 liant society which has owed to him the greater part of its fame. 
 He was always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, 
 and begging to be spit upon and trampled upon. He was 
 always earning some ridiculous nickname, and then " binding 
 it as a crown unto him," not merely in metaphor, but literally. 
 He exhibited ,himself, at the Shakespeare Jubilee, to all thq 
 
BO SWELL'S LIFE OF yO JIN SON. 349 
 
 crowd which filled Stratford-on-Avon, with a placard round his 
 hat bearing the inscription of Corsica Boswell. In his Tour, 
 he proclaimed to all the world that at Edinburgh he was known 
 by the appellation of Paoli Boswell. Servile and impertinent, 
 shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family 
 pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gen- 
 tleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a 
 common butt in the taverns of London, so curious to know 
 every body who was talked about, that, Tory and High Church- 
 man as he was, he manoeuvred, we have been told, for an in- 
 troduction to Tom Paine, so vain of the most childish distinc- 
 tions, that when he had been to court, he drove to the office 
 where his book was printing without changing his clothes, and 
 summoned all the printer's devils to admire his new ruffles and 
 sword ; such was this man, and such he was content and proud 
 to be. Every thing which another man would have hidden, 
 every thing the publication of which would have made another 
 man hang himself, was matter of gay and clamorous exultation 
 to his weak and diseased mind. What silly things he said, 
 what bitter retorts he provoked, how at one place he was trou- 
 bled with evil presentiments which came to nothing, how at 
 another place, on waking from a drunken doze, he read the 
 prayer-book and took a hair of the dog that had bitten him, 
 how he went to see men hanged and came away maudlin, how 
 he added five hundred pounds to the fortune of one of his 
 babies because she was not scared at Johnson's ugly face, how 
 he was frightened out of his wits at sea, and how the sailors 
 quieted him as they would have quieted a child, how tipsy he 
 was at Lady Cork's one evening and how much his merriment 
 annoyed the ladies, how impertinent he was to the Duchess of 
 Argyle and with what stately contempt she put down his im- 
 pertinence, how Colonel Macleod sneered to his face at his 
 impudent obtrusiveness, how his father and the very wife of his 
 bosom laughed and fretted at his fooleries — all these things he 
 proclaimed to all the world, as if they had been subjects for 
 pride and ostentatious rejoicing. All caprices of his temper, 
 all the illusions of his vanity, all his hypochondriac whimsies, 
 all his castles in the air, he displayed with a cool self-compla- 
 cency, a perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of 
 himself, to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the whole 
 history of mankind. He has used many people ill ; but 
 assuredly he has used nobody so ill as himself. 
 
 That such a man should have written one of the best books 
 in the world is strange enough. But this is not all. M.any 
 persons who have conducted themselves foolishly in aqtive life, 
 
350 MACAULAY ON 
 
 and whose conversation has indicated no superior powers of 
 mind, have left us valuable works. Goldsmith was very justly 
 described by one of his contemporaries as an inspired idiot, 
 and by another as a being, 
 
 " Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll." 
 
 La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton. His blunders 
 would not come in amiss among the stories of Hierocles. 
 But these men attained literary eminence in spite of their weak- 
 nesses. Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses. If 
 he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great 
 writer. Without all the qualities which made him the jest and 
 the torment of those among whom he lived, without the offi- 
 ciousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, 
 the insensibility to all reproof, he never could have produced 
 so excellent a book. He was a slave proud of his servitude, a 
 Paul Pry, convinced that his own curiosity and garrulity were 
 virtues, an unsafe companion who never scrupled to repay the 
 most liberal hospitality by the basest violation of confidence, a 
 man without delicacy, without shame, without sense enough to 
 know when he was hurting the feelings of others or when he 
 was exposing himself to derision ; and because he was all this, 
 he has, in an important department of literature, immeasurably 
 surpassed such writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his 
 own idol Johnson. 
 
 Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as 
 writers, Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his 
 books a single remark of his own on literature, politics, relig- 
 ion, or society, which is not either commonplace or absurd. 
 His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade, 
 and on the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples. 
 To say that these passages are sophistical would be to pay 
 them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to 
 argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable 
 observations made by himself in the course of conversation. 
 Of those observations we do not remember one which is above 
 the intellectual capacity of a boy of fifteen. He has printed 
 many of his own letters, and in these letters he is always rant- 
 ing or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those 
 things which are generally considered as making a book valua- 
 ble, were utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick 
 observation and a retentive memory. These qualities, if he 
 had been a man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of them- 
 selves have sufficeji to make him conspicuous ; but because he 
 
BO SWELL'S L'IFE OF JOHNSON. 351 
 
 was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made him 
 immortal. 
 
 Those parts of his book which, considered abstractedly, are 
 most utterly worthless, are delightful when we read them as 
 illustrations of the character of the writer. Bad in themselves, 
 they are good dramatically, like the nonsense of Justice Shallow, 
 the clipped English of Dr. Caius, or the misplaced consonants 
 of Fluellen. Of all confessors, Boswell is the most candid. 
 Other men who have pretended to lay open their own hearts, 
 Rousseau, for example, and Lord Byron, have evidently writ- 
 ten with a constant view to effect, and are to be then most dis- 
 trusted when they seem to be most sincere. There is scarcely 
 any man who would not rather accuse himself of great crimes 
 and of dark and tempestuous passions than proclaim all his lit- 
 tle vanities and wild fancies. It would be easier to find a per- 
 son who Would avow actions like those of Caesar Borgia or 
 Danton, than one who would publish a day-dream like those of 
 Alnaschar and Malvolio. Those weaknesses which most men 
 keep covered up in the most secret places of the mind, not to 
 be disclosed to the eye of friendship or of love, were precisely 
 the weaknesses which Boswell paraded before all the world. 
 He was perfectly frank, because the weakness of his under- 
 standing and the tumult of his spirits prevented him from 
 knowing when he made himself ridiculous. His book resem- 
 bles nothing so much as the conversation of the inmates of the 
 Palace of Truth. 
 
 His fame is great ; and it will, we have no doubt, be last- 
 ing ; but it is fame of a peculiar kind, and indeed marvellously 
 resembles infamy. We remember no other case in which the 
 world has made so great a distinction between a book and its 
 author. In general, the book and the author are considered as 
 one. To admire the book is to admire the author. The case 
 of Boswell is an exception, we think the only exception, to this 
 rule. His work is universally allowed to be interesting, in- 
 structive, eminently original ; yet it has brought him nothing 
 but contempt. All the world reads it ; all the world delights 
 in it ; yet we do not remember ever to have read or ever to 
 have heard any expression of respect and admiration for the 
 man to whom we owe so much instruction and amusement. 
 While edition after edition of his book was coming forth, his 
 son, as Mr. Croker tells us, was ashamed of it, and hated to 
 hear it mentioned. This feeling was natural and reasonable. 
 Sir Alexander saw that, in proportion to the celebrity of the 
 work, was the degradation of the author. The very editors of 
 this unfortunate gentleman's books have forgotten their alle- 
 
352 
 
 MA CAUL AY ON 
 
 giance, and, like those Puritan casuists who took arms by the 
 authority of the king against his person, have attacked the 
 writer while doing homage to the writings. Mr. Croker, for 
 example, has published two thousand five hundred notes on the 
 life of Johnson, and yet scarcely ever mentions the biographer 
 whose performance he has taken such pains to illustrate with- 
 out some expression of contempt. 
 
 An ill-natured man Boswell certainly was not ; yet the 
 malignity of the most malignant satirist could scarcely cut 
 deeper than his thoughtless loquacity. Having himself no 
 sensibility to derision and contempt, he took it for granted that 
 all others were equally callous. He was not ashamed to 
 exhibit himself to the whole world as a common spy, a com- 
 mon tattler, a humble companion without the excuse of pov- 
 erty, and to tell a hundred stories of his own pertness and 
 folly, and of the insults which his pertness and folly brought 
 upon him. It was natural that he should show little discretion 
 in cases in which the feelings or the honor of others might 
 be concerned. No man, surely, ever published such stories 
 respecting persons whom he professed to love and revere. He 
 would infallibly have made his hero as contemptible as he has 
 made himself, had not his hero really possessed some moral 
 and intellectual qualities of a very high order. The best proof 
 that Johnson was really an extraordinary man is that his char- 
 acter, instead of being degraded, has, on the whole, been de- 
 cidedly raised by a work in which all his vices and weaknesses 
 are exposed more unsparingly than they ever were exposed by 
 Churchill or by Kenrick. -J 
 
 Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fulness of his fame and 
 in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us 
 than any other man in history. Every thing about him, his 
 coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's 
 dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs 
 which too clearly marked his approbation of his dinner, his 
 insatiable appetite for fish-sauce and veal-pie with plums, his 
 inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the posts 
 as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up scraps of 
 orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputations, 
 his contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings, his 
 vigorous, acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his 
 vehemence, his insolence, his fits of tempestuous rage, his 
 queer inmates, old Mr. Levett and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat 
 Hodge and the negro Frank, all are as familiar to us as the 
 objects by which we have been surrounded from childhood. 
 But we have no minute information respecting those years of 
 
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 353 
 
 Johnson's life during which his character and his manners be- 
 came immutably fixed. We know him, not as he was known 
 to the men of his own generation, but as he was known to men 
 whose father he might have been. That celebrated club of 
 which he was the most distinguished member contained few 
 persons who could remember a time when his fame was not 
 fully established and his habits completely formed. He had 
 made himself a name in literature while Reynolds and the 
 Wartons were still boys. He was about twenty years older 
 than Burke, Goldsmith, and Gerard Hamilton, about thirty 
 years older than Gibbon, Beauclerk, and Langton, and about 
 forty years older than Lord Stowell, Sir William Jones, and 
 Windham. Boswell and Mrs. Thrale, the two writers from 
 whom we derive most of our knowledge respecting him, never 
 saw him till long after he was fifty years old, till most of his 
 great works had become classical, and till the pension bestowed 
 on him by the Crown had placed him above poverty. Of 
 those eminent men who were his most intimate associates 
 towards the close of his life, the only one, as far as we remem- 
 ber, who knew him during the first ten or twelve years of his 
 residence in the capital, was David Garrick ; and it does not 
 appear that, during those years, David Garrick saw much of 
 his fellow-townsman. 
 
 Johnson came up to London precisely at the time when the 
 condition of a man of letters was most miserable and degraded. 
 It was a dark night between two sunny days. The age of pat- 
 ronage had passed away. The age of general curiosity and in- 
 telligence had not arrived. The number of readers is at pres- 
 ent so great that a popular author may subsist in comfort and 
 opulence on the profits of his works. In the reigns of William 
 the Third, of Anne, and of George the First, even such men as 
 Congreve and Addison would scarcely have been able to live 
 like gentlemen by the mere sale of their writings. But the de- 
 ficiency of the natural demand for literature was, at the close 
 of the seventeenth and at the beginning of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, more than made up by artificial encouragement, by a 
 vast system of bounties and premiums. There was, perhaps, 
 never a time at which the rewards of litesrary merit were so 
 splendid, at which men who could write well found such easy 
 admittance into the most distinguished society, and to the 
 highest honors of the state. The chiefs of both the great 
 parties into which the kingdom was divided patronized litera- 
 ture with emulous munificence. Congreve, when he had scarce- 
 ly attained his majority, was rewarded for his first comedy 
 with places which made him independent for life. Smith, 
 
354 MACAULAY ON 
 
 though his " Hippolytus" and " Phsedra" failed, would have 
 been consoled with three hundred a year but for his own folly. 
 Rowe was not only poet-laureate, but also land-surveyor of 
 the customs in the port of London, clerk of the council to the 
 Prince of Wales, and secretary of the Presentations to the Lord 
 Chancellor. Hughes was secretary to the Commissions of the 
 Peace. Ambrose Philips was judge of the Prerogative Court 
 in Ireland. Locke was commissioner of appeals and of the 
 Board of Trade. Newton was master of the Mint. Stepney 
 and Prior were employed in embassies of high dignity and im- 
 portance. Gay, who commenced life as apprentice to a silk 
 mercer, became a secretary of legation at five-and-twenty. It 
 was to a poem on the Death of Charles the Second, and to the 
 City and Country Mouse, that Montague owed his introduction 
 into public life, his earldom, his garter, and his auditorship of 
 the exchequer. Swift, but for the unconquerable prejudice of 
 the queen, would have been a bishop. Oxford, with his white 
 staff in his hand, passed through the crowd of his suitors to 
 welcome Parnell, when that ingenious writer deserted the 
 Whigs. Steele was a commissioner of stamps and a member of 
 Parliament. Arthur Mainwaring was a commissioner of the 
 customs, and auditor of the imprest. Tickell was secretary to 
 the Lords Justices of Ireland. Addison was secretary of state. 
 This liberal patronage was brought into fashion, as it seems, 
 by the magnificent Dorset, almost the only noble versifier in the 
 court of Charles the Second who possessed talents for composi- 
 tion which were independent of the aid of a coronet. Mon- 
 tague owed his elevation to the favor of Dorset, and imitated 
 . through the whole course of his life the liberality to which he 
 was himself so greatly indebted. The Tory leaders, Harley 
 and Bolingbroke in particular, vied with the chiefs of the Whig 
 party in zeal for the encouragement of letters. But soon after 
 the accession of the house of Hanover a change took place. 
 The supreme power passed to a man who cared little for poetry 
 or eloquence. The importance of the House of Commons was 
 constantly on the increase. The government was under the 
 necessity of bartering for parliamentary support much of that 
 patronage which had been employed in fostering literary merit ; 
 and Walpole was by no means inclined to divert any part of 
 the fund of corruption to purposes which he considered as idle. 
 He had eminent talents for government and for debate. But 
 he had paid little attention to books, and felt little respect for 
 authors. One of the coarse jokes of his friend. Sir Charles 
 Hanbury Williams, was far more pleasing to him than Thom- 
 son's "Seasons" or Richardson's "Pamela," He had ob- 
 
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF fOHNSOl^. 355 
 
 served that some of the distinguished writers whom the favor of 
 Halifax had turned into statesmen had been mere encumbran- 
 ces to their party, dawdlers in office, and mutes in Parliament. 
 During the whole course of his administration, therefore, he 
 scarcely befriended a single man of genius. The best writers 
 of the age gave all their support to the opposition, and con- 
 tributed to excite that discontent which, after plunging the 
 nation into a foolish and unjust war, overthrew the minister tp 
 make room for men less able and equally immoral. The oppo- 
 sition could reward its eulogists with little more than prom- 
 ises and caresses. St. James's would give nothing : Leicester 
 house had nothing to give. 
 
 Thus, at the time when Johnson commenced his literary 
 career, a writer had little to hope from the patronage of power- 
 ful individuals. The patronage of the public did not yet fur- 
 nish the means of comfortable subsistence. The prices paid 
 by booksellers to authors were so low that a man of considera- 
 ble talents and unremitting industry could do little more than 
 provide for the day which was passing over him. The lean 
 kine had eaten up the fat kine. The thin and withered ears had 
 devoured the good ears. The season of rich harvests was over, 
 and the period of famine had begun. All that is squalid and 
 miserable might now be summed up in the word Poet. That 
 word denoted a creature dressed like a scarecrow, familiar 
 with compters and sponging-houses, and perfectly qualified to 
 decide on the comparative merits of the Common Side in the 
 King's Bench prison and of Mount Scoundrel in the Fleet. 
 Even the poorest pitied him ; and they well might pity him. 
 For if their condition was equally abject, their aspirings were 
 not equally high, nor their sense of insult equally acute. To 
 lodge in a garret up four pair of stairs, to dine in a cellar 
 among footmen out of place, to translate ten hours a day for 
 the wages of a ditcher, to be hunted by bailiffs from one haunt 
 of beggary and pestilence to another, from Grub Street to St. 
 George's Fields, and from St. George's Fields to the alleys 
 behind St. Martin's church, to sleep on a bulk in June and 
 amidst the ashes of a glass-house in December, to die in an 
 hospital and to be buried in a parish vault, was the fate of 
 more than one writer who, if he had lived thirty years earlier, 
 would have been admitted to the sittings of the Kitcat or the 
 Scriblerus Club, would have sat in Parliament, and would have 
 been intrusted with embassies to the High Allies ; who, if he- 
 had Hved in our time, would have found encouragement' 
 scarcely less munificent in Albemarle Street or in Paternoster 
 Row. 
 
356 macaulay oh 
 
 As every climate has its peculiar diseases, so every walk of 
 life has its peculiar temptations. The literary character, as- 
 suredly, has always had its share of faults: vanity, jealousy, 
 morbid sensibility. To these faults were now superadded the 
 faults which are commonly found in men whose livelihood is 
 precarious, and whose principles are exposed to the trial of 
 severe distress. All the vices of the gambler and of the beggar 
 were blended with those of the author. The prizes in the 
 wretched lottery of book-making were scarcely less ruinous 
 than the blanks. If good fortune came, it came in such a 
 manner that it was almost certain to be abused. After months 
 of starvation and despair, a full third night or a well-received 
 dedication filled the pocket of the lean, ragged, unwashed poet 
 with guineas. He hastened to enjoy those luxuries with the 
 images of which his mind had been haunted while he was 
 sleeping amidst the cinders and eating potatoes at the Irish 
 ordinary in Shoe Lane. A week of taverns soon qualified him 
 for another year of night-cellars. Such was the life of Savage, 
 of Boyse, and of a crowd of others. Sometimes blazing in 
 gold-laced hats and waistcoats ; sometimes lying in bed be- 
 cause their coats had gone to pieces, or wearing paper cravats 
 because their linen was in pawn ; sometimes drinking Cham- 
 pagne and Tokay with Betty Careless ; sometimes standing at 
 the window of an eating-house in Porridge Island, to snuff up 
 the scent of what they could not afford to taste : they knew 
 luxury ; they knew beggary ; but they never knew comfort. 
 These men were irreclaimable. They looked on a regular and 
 frugal life with the same aversion which an old gypsy or a Mo- 
 hawk hunter feels for a stationary abode and for the restraints 
 and securities of civilized communities. They were as un- 
 tamable, as much wedded to their desolate freedom, as the 
 wild ass. They could no more be broken in to the offices of 
 social man than the unicorn could be trained to serve and 
 abide by the crib. It was well if they did not, like beasts of a 
 still fiercer race, tear the hands which ministered to their 
 necessities. To assist them was impossible ; and the most 
 benevolent of mankind at length became weary of giving relief 
 which was dissipated with the wildest profusion as soon as it 
 had been received. If a sum was bestowed on the wretched 
 adventurer, such as, properly husbanded, might have supplied 
 him for six months, it was instantly spent in strange freaks of 
 sensuality, and, before forty-eight hours had elapsed, the poet 
 was again pestering all his acquaintance for twopence to get a 
 plate of shin of beef at a subterraneous cook-shop. If his 
 friends gave him an asylum in their houses, those houses were 
 
BO SWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 357 
 
 forthwith turned into bagnios and taverns. All order was de- 
 stroyed ; all business was suspended. The most good-natured 
 host began to repent of his eagerness to serve a man of genius 
 in distress when he heard his guest roaring for fresh punch at 
 five o'clock in the morning. 
 
 A few eminent writers were more fortunate. Pope had 
 been raised above poverty by the active patronage which, in his 
 youth, both the great political parties had extended to his 
 Homer. Young had received the only pension ever bestowed, 
 to the best of our recollection, by Sir Robert Walpole, as the 
 reward of mere literary merit. One or two of the many poets 
 who attached themselves to the opposition, Thomson in partic- 
 ular and Mallet, obtained, after much severe suffering, the 
 means of subsistence from their political friends. Richardson, 
 like a man of sense, kept his shop ; and his shop kept him, 
 which his novels, admirable as they are, would scarcely have 
 done. But nothing could be more deplorable than the state 
 even of the ablest men, who at that time depended for sub- 
 sistence on their writings. Johnson, Collins, Fielding, and 
 Thomson were certainly four of the most distinguished per- 
 sons that England produced during the eighteenth century. It 
 is well known that they were all four arrested for debt. 
 
 Into calamities and difficulties such as these Johnson 
 plunged in his twenty-eighth year. From that time till he was 
 three or four and fifty, we have little information respecting 
 him — ^little, we mean, compared with the full and accurate in- 
 formation which we possess respecting his proceedings and 
 habits towards the close of his Ufe. He emerged at length 
 from cocklofts and sixpenny ordinaries into the society of the 
 polished and the opulent. His fame was established. A pen- 
 sion sufficient for his wants had been conferred on him ; and 
 he came forth to astonish a generation with which he had 
 almost as little in common as with Frenchmen or Spaniards. 
 
 In his early years he had occasionally seen the great ; but 
 he had seen them as a beggar. He now came amoiig them as 
 a companion. The demand for amusement and instruction 
 had, during the course of twenty years, been gradually increas- 
 ing. The price of literary labor had risen ; and those rising 
 men of letters with whom Johnson was henceforth to associate 
 were for the most part persons widely different from those who 
 had walked about with him all night in the streets for want of a 
 lodging. Burke, Robertson, the Wartons, Gray, Mason, Gib- 
 bon, Adam Smith, Beattie, Sir William Jones, Goldsmith, and 
 Churchill, were the most distinguished writers of what may be 
 called the second generation of the Johnsonian age. Of these 
 
358 MACAULAY 01^ 
 
 men Churchill was the only one in whom we can trace the 
 stronger lineaments of that character which, when Johnson 
 first came up to London, was common among authors. Of 
 the rest, scarcely any had felt the pressure of severe poverty. 
 Almost all had been early admitted into the most respectable 
 society on an equal footing. They were men of quite a differ- 
 ent species from the dependents of Curll and Osborne. 
 
 Johnson came among them the solitary specimen of a past 
 age, the last survivor of the genuine race of Grub-street hacks ; 
 the last of that generation of authors whose abject misery and 
 whose dissolute manners had furnished inexhaustible matter to 
 the satirical genius of Pope. From nature he had received an 
 uncouth figure, a diseased constitution, and an irritable tem- 
 per. The manner in which the earlier years of his manhood 
 had been passed had given to his demeanor, and even to his 
 moral character, some peculiarities appalling to the civilized 
 beings who were the companions of his old age. The perverse 
 irregularity of his hours, the slovenliness of his person, his fits 
 of strenuous exertion, interrupted by long intervals of sluggish- 
 ness, his strange abstinence, and his equally strange voracity, 
 his active benevolence, contrasted with the constant rudeness 
 and the occasional ferocity of his manners in society, made 
 him, in the opinion of those with whom he lived during the 
 last twenty years of his life, a complete original. An original 
 he was, undoubtedly, in some respects. But if we possessed 
 full information concerning those who shared his early hard- 
 ships, we should probably find that what we call his singulari- 
 ties of manner were, for the most part, failings which he had 
 in common with the class to which he belonged. He ate at 
 Streatham Park as he had been used to eat behind the screen 
 at St. John's Gate, when he was ashamed to show his ragged 
 clothes. He ate as it was natural that a man should eat, who, 
 during a great part of his life, had passed the morning in doubt 
 whether he should have food for the afternoon. The habits of 
 his early life had accustomed him to bear privation with forti- 
 tude, but not to taste pleasure with moderation. He could 
 fast ; but when he did not fast, he tore his dinner like a fam- 
 ished wolf, with the veins swelling on his forehead, and the 
 perspiration running down his cheeks. He scarcely ever took 
 wine ; but when he drank it he drank it greedily and in large 
 tumblers. These were, in fact, mitigated symptoms of that 
 same moral disease which raged with such deadly malignity in 
 his friends Savage and Boyse. The roughness and violence 
 which he showed in society were to be expected from a man 
 whose temper,- not naturally gentle, had been long tried by the 
 
BO SWELL'S LIFM OF JOHNSOl^. 359 
 
 bitterest calamities, by the want of meat, of fire, and of clothes, 
 by the importunity of creditors, by the insolence of booksellers, 
 by the derision of fools, by the insincerity of patrons, by that 
 bread which is the bitterest of all food, by those stairs which 
 are the most toilsome of all paths, by that deferred hope which 
 makes the heart sick. Through all these things the ill-dressed, 
 coarse, ungainly pedant had struggled manfully up to eminence 
 and command. It was natural that, in the exercise of his 
 power, he should be " eo immitior, quia toleraverat, ' ' that, 
 though his heart was undoubtedly generous and humane, his 
 demeanor in society should be harsh and despotic. For 
 severe distress he had sympathy, and not only sympathy, but 
 munificent relief. But for the suffering which a harsh world 
 inflicts upon a delicate mind he had no pity ; for it was a kind 
 of suffering which he could scarcely conceive. He would 
 carry home on his shoulders a sick and starving girl from the 
 streets. He turned his house into a place of refuge for a 
 crowd of wretched old creatures who could find no other asy- 
 lum ; nor could all their peevishness and ingratitude weary 
 out his benevolence. But the pangs of wounded vanity 
 seemed to him ridiculous ; and he scarcely felt sufficient com- 
 passion even for the pangs of wounded affection. He had 
 seen and felt so much of sharp misery, that he was not affected 
 by paltry vexations ; and he seemed to think that every body 
 ought to be as much hardened to those vexations as himself. 
 He was angry with Boswell for complaining of a headache, with 
 Mrs. Thrale for grumbling about the dust on the road or the 
 smell of the kitchen. These were, in his phrase, ' ' foppish 
 lamentations," which people ought to be ashamed to utter in a 
 world so full of sin and sorrow. Goldsmith crying because the- 
 "Good-natured Man" had failed inspired him with no pity. 
 Though his own health was not good, he detested and despised 
 valetudinarians. Pecuniary losses, unless they reduced the 
 loser absolutely to beggary, moved him very little People 
 whose hearts had been softened by prosperity might weep, he 
 said, for such events ; but all that could be expected of a plain 
 man was not to laugh. He was not much moved even by the 
 spectacle of Lady Tavistock dying of a broken heart for the 
 loss of her lord'. Such grief he considered as a luxury reserved 
 for the idle and the wealthy. A washerwoman, left a widow 
 with nine small children, would not have sobbed herself to 
 death. 
 
 A person who troubled himself so little about small or senti- 
 mental grievances was not likely to be very attentive to the 
 feelings of others in the ordinary intercourse of society. He 
 
360 MACAULAy ON 
 
 could not understand how a sarcasm or a reprimand could 
 make any man really unhappy. " My dear doctor," said he to 
 Goldsmith, " what harm does it do to a man to call him Holo- 
 fernes?" "Pooh, ma'am," he exclaimed to Mrs. Carter, 
 " who is the worse for being talked of uncharitably ?" Polite- 
 ness has been well defined as benevolence in small things. 
 Johnson was impolite, not because he wanted benevolence, but 
 because small things appeared smaller to him than to people 
 who had never known what it was to live for fourpence half- 
 penny a day. 
 
 The characteristic peculiarity of his intellect was the union 
 of great powers with low prejudices. If we judged of him by 
 the best parts of his mind, we should place him almost as high 
 as he was placed by the idolatry of Boswell ; if by the worst 
 parts of his mind, we should place him even below Boswell 
 himself. Where he was not under the influence of some 
 strange scruple or some domineering passion, which prevented 
 him from boldly and fairly investigating a subject, he was a 
 wary and acute reasoner, a little too much inclined to scepti- 
 cism, and a little too fond of paradox. No man was less likely 
 to be imposed upon by fallacies in argument or by exaggerated 
 statements of fact. But if, while he was beating down soph- 
 isms and exposing false testimony, some childish prejudices, 
 such as would excite laughter in a well-managed nursery, came 
 across him, he was smitten as if by enchantment. His mind 
 dwindled away under the spell from gigantic elevation to 
 dwarfish littleness. Those who had lately been admiring its 
 amplitude and its force were now as much astonished at its 
 strange narrowness and feebleness as the fisherman in the Ara- 
 bian tale, when he saw the Genie, whose stature had overshad- 
 owed the whole sea-coast, and whose might seemed equal to a 
 contest with armies, contract himself to the dimensions of his 
 small prison, and lie there the helpless slave of the charm of 
 Solomon. 
 
 Johnson was in the habit of sifting with extreme severity the 
 evidence for all stories which were merely odd. But when 
 they were not only odd but miraculous, his severity relaxed. 
 He began to be credulous precisely at the point where the most 
 credulous people begin to be sceptical. It is curious to ob- 
 serve, both in his writings and in his conversation, the contrast 
 between the disdainful manner in which he rejects unauthenti- 
 cated anecdotes, even when they are consistent with the gen- 
 eral laws of nature, and the respectful manner in which he 
 mentions the wildest stories relating to the invisible world. A 
 man who told him of a water-spout or a meteoric stone gen- 
 
BO SWELL'S LIPE OF yOHNSON 36 1 
 
 erally had the lie direct given him for his pains. A man who 
 told him of a prediction or a dream wonderfully accomplished 
 was sure of a courteous hearing. " Johnson," observed 
 Hogarth, "like King David, says in his haste that all men 
 are liars. " " His incredulity, ' ' says Mrs. Thrale, ' ' amounted 
 almost to disease." She tells us how he browbeat a gentle- 
 man who gave him an account of a hurricane in the West In- 
 dies, and a poor Quaker who related some strange circumstance 
 about the red-hot balls fired at the siege of Gibraltar. " It is 
 not so ; it cannot be true. Don't tell that story again. You 
 cannot think how poor a figure you make in telling it." He 
 once said, half jestingly we suppose, that for six months he 
 refused to credit the fact of the earthquake at Lisbon, and that 
 he still believed the extent of the calamity to be greatly exag- 
 gerated. Yet he related with a grave face how old Mr. Cave 
 of St. John's Gate saw a ghost, and how this ghost was some- 
 ' thing of a shadowy being. He went himself on a ghost-hunt to 
 Cock Lane, and was angry with John Wesley for not following 
 up another scent of the same kind with proper spirit and perse- 
 verance. He rejects the Celtic genealogies and poems without 
 the least hesitation ; yet he declares himself willing to believe 
 the stories of the second sight. If he had examined the claims 
 of the Highland seers with half the severity with which he sifted 
 the evidence for the genuineness of ' ' Fingal, ' ' he would, we 
 suspect, have come away from Scotland with a mind fully made 
 up. In his '* Lives of the Poets," we find that he is unwilling 
 to give credit to the accounts of Lord Roscommon's early 
 proficiency in his studies ; but he tells with great solemnity an 
 absurd romance about some intelligence preternaturally im- 
 pressed on the mind of that nobleman. He avows himself to 
 be in great doubt about the truth of the story, and ends by 
 warning his readers not wholly to slight such impressions. 
 
 Many of his sentiments on religious subjects are worthy of 
 a liberal and enlarged mind. He could discern clearly enough 
 the folly and rneanness of all bigotry except his own. When 
 he spoke of the scruples of the Puritans, he spoke like a person 
 who had really obtained an insight into the divine philosophy 
 of the New Testament, and who considered Christianity as a 
 noble scheme of government, tending to promote the happiness 
 and to elevate the moral nature of man. The horror which the 
 sectaries felt for cards, Christmas ale, plum-porridge, mince- 
 pies, and dancing bears excited his contempt. To the argu- 
 ments urged by some very worthy people against showy dress 
 hq replied with admirable sense and spirit, " Let us not be 
 found, when our Master calls us, stripping the lace off our 
 
362 MAiAULAV ON' 
 
 waistcoats, but the spirit of contention from our souls and 
 tongues. Alas ! sir, a man who cannot get to heaven m a 
 green coat will not find his way thither the sooner in a gray 
 one. ' ' Yet he was himself under the tyranny of scruples as 
 unreasonable as those of Hudibras or Ralpho, and carried his 
 zeal for ceremonies and for ecclesiastical dignities to lengths 
 a^ltogether inconsistent with reason or with Christian charity. 
 He has gravely noted down in his diary that he once committed 
 the sin of drinking coffee on Good Friday. In Scotland he 
 thought it his duty to pass several months without joining in 
 public worship solely because the ministers of the kirk had not 
 been ordained by bishops. His mode of estimating the piety 
 of his neighbors was somewhat singular. " Campbell," said 
 he, " is a good man, a pious man. I am afraid he has not 
 been in the inside of a church for many years ; but he never 
 passes a church without pulling off his hat : this shows he has 
 good principles. ' ' Spain and Sicily must surely contain many 
 pious robbers and well-principled assassins. Johnson could 
 easily see that a Roundhead who named all his children after 
 Solomon's singers, and talked in the House of Commons about 
 seeking the Lord, might be an unprincipled villain, whose relig- 
 ious mummeries only aggravaited his guilt. But a man who 
 took off his hat when he passed a church episcopally conse- 
 crated must be a good man, a pious man, a man of good prin- 
 ciples. Johnson could easily see that those persons who 
 looked on a dance or a laced waistcoat as sinful, deemed most 
 ignobly of the attributes of God and of the ends of revelation. 
 But with what a storm of invective he would have overwhelmed 
 any man who had blamed him for celebrating the redemption 
 of mankind with sugarless tea and butterless buns ! 
 
 Nobody spoke more contemptuously of the cant of patriot- 
 ism. Nobody saw more clearly the error of those who regard- 
 ed liberty not as a means but as an end, and who proposed to 
 themselves, as the object of their pursuit, the prosperity of the 
 state as distinct from the prosperity of the individuals who 
 compose the state. His calm and settled opinion seems to 
 have been that forms of government have little or no influence 
 on the happiness of society. This opinion, erroneous as it is, 
 ought at least to have preserved him from all intemperance on 
 political questions. It did not, however, preserve him from 
 the lowest, fiercest, and most absurd extravagances of party 
 spirit, from rants which, in every thing but the diction, resem- 
 bled those of Squire Western. He was, as a politician, half ice 
 and half fire. On the side of his intellect he was a mere Po- 
 cocurante, far too apathetic about public affairs, far too seep- 
 
BOSWELVS LIFE OF JOHNSON. 363 
 
 tical as to the good or evil tendency of any form of polity. 
 His passions, on the contrary, were violent even to slaying 
 against all who leaned to Whiggish principles. The well- 
 known lines which he inserted in Goldsmith's " Traveller" ex- 
 press what seems to have been his deliberate judgment : 
 
 " How small, of all that human hearts endure. 
 That part which kings or laws can cause or cure !" 
 
 He had previously put expressions very similar into the mouth 
 of Rasselas. It is amusing to contrast these passages with the 
 torrents of raving abuse which he poured forth against the 
 Long Parliament and the American Congress. In one of the 
 conversations reported by Boswell this inconsistency displays 
 itself in the most ludicrous manner. 
 
 " Sir Adam Ferguson," says Boswell, " suggested that luxury 
 corrupts a people and destroys the spirit of liberty. ' ' John- 
 son : " Sir, that is all visionary. I would not give half a 
 guinea to live under one form of government rather than an- 
 other. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual. 
 Sir, the danger of the abuse of power is nothing to a private 
 man. What Frenchman is prevented passing his life as he 
 pleases?" Sir Adam : " But, sir, in the British constitution 
 it is surely of importance to keep up a spirit in the people, so 
 as to preserve a balance against the crown." Johnson : 
 " Sir, I perceive you are a vile Whig. Why all this childish 
 jealousy of the power of the crown ? The crown has not 
 power enough." 
 
 One of the old philosophers. Lord Bacon tells us, used to say 
 that life and death were just the same to him. ' ' Why then, ' ' 
 said an objector, "do you not kill yourself?" The philoso- 
 pher answered, "Because it is just the same." If the differ- 
 ence between two forms of government be not worth half a 
 guinea, it is not easy to see how Whiggism can be viler than 
 Toryism, or how the crown can have too little power. If the 
 happiness of individuals is not affected by political abuses, zeal 
 for liberty is doubtless ridiculous. But zeal for monarchy 
 must be equally so. No person could have been more quick- 
 sighted than Johnson to such a contradiction as this in the logic 
 of an antagonist. 
 
 The judgments which Johnson passed on books were, in his 
 own time, regarded with superstitious veneration, and in our 
 time are generally treated with indiscriminate contempt. They 
 are the judgments of a strong but enslaved understanding. 
 The mind of the critic was hedged round by an uninterrupted 
 fence of prejudices and superstitions. Within his narrow 
 
364 MACAULAY ON 
 
 limits he displayed a vigor and an activity which ought to 
 have enabled him to clear the barrier that confined him. 
 
 How it chanced that a man who reasoned on his premises 
 so ably should assume his premises so foolishly, is one of the 
 great mysteries of human nature. The same inconsistency 
 may be observed in the schoolmen of the middle ages. Those 
 writers show so much acuteness and force of mind in arguing 
 on their wretched data, that a modern reader is perpetually at 
 a loss to comprehend how such mind came by such data. Not 
 a flaw in the superstructure of the theory which they are rear- 
 ing escapes their vigilance. Yet they are blind to the obvious 
 unsoundness of the foundation. It is the same with some emi- 
 nent lawyers. Their legal arguments are intellectual prodigies, 
 abounding with the happiest analogies and the most refined dis- 
 tinctions. The principles of their arbitrary science being once 
 admitted, the statute-book and the reports being once assumed 
 as the foundations of reasoning, these men must be allowed to 
 be perfect masters of logic. But if a question arises as to the 
 postulates on which their whole system rests, if they are called 
 upon to vindicate the fundamental maxims of that system 
 which they have passed their lives in studying, these very men 
 often talk the language of savages or of children. Those who 
 have listened to a man of this class in his own court, and who 
 have witnessed the skill with which he analyzes and digests a 
 vast mass of evidence, or reconciles a crowd of precedents 
 which at first sight seem contradictory, scarcely know him again 
 when, a few hours later, they hear him speaking on the other 
 side of Westminster Hall in his capacity of legislator. They 
 can scarcely believe that the paltry quirks which are faintly 
 heard through a storm of coughing, and which do not impose 
 on the plainest country gentleman, can proceed from the same 
 sharp and vigorous intellect which had excited their admiration 
 under the same roof and on the same day. 
 
 Johnson decided literary questions like a lawyer, not like a 
 legislator. He never examined foundations where a point was 
 already ruled. His whole code of criticism rested on pure as- 
 sumption, for which he sometimes quoted a precedent or an 
 authority, but rarely troubled himself to give a reason drawn 
 from the nature of things. He took it for granted that the 
 kind of poetry which flourished in his own time, which he had 
 been accustomed to hear praised from his childhood, and 
 which he had himself written with success, was the best kind of 
 poetry. In his biographical work he has repeatedly laid it 
 down as an undeniable proposition that during the latter part 
 of the seventeenth century, and the earlier part of the eight- 
 
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 365 
 
 eenth, English poetry had been in a constant progress of im- 
 provenaent. Waller, Denham, Dryden, and Pope had been, 
 according to him, the great reformers. He judged of all works 
 of the imagination by the standard established amonp; his own 
 contemporaries. Though he allowed Homer to have been a 
 greater man than Virgil, he seems to have thought the ' ' ^neid' ' 
 a greater poem than the ' ' Iliad. ' ' Indeed he well might have 
 thought so ; for he preferred Pope's " Iliad " to Homer's. He 
 pronounced that, after Hook's translation of Tasso, Fairfax's 
 would hardly be reprinted. He could see no merit in our fine 
 old English ballads, and always spoke with the most provoking 
 contempt of Percy's fondness for them. Of the great original 
 works of imagination which appeared during his time, Richard- 
 son's novels alone excited his admiration. He could see little 
 or no merit in " Tom Jones," in " Gulliver's Travels," or in 
 " Tristram Shandy. " To Thomson's "Castle of Indolence" 
 he vouchsafed only a line of cold commendation, of com- 
 mendation much colder than what he has bestowed on the 
 "Creation" of that portentous bore. Sir Richard Blackmore. 
 Gray was, in his dialect, a barren rascal. Churchill was a block- 
 head. The contempt which he felt for the trash of Macpher- 
 son was indeed just ; but it was, we suspect, just by chance. 
 He despised the " Fingal " for the very reason which led many 
 men of genius to admire it. He despised it, not because it was 
 essentially commonplace, but because it had a superficial air of 
 originality. 
 
 He was undoubtedly an excellent judge of compositions 
 fashioned on his own principles. But when a deeper philos- 
 ophy was required, when he undertook to pronounce judg- 
 ment on the works of those great minds which ' ' yield homage 
 only to eternal laws, ' ' his failure was ignominious. He criti- 
 cised Pope's " Epitaphs" excellently. But his observations on 
 Shakespeare's plays and Milton's poems seem to us for the 
 most part as wretched as if they had been written by Rymer 
 himself, whom we take to have been the worst critic that ever 
 lived. 
 
 Some of Johnson's whims on literary subjects can be com- 
 pared only to that strange nervous feeling which made him 
 uneasy if he had not touched every post between the Mitre 
 tavern and his own lodgings. His preference of Latin epitaphs 
 to English epitaphs is an instance. An English epitaph, he 
 said, would disgrace Smollett. He declared that he would 
 not pollute the walls of Westminster Abbey with an English ep- 
 itaph on Goldsmith. What reason there can be for celebrating 
 a British writer in Latin, which there was not for covering the 
 
366 MACAULAY ON 
 
 Roman arches of triumph with Greek inscriptions, or for com- 
 memorating the deeds of the heroes of Thermopylae in Egyptian 
 hieroglyphics, we are utterly unable to imagine. 
 
 On men and manners, at least on the men and manners of 
 a particular place and a particular age, Johnson had certainly 
 looked with a most observant and discriminating eye. His re- 
 marks on the education of children, on marriage, on the econo- 
 my of families, on the rules of society, are always striking, and 
 generally sound. In his writings, indeed, the knowledge of life 
 which he possessed in an eminent degree is very imperfectly ex- 
 hibited. Like those unfortunate chiefs of the middle ages who 
 were suffocated by their own chain-mail and cloth of gold, his 
 maxims perish under that load of words which was designed for 
 their defence and their ornament. But it is clear, from the re- 
 mains of his conversation, that he had more of that homely wis- 
 dom which nothing but experience and observation can give 
 than any writer since the time of Swift. If he had been con- 
 tent to write as he talked, he might have left books "on the 
 practical art of living superior to the " Directions to Servants." 
 
 Yet even his remarks on society, like his remarks on litera- 
 ture, indicate a mind at least as remarkable for narrowness as 
 for strength. He was no master of the great science of human 
 nature. He had studied, not the genus man, but the species 
 Londoner. Nobody was ever so thoroughly conversant with 
 all the forms of life and all the shades of moral and intellectual 
 character which were to be seen from Islington to the Thames, 
 and from Hyde-Park corner to Mile-End green. But his philos- 
 ophy stopped at the first turnpike-gate. Of the rural life of 
 England he knew nothing ; and he took it for granted that 
 every body who lived in the country was either stupid or miser- 
 able. ' ' Country gentlemen, ' ' said he, ' ' must be unhappy ; 
 for they have not enough to keep their lives in motion ;" as if 
 all those peculiar habits and associations which made Fleet 
 Street and Charing Cross the finest views in the world to him- 
 self had been essential parts of human nature. Of remote 
 countries and past times he talked with wild and ignorant pre- 
 sumption. ' ' The Athenians of the age of Demosthenes, ' ' he 
 said to Mrs. Thrale, ' ' were a people of brutes, a barbarous 
 people. ' ' In conversation with Sir Adam Ferguson he used 
 similar language. " The boasted Athenians," he said, " were 
 barbarians. The mass of every people must be barbarous 
 where there is no printing. ' ' The fact was this : he saw that 
 a Londoner who could not read was a very stupid and brutal 
 fellow ; he saw that great refinement of taste and activity of in- 
 tellect were rarely found in a_j;x)ndoner who had not rea^J 
 
BOSWELVS LIFE OF JOHNSON. 367 
 
 much ; and, because it was by means of books that people 
 acquired a.lmost all their knowledge in the society with which he 
 was acquainted, he concluded, in defiance of the strongest and 
 clearest evidence, that the human mind can be cultivated by 
 means of books alone. An Athenian citizen might possess 
 very few volumes ; and the largest library to which he had ac- 
 cess might be much less valuable than Johnson's bookcase in 
 Bolt Court. But the Athenian might pass every morning in 
 conversation with Socrates, and might hear Pericles speak four 
 or five times every month. He saw the plays of Sophocles and 
 Aristophanes ; he walked amidst the friezes of Phidias and 
 the paintings of Xeuxis ; he knew by heart the choruses of 
 ^schylus ; he heard the rhapsodist at the corner of the street 
 reciting the Shield of Achilles or the Death of Argus ; he was a 
 legislator, conversant with high questions of alliance, revenue, 
 and war ; he was a soldier, trained under a liberal and generous 
 discipline ; he was a judge, compelled every day to weigh the 
 eifect of opposite arguments. These things were in themselves 
 an education, an education eminently fitted, not, indeed, to 
 form exact or profound thinkers, but to give quickness to the 
 perceptions, delicacy to the taste, fluency to the expression, 
 and politeness to the manners. All this was overlooked. An 
 Athenian who did not improve his mind by reading was, in 
 Johnson's opinion, much such a person as a Cockney who 
 made his mark, much such a person as black Frank before he 
 went to school, and far inferior to a parish clerk or a printer's 
 devil. 
 
 Johnson's friends have allowed that he carried to a ridicu- 
 lous extreme his unjust contempt for foreigners. He pro- 
 nounced the French to be a very silly people, much behind 
 us, stupid, ignorant creatures. And this judgment he formed 
 after having been at Paris about a month, during which he would 
 not talk French, for fear of giving the natives an advantage 
 over him in conversation. He pronounced them, also, to be 
 an indelicate people, because a French footman touched the 
 sugar with his fingers. That ingenious and amusing traveller, 
 M. Simond, has defended his countrymen very successfully 
 against Johnson's accusation, and has pointed out some Eng- 
 lish practices which, to an impartial spectator, would seem at 
 least as inconsistent with physical cleanliness and social deco- 
 rum as those which Johnson so bitterly reprehended. To the 
 sage, as Boswell loves to call him, it never occurred to doubt that 
 there must be something eternally and immutably good in the 
 usages to which he had been accustomed. In fact, Johnson's 
 remarks on society bpyond the bills of mortality are generally 
 
368 MACAULAY ON 
 
 of much the same kind with those of honest Tom Dawson, the 
 English footman in Dr. Moore's "Zeluco." "Suppose the 
 King of France has no sons, but only a daughter, then, when 
 the king dies, this here daughter, according to that there law, 
 cannot be made queen, but the next near relative, provided he is 
 a man, is made king, and not the last king's daughter, which, 
 to be sure, is very unjust. The French foot-guards are dressed 
 in blue, and all the marching regiments in white, which has a 
 very foolish appearance for soldiers ; and as for blue regimen- 
 tals, it is only fit for the blue horse or the artillery. ' ' 
 
 Johnson's visit to the Hebrides introduced him to a state 
 of society completely new to him ; and a salutary suspicion of 
 his own deficiencies seems on that occasion to have crossed his 
 mind for the first time. He confessed, in the last paragraph of 
 his Journey, that his thoughts on national manners were the 
 thoughts of one who had seen but little, of one who had passed 
 his time almost wholly in cities. This feeling, however, soon 
 passed awaj'. It is remarkable that to the last he entertained 
 a fixed contempt for all those modes of life and those studies 
 which tend to emancipate the mind from the prejudices of a 
 particular age or a particular nation. Of foreign travel and 
 of history he spoke with the fierce and boisterous contempt 
 of ignorance. "What does a man learn by travelling? Is 
 Beauclerk the better for travelling ? What did Lord Charle- 
 mont learn in his travels, except that there was a snake in one 
 of the pyramids of Egypt?" History was, in his opinion, to 
 use the fine expression of Lord Plunkett, an old almaiiac ; 
 historians could, as he conceived, claim no higher dignity than 
 that of almanac-makers ; and his favorite historians were 
 those who, like Lord Hailes, aspired to no higher dignity. He 
 always spoke with contempt of Robertson. Hume he would 
 not even read. He affronted one of his friends for talking to 
 him about Catiline's conspiracy, and declared that he never 
 desired to hear of the Punic war again as long as he lived. 
 
 Assuredly one fact which does not directly affect our own 
 interests, considered in itself, is no better worth knowing than 
 another fact. The fact that there is a snake in a pyramid, or 
 the fact that Hannibal crossed the Alps, are in themselves as 
 unprofitable to us as the fact that there is a green blind in a 
 particular house in Threadneedle Street, or the fact that a Mr. 
 Smith comes into the city every morning on the top of one of 
 the Blackwall stages. But it is certain that those who will not 
 crack the shell of history will never get at the kernel. John- 
 son, with hasty arrogance, pronounced the kernel worthless^ 
 because he saw no value in the shell. The real use of travel- 
 
BOSWELVS LIFE OF JOHNSON. 369 
 
 ling to distant countries and of studying the annals pf past 
 times is to preserve men from the contraction of mina which 
 those can hardly escape whose, whole communion is with one 
 generation and one neighborhood, who arrive at conclusions 
 by means of an induction not suflficiently copious, and who 
 therefore constantly confound exceptions with rules, and acci- 
 dents with essential properties. In short, the real use of trav- 
 elling and of studying history is to keep men from being 
 what Tom Dawson was in fiction and Samuel Johnson in 
 reality. 
 
 Johnson, as Mr. Burke most justly observed, appears far 
 greater in Boswell's books than in his own. His conversation 
 appears to have been quite equal to his writings in matter, and 
 far superior to them in manner. When he talked, he clothed 
 his wit and his sense in forcible and natural expressions. As 
 soon as he took his pen in his hand to write for the public, his 
 style became systematically vicious. All his books are \yritten 
 in a learned language, in a language which nobody hears from 
 his mother or his nurse, in a language in which nobody ever 
 quarrels, or drives bargains, or makes love, in a language in 
 which nobody ever thinks. It is clear that Johnson himself 
 did not think in the dialect in which he wrote. The expres- 
 sions which came first to his tongue were simple, energetic, and 
 picturesque. When he wrote for publication, he did his senten- 
 ces out of English into Tohnsonesf. His letters from the Heb- 
 rides to Mrs. Thrale are the original of that work of which the 
 " Journey to the Hebrides" is the translation ; and it is amus- 
 ing to compare the two versions. " When we were taken up- 
 stairs," says he in one of his letters, " a dirty fellow bounced 
 out of the bed on which one of us was to lie. ' ' This incident 
 is recorded in the Journey as follows : " Out of one of the 
 beds on which we were to repose started up, at our entrance, a 
 man black as a Cyclops from the forge." Sometimes Johnson 
 translated aloud. " ' The Rehearsal,' " he said, very unjustly, 
 " has not wit enough to keep it sweet;" then, after a pause, 
 " it has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefac- 
 tion." 
 
 Mannerism is pardonable, and is sometimes even agreeable, 
 when the manner, though vicious, is natural. Few readers, for 
 example, would be willing to part with the mannerism of Mil- 
 ton or of Burke. But a mannerism which does not sit easy on 
 the mannerist, which has been adopted on principle, and which 
 can be sustained only by constant effort, is always offensive. 
 And such is the mannerism of Johnson. 
 
 The characteristic faults of his style are so familiar to all 
 
370 MACAULAY ON 
 
 our readers, and have been so often burlesqued, that it is al- 
 most superfluous to point them out. It is well known that he 
 made less use than any other eminent writer of those strong 
 plain words, Anglo-Saxon or Norman-French, of which the 
 roots lie in the inmost depths of our language ; and that he felt 
 a vicious partiality for terms which, long after our own speech 
 had been fixed, were borrowed from the Greek and Latin, and 
 which, therefore, even when lawfully naturalized, must be con- 
 sidered as born aliens, not erititled to rank with the king's Eng- 
 lish. His constant practice of padding out a sentence with use- 
 less epithets, till it became as stiff as the bust of an exquisite, 
 his antithetical forms of expression, constantly employed even 
 where there is no opposition in the ideas expressed, his big 
 words wasted on little things, his harsh inversions, so widely 
 different from those graceful and easy inversions which give 
 variety, spirit, and sweetness to the expression of our great old 
 writers — all these peculiarities have been imitated by his ad- 
 mirers and parodied by his assailants, till the public has be- 
 come sick of the subject. 
 
 Goldsmith said to him, very wittily and very justly, " If you 
 were to write a fable about little fishes, doctor, you would make 
 the little fishes talk like whales." No man surely ever had so 
 little talent for personation as Johnson. Whether he wrote in 
 the character of a disappointed legacy-hunter or an empty town 
 fop, of a crazy virtuoso or a flippant coquette, he wrote in the 
 same pompous and unbending style. His speech, like Sir 
 Piercy Shaf ton's euphuistic eloquence, bewrayed him under 
 every disguise. Euphelia and Rhodoclea talk as finely as Im- 
 lac the poet, or Seged, Emperor of Ethiopia. The gay Corne- 
 lia describes her reception at the country-house of her relations 
 in such terms as these : " I was surprised, after the civilities 
 of my first reception, to find, instead of the leisure and tran- 
 quillity which a rural life always promises, and, if well con- 
 ducted, might always afford, a confused wildness of care, and a 
 tumultuous hurry of diligence, by which every face was cloud- 
 ed and every motion agitated." The gentle Tranquilla in- 
 forms us that she ' ' had not passed the earlier part of life 
 without the flattery of courtship and the joys of triumph ; but 
 had danced the round of gayety amidst the murmurs of envy 
 and the gratulations of applause, had been attended from pleas- 
 ure to pleasure by the great, the sprightly, and the vain, and 
 had seen her regard solicited by the obsequiousness of gallan- 
 try, the gayety of wit, and the timidity of love. ' ' Surely Sir 
 John Falstaff himself did not wear his petticoats with a •wors2 
 grafce. The reader may well cry out, with honest Sir Hugh 
 
BOSWELVS LIFE OF JOHNSON. 371 
 
 Evans, " I like not when a 'oman has a great peard : I spy a 
 great peard under her mufHer." ' 
 
 We had something more to say. But our article is already 
 too long ; and we must close it. We would fain part in good 
 humor from the hero, from the biographer, and even from the 
 editor, who, ill as he has preformed his task, has at least this 
 claim to our gratitude, that he has induced us to read Bos well's 
 book again. As we close it the club-room is before us, and 
 the table on which stands the omelet for Nugent and the 
 lemons for Johnson. There are assembled those heads which 
 live forever on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the spec- 
 tacles of Burke and the tall thin form of Langton, the courtly 
 sneer of Beauclerk and the beaming smile of Garrick, Gibbon 
 tapping his snuff-box and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. 
 In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to 
 us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought 
 up, the gigantic body, the huge massy face, seamed with the 
 scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, 
 the gray wig with the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the 
 nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes and 
 mouth moving with convulsive twitches ; we see the heavy 
 form rolling ; we hear it puffing ; and then comes the ' ' Why, 
 sir!" and the " What then, sir?" and the " No, sir !" and 
 the " You don't see your way through the question, sir !" 
 
 What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable 
 man ! To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours 
 as a companion ! To receive from his contemporaries that full 
 homage which men of genius have in general received only 
 -from posterity ! To be more intimately known to posterity 
 than other men are known to their contemporaries ! That kind 
 of fame which is commonly the most transient is, in his case, 
 the most durable. The reputation of those writings, which he 
 probably expected to be immortal, is every day fading ■ while 
 those peculiarities of manner and that careless table-talk, the 
 memory of which he probably thought would die with him, are 
 likely to be remembered as long as the English language is 
 spoken in any quarter of the globe. 
 
 ' It is proper to observe that this passage bears a very close resem- 
 blance to a passage in the " Rambler" (No. 20). The resemblance may 
 possibly be the effect of unconscious plagiarism. 
 
CARLYLE ON BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON.' 
 
 [1832.] 
 
 ^sop's fly, sitting on the axle of the chariot, has been 
 much laughed at for exclaiming : What a dust I do raise ! Yet 
 which of us, in his way, has not sometimes been guilty of the 
 like ? Nay, so foolish are men, they often, standing at ease 
 and as spectators on the highway, will volunteer to exclaim of 
 the fly (not being tempted to it, as he was) exactly to the same 
 purport : What a dust thou dost raise ! Smallest of mortals, 
 when mounted aloft by circumstances, come to seem great ; 
 smallest of phenomena connected with them are treated as im- 
 portant, and must be sedulously scanned, and commented upon 
 with loud emphasis. 
 
 That Mr. Croker should undertake to edit " Boswell's Life 
 of Johnson" was a praiseworthy but no miraculous procedure ; 
 neither could the accomplishment of such undertaking be, in 
 an epoch like ours, anywise regarded as an event in universal 
 history ; the right or the wrong accomplishment thereof was, 
 in very truth, one of the most insignificant of things. However, 
 it sat in a great environment, on the axle of a high, fast-rolling, 
 parliamentary chariot ; and all the world has exclaimed over 
 it, and the author of it : What a dust thou dost raise ! List to 
 the reviews and ' ' organs of public opinion, ' ' from the Nation- 
 al Omnibus upwards : criticisms, vituperative and laudatory, 
 stream from their thousand throats of brass and of leather ; 
 here chanting lo-pceans ; there grating harsh thunder or vehe- 
 ment shrewmouse squeaklets ; till the general ear is filled and 
 nigh deafened. Boswell's book had a noiseless birth compared 
 with this edition of Boswell's book. On the other hand, con- 
 sider with what degree of tumult ' ' Paradise Lost' ' and the 
 " Iliad " were ushered in ! 
 
 To swell such clamor, or prolong it beyond the time, seems 
 nowise our vocation here. At most, perhaps, we are bound to 
 inform simple readers, with all possible brevity, what manner 
 of performance and edition this is ; especially, whether, in our 
 poor judgment, it is worth laying out three pounds sterling 
 
 ' Eraser's Magazine, No. 28. — "The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. ; 
 including a Tour to the Hebrides." By James Boswell, Esq. A New 
 Edition, with numerous Additions and Notes, by John Wilson Croker, 
 LL.D., F.R.S. 5 vols. London, 1831. 
 
374 CARLYLE ON 
 
 upon, yea or not. The whole business belongs distinctly to 
 the lower ranks of the trivial class. 
 
 Let us admit, then, with great readiness, that as Johnson 
 once said, and the editor repeats, " All works which describe 
 manners require notes in sixty or seventy years, or less ;" that, 
 accordingly, a new edition of Boswell was desirable ; and that 
 Mr. Croker has given one. For this task he had various qualifi- 
 cations : his own voluntary resolution to do it ; his high place 
 in society, unlocking all manner of archives to him ; not less, 
 perhaps, a certain anecdotico-biographic turn of mind, natural 
 or acquired ; we mean a love for the minuter events of his- 
 tory, and talent for investigating these. Let us admit, too, that 
 he has been very diligent ; seems to have made inquiries per- 
 severingly far and near ; as well as drawn freely from his own 
 ample stores ; and so tells us, to appearance quite accurately, 
 much that he has not found lying on the highways, but has had 
 to seek and dig for. Numerous persons, chiefly of quality, 
 rise to view in these notes ; when and also where they came 
 into this world, received office or promotion, died and were 
 buried (only what they did, except digest, remaining often too 
 mysterious), is faithfully enough set down. Whereby all that 
 their various and doubtless widely-scattered tombstones could 
 have taught us, is here presented, at once, in a bound book. 
 Thus is an indubitable conquest, though a small one, gained over 
 our great enemy, the all-destroyer Time, and as such shall 
 have welcome. 
 
 Nay, let us say that the spirit of diligence exhibited in this 
 department seems to attend the editor honestly throughout ; 
 he keeps everywhere a watchful outlook on his text ; reconcil- 
 ing the distant with the present, or at least indicating and re- 
 gretting their irreconcilability ; elucidating, smoothing down ; 
 in all ways exercising, according to ability, a strict editorial 
 superintendence. Any little Latin or even Greek phrase is ren- 
 dered into English, in general with perfect accuracy ; citations 
 are verified, or else corrected. On all hands, moreover, there 
 is a certain spirit of decency maintained and insisted on : if 
 not good morals, yet good manners are rigidly inculcated ; if 
 not religion, and a devout Christian heart, yet orthodoxy, and 
 a cleanly shovel-hatted look, which, as compared with flat 
 nothing, is something very considerable. Grant, too, as no 
 contemptible triumph of this latter spirit, that though the ed- 
 itor is known as a decided politician and party-man, he has 
 carefully subdued all temptations to trangress in that way : ex- 
 cept by quite involuntary indications, and rather as it were the 
 pervading temper of the whole, you could not discover on 
 
BOSWELL'& LtPE OP yOttNSOM. 375 
 
 which side of the political warfare he is enlisted and fights. 
 This, as we said, is a great triumph of the decency-principle : 
 for this, and for these other graces and performances, let the 
 editor have all praise. 
 
 Herewith, however, must the praise unfortunately termi- 
 nate. Diligence, fidelity, decency, are good and indispensa- 
 ble ; yet, without faculty, without light, they will not do the 
 work. Along with that tombstone-information, perhaps even 
 without much of it, we could have liked to gain some answer, 
 in one way or other, to this wide question : What and how was 
 English life in Johnson's time ; wherein has ours grown to 
 differ therefrom ? In other words : What things have we to 
 forget, what to fancy and remember, before we, from such dis- 
 tance, can put ourselves in Johnson 's//af^ j and so, in the full 
 sense of the term, understand him, his sayings and his doings ? 
 This was indeed specially the problem which a commentator 
 and editor had to solve : a complete solution of it should have 
 lain in him, his whole mind should have been filled and pre- 
 pared with perfect insight into it ; then, whether in the way of 
 express dissertation, of incidental exposition and indication, 
 opportunities enough would have occurred of bringing out the 
 same : what was dark in the figure of the past had thereby 
 been enlightened ; Boswell nad, not in show and word only, 
 but in very fact, been made new agaixi, readable to us who are 
 divided from him, even as he was to those close at hand. Of 
 all which very little has been attempted here ; accomplished, 
 we should say, next to nothing, or altogether nothing. 
 
 Excuse, no doubt, is in readiness for such omission ; and, 
 indeed, for innumerable other failings — as where, for example, 
 the editor will punctually explain what is already sun-clear ; 
 and then anon, not without frankness, declare frequentlf 
 enough that ' ' the editor does not understand, ' ' that ' ' the editoi 
 cannot guess" — while, for most part, the reader cannot hell 
 both guessing and seeing. Thus, if Johnson say, in one sen- 
 tence, that " English names should not be used in Latin verses;" 
 and then, in the next sentence, speak blamingly of " Carteret 
 being used as a dactyl, ' ' will the generality of mortals detect any 
 puzzle there ? Or again, where poor Boswell writes, " I always 
 remember a remark made to me by a Turkish lady, educated in 
 France : ' Ma foi, monsieur, notre bonheur depend de la fafon 
 que notre sang circule ' " — though the Turkish lady here 
 speaks English-French, where is the call for a note like this : 
 " Mr. Boswell no doubt fancied these words had some meaning, 
 or he would hardly have quoted them ; but what that meaning 
 is the editor cannot guess ' ' ? The editor is clearly no witch 
 
'l^>](> CARLYLE ON 
 
 at a riddle. For these and all kindred deficiencies the excuse, 
 as we said, is at hand ; but the fact of their existence is not the 
 less certain and regrettable. 
 
 Indeed it, from a very early stage of the business, becomes 
 afflictively apparent how much the editor, so well furnished 
 with all external appliances and means, is from within unfur- 
 nished with means for forming to himself any just notion of 
 Johnson or of Johnson's Life ; and therefore of speaking on 
 that subject with much hope of edifying. Too lightly is it from 
 the first taken for granted that hunger, the great basis of our 
 life, is also its apex and ultimate perfection ; that as ' ' needi- 
 ness and greediness and vainglory" are the chief qualities of 
 most men, so no man, not even a Johnson, acts or can think of 
 acting on any other principle. Whatsoever, therefore, cannot 
 be referred to the two former categories (deed and greed) is 
 without scruple ranged under the latter. It is here properly 
 that our editor becomes burdensome, and, to the weaker sort, 
 even a nuisance. "What good is it," will such cry, "when 
 we had still some faint shadow of belief that man was better 
 than a selfish digesting-machine, what good is it to poke in, at 
 every turn, and explain how this and that, which we thought 
 noble in old Samuel, was vulgar, base ; that for him, too, there 
 was no reality but in the stomach ; and except pudding, and the 
 finer species of pudding which is named praise, life had no pab- 
 ulum ? Why, for instance, when we know that Johnson loved 
 his good wife, and says expressly that their marriage was ' a 
 love-match on both sides,' should two closed lips open to tell 
 us only this : ' Is it not possible that the obvious advantage of 
 having a woman of experience to superintend an establishment 
 of this kind (the Edial school) may have contributed to a match 
 so disproportionate in point of age ? — Ed. ' ? Or again when, 
 in the text, the honest cynic speaks freely of his former pover- 
 ty, and it is known that he once lived on fourpence-halfpenny 
 a day, need a commentator advance and comment thus : 
 ' When we find Dr. Johnson tell unpleasant truths to, or of, 
 other men, let us recollect that he does not appear to have 
 spared himself, on occasions in which he might be forgiven 
 for doing so ' ? Why, in short, ' ' continues the exasperated 
 reader, ' ' should notes of this species stand affronting me, 
 when there might have been no note at all ?' ' Gentle Reader, 
 we answer, be not wroth. What other could an honest com- 
 mentator do than give thee the best he had ? Such was the 
 picture and theorem he had fashioned for himself of the world 
 and of man's doings therein : take it, and draw wise in- 
 ferences from it. If there did exist a leader of public 
 
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 377 
 
 opinion, and champion of orthodoxy in the Church of Jesus 
 of Nazareth, who reckoned that man's glory consisted in not 
 being poor ; and that a sage, and prophet of his time, must 
 needs blush because the world had paid him at that easy rate 
 of fourpence-halfpenny per diem — was not the fact of such 
 existence worth knowing, worth considering ? 
 
 Of a much milder hue, yet to us practically of an all-de- 
 facing, and for the present enterprise quite ruinous character, 
 is another grand fundamental failing ; the last we shall feel 
 ourselves obliged to take the paiti of specifying here. It is, 
 that our editor has fatally, and almost surprisingly, mistaken 
 the limits of an editor's function ; and so, instead of working 
 on the margin with his pen, to elucidate as best might be, 
 strikes boldly into the body of the page with his scissors, and 
 there clips at discretion ! Fonr books Mr. C. had by him, 
 wherefrom to gather light for the fifth, which was Boswell's. 
 What does he do but now' in the placidest manner, slit the 
 whole five into slips, and sew these together into a sextum quid, 
 exactly at his own convenience, giving Boswell the credit of 
 the whole ! By what art-magic, our readers ask, has he united 
 them ? By the simplest of all : by brackets. Never before 
 was the full virtue of the bracket made manifest. You begin 
 a sentence under Boswell's guidance, thinking to be carried 
 happily through it by the same : but no ; in the middle, per- 
 haps ajfter your semicolon, and some consequent " for," starts 
 up one of these bracket-ligatures, and stitches you in from 
 half a page to twenty or thirty pages of a Hawkins, Tyers, Mur- 
 phy, Piozzi ; so that often one must make the old sad reflection, 
 Where we are, we know ; whither we are going, no man 
 knoweth ! It is truly said also. There is much between the 
 cup and the lip ; but here the case is still sadder : for not till 
 after consideration can you ascertain, now when the cup is at 
 the lip, what liquor it is you are imbibing ; whether Boswell's 
 French wine which you began with, or some of Piozzi's ginger- 
 beer, or Hawkins's entire, or perhaps some other great brew- 
 er's penny-swipes or even alegar, which has been surreptitious- 
 ly substituted instead thereof. A situation almost original ; 
 not to be tried a second time ! But, in fine, what ideas Mr. 
 Croker entertains of a literary whole and the thing called book, 
 and how the very printer's devils did not rise in mutiny 
 against such a conglomeration as this, and refuse to print it, 
 may remain a problem. 
 
 And now happily our say is said. All faults, the moralists 
 tell us, are properly shortcomings ; crimes themselves are noth- 
 ing other than a not doing enough ; a fighting, but with defective 
 
378 CARLYLE ON 
 
 vigor. How much more a mere insufficiency, and this after 
 good efforts, in handicraft practice! Mr. Croker says, "The 
 worst that can happen is that all the present editor has con- 
 tributed may, if the reader so pleases, be rejected as surplus- 
 age y It is our pleasant duty to take with hearty welcome 
 what he has given ; and render thanks even for what he meant 
 to give. Next, and finally, it is our painful duty to declare, 
 aloud if that be necessary, that his gift, as weighed against the 
 hard money which the booksellers demand for giving it you, is 
 (in our judgment) very greatly the lighter. No portion, ac- 
 cordingly, of our small floating capital has been embarked in 
 the business, or shall ever be ; indeed, were we in the market 
 for such a thing, there is simply no edition of Boswell to which 
 this last would seem preferable. And now enough, and more 
 than enough ! 
 
 We have next a word to say of James Boswell. Boswell has 
 already been much commented upon ; but rather in the way of 
 censure and vituperation than of true recognition. He was a 
 man that brought himself much before the world ; confessed 
 that he eagerly coveted fame, or if that were not possible, no- 
 toriety ; of which latter as he gained far more than seemed his 
 due, the public were incited, not only by their natural love of 
 scandal, but by a special ground of envy, to say whatever ill of 
 him could be said. Out of the fifteen millions that then lived, 
 and had bed and board, in the British islands, this man has 
 provided us a greater pleasure than any other individual, at 
 whose cost we now enjoy ourselves ; perhaps has done us a 
 greater service than can be specially attributed to more than 
 two or three : yet, ungrateful that we are, no written or spoken 
 eulogy of James Boswell anywhere exists ; his recompense in 
 solid pudding (so far as copyright went) was not excessive ; 
 and as for the empty praise, it has altogether been denied him. 
 Men are unwiser than children ; they do not know the hand 
 that feeds them. 
 
 Boswell was a person whose mean or bad qualities lay open 
 to the general eye ; visible, palpable to the dullest. His good 
 qualities, again, belonged not to the time he lived in ; were 
 far from common then ; indeed, in such a degree, were almost 
 unexampled ; not recognizable therefore by every one ; nay , 
 apt even (so strange had they grown) to be confounded with 
 the very vices they lay contiguous to and had sprung out of. 
 That he was a wine-bibber and gross liver ; gluttonously fond 
 of whatever would yield him a little solacement, were it only of 
 a stomachic character, is undeniable enough. That he was 
 
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 2,79 
 
 vain, heedless, a babbler ; had much of the sycophant, alternat- 
 ing with the braggadocio, curiously spiced too with an all-per- 
 vading dash of the coxcomb ; that he gloried much when the 
 tailor, by a court-suit, had made a new man of him ; that he 
 appeared at the Shakespeare Jubilee with a ribbon, imprinted 
 " Corsica Bos well," round his hat ; and in short, if you will, 
 lived no day of his life without doing and saying more than one 
 pretentious ineptitude : all this unhappily is evident as the sun 
 at noon. The very look of Boswell seems to have signified so 
 much. In that cocked nose, cocked partly in triumph over his 
 weaker fellow-creatures, partly to snuff-up the smell of coming 
 pleasure, and scent it from afar ; in those bag-cheeks, hanging 
 like half-filled wine-sking, still able to contain more ; in that 
 coarsely-protruded shelf-mouth, that fat dewlapped chin : in all 
 this, who sees not sensuality, pretension, boisterous imbecility 
 enough ; much that could not have been ornamental in the 
 temper of a great man's overfed great man (what the Scotch 
 naxnt flunky), though it had been more natural there? The 
 under part of Boswell' s face is of a low, almost brutish char- 
 acter. 
 
 Unfortunately, on the other hand, what great and genuine 
 good lay in him was nowise so self-evident. That Boswell was 
 a hunter after spiritual notabilities, that he loved such, and 
 longed, and even crept and crawled to be near them ; that he 
 first (in old Touchwood Auchinleck's phraseology) "took on 
 with Paoli ;" and then being off with "the Corsican land- 
 louper, ' ' took on with a schoolmaster, ' ' ane that keeped a 
 schule, and ca'd it an academy :" that he did all this, and 
 could not help doing it, we account a very singular merit. The 
 man, once for all, had an ' ' open sense, ' ' an open loving heart, 
 which so few have : where excellence existed, he was com- 
 pelled to acknowledge it ; was drawn towards it, and (let the 
 old sulphur-brand of a laird say what he liked) could not but 
 walk with it — if not as superior, if not as equal, then as inferior 
 and lackey, better so than not at all. If we reflect now that 
 this love of excellence had not only such an evil nature to 
 triumph over ; but also what an education and social position 
 withstood it and weighed it down, its innate strength, victori- 
 ous over all these things, may astonish us. Consider what an 
 inward impulse there must have been, how many mountains of 
 impediment hurled aside, before the Scottish laird could, as 
 humble servant, embrace the knees (the bosom was not per- 
 mitted him) of the English dominie ! Your Scottish laird, 
 says an English naturalist of these days, ma>- be defined as the 
 hungriest and vainest of all bipeds yet known. Boswell too 
 
380 CARLYLE ON 
 
 was a Tory ; of quite peculiarly feudal, genealogical, pragmati- 
 cal temper ; had been nurtured in an atmosphere of heraldry, at 
 the feet of a very Gamaliel in that kind ; within bare walls, 
 adorned only with pedigrees, amid serving-men in threadbare 
 livery ; all things teaching him, from birth upwards, to remem- 
 ber that a laird was a laird. Perhaps there was a special 
 vanity in his very blood : old Auchinleck had, if not the gay, 
 tail-spreading, peacock vanity of his son, no little of the slow- 
 stalking, contentious, hissing vanity of the gander ; a still more 
 fatal species. Scottish advocates will yet tell you how the an- 
 cient man, having chanced to be the first sheriff appointed (af- 
 ter the abolition of ' ' hereditary jurisdictions") by royal authori- 
 ty, was wont, in dull-snufifling pompous tone, to preface many 
 a deliverance from the bench with these words : " I, the first 
 king's sheriff in Scotland." 
 
 And now behold the woithy Bozzy, so prepossessed and 
 held back by nature and by art, fly nevertheless like iron to its 
 magnet, whither his better genius called ! You may surround 
 the iron and the magnet with what enclosures and encum- 
 brances you please — with wood, with rubbish, with brass : it 
 matters not, the two feel each other, they struggle restlessly 
 towards each other, they will be together. The iron may be 
 a Scottish squirelet, full of gulosity and " gigmanity ;" ' the 
 magnet an English plebeian, and moving rag-and-dust moun- 
 tain, coarse, proud, irascible, imperious : nevertheless, behold 
 how they embrace, and inseparably cleave to one another ! It 
 is one of the strangest phenomena of the past century, that at 
 a time when the old reverent feeling of discipleship (such as 
 brought men from far countries, with rich gifts, and prostrate 
 soul, to the feet of the prophets) had passed utterly away from 
 men's practical experience, and was no longer surmised to 
 exist (as it does), perennial, indestructible, in man's inmost 
 heart — James Boswell should have been the individual, of all 
 others, predestined to recall it, in such singular guise, to the 
 wondering .and, for a long while, laughing and unrecognizing 
 world. It has been commonly said. The man's vulgar vanity 
 was all that attached him to Johnson ; he delighted to be seen 
 near him, to be thought connected with him. Now let it be at 
 once granted that no consideration springing out of vulgar 
 vanity could well be absent from the mind of James Boswell, 
 in this his intercourse with Johnson, or in any considerable 
 
 ^ " Q. What do you mean by • respectable ' ? — A. He always kept a 
 gig." (ThurteU's Tiial.) — " Thus," it has been said, " does society natu- 
 rally divide itself into four classes ; Noblemen, Gentlemen, Gigmen, and 
 Men." 
 
BOSWELVS LIFE OF JOHNSON. 38 1 
 
 transaction of his life. At the same time, ask yourself ; 
 Whether such vanity, and nothing else, actuated him therein ; 
 whether this was the true essence and moving principle of the 
 phenomenon, or not rather its outward vesture, and the acci- 
 dental environment (and defacement) in which it came to light ? 
 The man was, by nature and habit, vain ; a sycophant- cox- 
 comb, be it granted : but had there been nothing more than 
 vanity in him, was Samuel Johnson the man of men to whom 
 he must attach himself ? At the date when Johnson was a poor 
 rusty-coated ' ' scholar, ' ' dwelling in Temple-lane, and indeed 
 throughout their whole intercourse afterwards, were there not 
 chancellors and prime ministers enough ; graceful gentlemen, 
 the glass of fashion ; honor-giving noblemen ; dinner-giving 
 rich men ; renowned fire-eaters, swordsmen, gownsmen ; 
 quacks and realities of all hues — any one of whom bulked 
 much larger in the world's eye than Johnson ever did ? To 
 any one of whom, by half that submissiveness and assiduity, 
 our Bozzy might have recommended himself ; and sat there, 
 the envy of surrounding lickspittles ; pocketing now solid 
 emolument, swallowing now well-cooked viands and wines of 
 rich vintage ; in each case, also, shone-on by some glittering 
 reflex of renown or notoriety, so as to be the observed of in- 
 numerable observers. To no one of whom, however, though 
 otherwise a most diligent solicitor and purveyor, did he so at- 
 tach himself : such vulgar courtierships were his paid drudgery, 
 or leisure amusement ; the worship of Johnson was his grand, 
 ideal, voluntary business. Does not the frothy-hearted, yet en- 
 thusiastic man, doffing his advocate 's-wig, regularly take post, 
 and hurry up to London, for the sake of his sage chiefly ; as to 
 a feast of tabernacles, the Sabbath of his whole year ? The 
 plate-licker and wine-bibber dives into Bolt Court, to sip mud- 
 dy coffee with a cynical old man and a sour-tempered blind 
 old woman (feeling the cups, whether they are full, with her 
 finger) ; and patiently endures contradictions without end ; too 
 happy so he may but be allowed to listen and live. Nay, it 
 does not appear that vulgar vanity could ever have been much 
 flattered by Boswell's relation to Johnson. Mr. Croker says, 
 Johnson was, to the last, little regarded by the great world ; 
 from which, for a vulgar vanity, all honor, as from its fountain, 
 descends. Bozzy, even among Johnson's friends and special 
 admirers, seems rather to have been laughed at than envied : 
 his officious, whisking, consequential ways, the daily reproofs 
 and rebuffs he underwent, could gain from the world no 
 golden but only leaden opinions. His devout discipleship 
 seemed nothing more than a mean spanielship^ iij '^% general 
 
382 CARLYLE ON 
 
 eye. His mighty " constellation," or sun, round whom he, as 
 satellite, observantly gyrated, was, for the mass of men, but a 
 huge ill-snuffed tallow-light, and he a weak night-moth, cir- 
 cling foolishly, dangerously about it, not knowing what he 
 wanted. If he enjoyed Highland dinners and toasts, as hench- 
 man to a new sort of chieftain, Henry Erskine, in the domestic 
 " Outer-House," could hand him a shilling " for the sight of his 
 bear." Doubtless the man was laughed at, and often heard 
 himself laughed at for his Johnsonism. To be envied is the 
 grand and sole aim of vulgar vanity ; to be filled with good 
 things is that of sensuality : for Johnson perhaps no man living 
 envied poor Bozzy ; and of good things (except himself paid 
 for them) there was no vestige in that acquaintanceship. Had 
 nothing other or better than vanity and sensuality been there, 
 Johnson and Boswell had never come together, or had soon 
 and finally separated again. 
 
 In fact, the so copious terrestrial dross that welters chaoti- 
 cally, as the outer sphere of this man's character, does but ren- 
 der for us more remarkable, more touching, the celestial spark 
 of goodness, of light, and reverence for wisdom which dwelt 
 in the interior, and could struggle through such encumbrances, 
 and in some degree illuminate and beautify them. There is 
 much lying yet undeveloped in the love of Boswell for Johnson. 
 A cheering proof, in a time which else utterly wanted and still 
 wants such, that living wisdom is quite infinitely precious to 
 man, is the symbol of the godlike to him, which even weak 
 eyes may discern ; that loyalty, discipieship, all that was ever 
 meant by hero-worship, lives perennially in the human bosom, 
 and waits, even in these dead days, only for occasions to un- 
 fold it, and inspire all men with it, and again make the world 
 alive ! James Boswell we can regard as a practical witness, or 
 real martyr, to this high everlasting truth. A wonderful mar- 
 tyr, if you will ; and in a time which made such martyrdom 
 doubly wonderful : yet the time and its martyr perhaps suited 
 each other. For a decrepit, death-sick era, when Cant had 
 first decisively opened her poison-breathing lips to proclaim 
 that God-worship and Mammon-worship were one and the same, 
 that life was a lie, and the earth Beelzebub's, which the Su- 
 preme Quack should inherit ; and so all things were fallen into 
 the yellow leaf, and fast hastening to noisome corruption : for 
 such an era, perhaps no better prophet than a parti-colored 
 zany-prophet, concealing, from himself and others, his pro- 
 phetic significance in such unexpected vestures, was deserved, 
 or would have been in place. A precious medicine lay hidden 
 in floods of coarsest, most composite treacle ; the world swal- 
 
BO SWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 383 
 
 lowed the treacle, for it suited the world's palate ; and now, 
 after half a century, may the medicine also begin to show it- 
 self ! James Boswell belonged, in his corruptible part, to the 
 lowest classes of mankind ; a foolish, inflated creature, swim- 
 ming in an element of self-conceit : but in his corruptible there 
 dwelt an incorruptible, all the more impressive and indubitable 
 for the strange lodging it had taken. 
 
 Consider, too, with what force, diligence, and vivacity he has 
 rendered back all this which, in Johnson's neighborhood, his 
 " open sense" had so eagerly and freely taken in. That loose- 
 flowing, careless-looking work of his is as a picture by one of 
 nature's own artists ; the best possible resemblance of a reali- 
 ty ; like the very image thereof in a clear mirror. Which in- 
 deed it was : let but the mirror be dear, this is the great point ; 
 the picture must and will be genuine. How the babbling 
 Bozzy, inspired only by love, and the recognition and vision 
 which love can lend, epitomizes nightly the words of wisdom, 
 the deeds and aspects of wisdom, and so, by little and little, 
 unconsciously works together for us a whole Johnsoniad ; a 
 more free, perfect, sunlit and spirit-speaking likeness than for 
 many centuries had been drawn by man of man !. Scarcely 
 since the days of Homer has the feat been equalled ; indeed, in 
 many senses, this also is a kind of heroic poem. The fit 
 " Odyssey" of ourunheroic age was to be written, not sung ; of 
 a thinker, not of a fighter ; and (for want of a Homer) by the 
 first open soul that might offer — looked such even through the 
 organs of a Boswell. We do the man's intellectual endowment 
 great wrong, if we measure it by its mere logical outcome ; though 
 here, too, there is not wanting a light ingenuity, a figurativeness 
 and fanciful sport, with glimpses of insight far deeper than the 
 common. But Boswell' s grand intellectual talent was, as such 
 ever is, an unconscious one, of far higher reach and significance 
 than logic ; and showed itself in the whole, not in parts. 
 Here again we have that old saying verified, ' ' The heart sees 
 farther than the head. ' ' 
 
 Thus does poor Bozzy stand out to us as an ill-assorted, 
 glaring mixture of the highest and the lowest. What, indeed, 
 is man's life generally but a kind of beast-godhood ; the god 
 in us triumphing more and more over the beast ; striving more 
 and more to subdue it under his feet ? Did not the ancients, 
 in their wise, perennially-significant way, figure nature itself, 
 their sacred All, or Pan, as a portentous commingling of these 
 two discords ; as musical, humane, oracular in its upper part, 
 yet ending below in the cloven hairy feet of a goat ? The 
 union of melodious, celestial free-will a,nd re9,son with foul 
 
384 CARLYLE ON 
 
 irrationality and lust ; in which, nevertheless, dwelt .a mys- 
 terious unspeakable fear and half-mad /a«?V awe ; as for mor- 
 tals there well might ! And is not man a microcosm, or epito- 
 mized mirror of that same universe ; or rather, is not that 
 universe even himself, the reflex of his own fearful and won- 
 derful being, ' ' the waste fantasy of his own dream ' ' ? No won- 
 der that man, that each man, and James Boswell like the 
 others, should resemble it ! The peculiarity in his case was 
 the unusual defect of amalgamation and subordination : the 
 highest lay side by side with the lowest ; not morally combined 
 with it and spiritually transfiguring it, but tumbling in half -me- 
 chanical juxtaposition with it, and from time to time, as the 
 mad alternation chanced, irradiating it, or eclipsed by it. 
 
 The world, as we said, has been but unjust to him ; 
 discerning only the outer terrestrial and often sordid mass ; 
 without eye, as it generally is, for his inner divine secret ; and 
 thus figuring him nowise as a god Pan, but simply of the bes- 
 tial species, like the cattle on a thousand hills. Nay, some- 
 times a strange enough hypothesis has been started of him ; as 
 if it were in virtue even of these same bad qualities that he did 
 his good work ; as if it were the very fact of his being among 
 the worst men in this world that had enabled him to write one 
 of the best books therein ! Falser hypothesis, we may venture 
 to say, never rose in human soul. Bad is by its nature nega- 
 tive, and can do nothing ; whatsoever enables us to do any thing 
 is by its very nature good. Alas, that there should be teachers 
 in Israel, or even learners, to whom this world-ancient fact is 
 still problematical, or even deniable ! Boswell wrote a good 
 book because he had a heart and an eye to discern ' wisdom, 
 and an utterance to render it forth ; because of his free insight, 
 his lively talent — above all, of his love and childlike open- 
 mindedness. His sneaking sycophancies, his greediness and 
 forwardness, whatever was bestial and earthy in him, are so 
 many blemishes in his book, which still disturb us in its clear- 
 ness ; wholly hindrances, not helps. ToAVards Johnson, how- 
 ever, his feeling was not sycophancy, wjiich is the lowest, but 
 reverence, which is the highest of human feelings. None but 
 a reverent man (which so unspeakably few are) could have 
 found his way from Boswell's environment to Johnson's : if 
 such worship for real God-made superiors showed itself also as 
 worship for apparent tailor-made superiors, even as hollow in- 
 terested mouth-worship for such — the case, in this composite 
 human nature of ours, was not miraculous, the more was the 
 pity ! But for ourselves, let every one of us cling to this last 
 article of faith, and know it as the beginning of all knowledge 
 
BO SWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 385 
 
 worth the name : That neither James Boswell's good book, 
 nor any other good thing, in any time or in any place, was, is, 
 or can be performed by any man in virtue of his badness, but 
 always and solely in spite thereof. 
 
 As for the book itself, questionless the universal favor en- 
 tertained for it is well merited. In worth as a book we have 
 rated it beyond any other product of the eighteenth century : 
 all Johnson's own writings, laborious and in their kind genu- 
 ine above most, stand on a quite inferior level to it ; already, 
 indeed, they are becoming obsolete for this generation ; and for 
 some future generation may be valuable chiefly as prolegomena 
 and expository scholia to this Johnsoniad of Boswell. Which 
 of us but remembers, as one of the sunny spots in his exist- 
 ence, the day when he opened these airy volumes, fascinating 
 him by a true natural magic ! It was as if the curtains of the 
 past were drawn aside, and we looked mysteriously into a kin- 
 dred country, where dwelt our fathers ; inexpressibly dear to 
 us, but which had seemed forever hidden from our eyes. For 
 the dead night had engulfed it ; all was gone, vanished as if it 
 had not been. Nevertheless, wondrously given back to us, 
 there once more it lay ; all bright, lucid, blooming ; a little 
 island of creation amid the circumambient void. There it 
 still lies ; like a thing stationary, imperishable, over which 
 changeful time were now accumulating itself in vain, and 
 could not, any longer, harm it or hide it. 
 
 If we examine by what charm it is that men are still held to 
 this " Life of Johnson, ' ' now, when so much else has been forgot- 
 ten, the main part of the answer will perhaps be found in that 
 speculation ' ' on the import of Reality, ' ' communicated to the 
 world, last month, in this magazine. The Johnsoniad of Bos- 
 well turns on objects that in very deed existed ; it is all true. 
 So far other in melodiousness of tone, it vies with the ' ' Odyssey, ' ' 
 or surpasses it, in this one point : to us these read pages, as 
 those chanted hexameters were to the first Greek hearers, are, 
 in the fullest, deepest sense, wholly credible. All the wit and 
 wisdom lying embalmed in Boswell's book, plenteous as these 
 are, could not have saved it. Far more scientific instruction 
 (mere excitement and enlightenment of the thinking power) can 
 be found in twenty other works of that time, which make but a 
 quite secondary impression on us. The other works of that 
 time, however, fall under one of two classes : either they are 
 professedly didactic ; and, in that way, mere abstractions, 
 philosophic diagrams, incapable of interesting us much other- 
 wise than as Euclid's Elements may do ; or else, with all their 
 vivacity and pictorial richness of color, they are fictions and 
 
386 CARLYLE ON 
 
 not realities. Deep truly, as Herr Sauerteig urges, is the force 
 of this consideration : the thing he restated is a fact ; those 
 figures, that local habitation, are not shadow but substance. 
 In virtue of such advantages, see how a very Boswell may be- 
 come poetical ! 
 
 Critics insist much on the poet that he should communicate 
 an " infinitude" to his delineation ; that by intensity of concep- 
 tion, by that gift of ' ' transcendental thought, ' ' which is fitly 
 named genius and inspiration, he should inform the finite with 
 a certain infinitude of significance ; or, as they sometimes say, 
 ennoble the actual into idealness. They are right in their 
 precept ; they mean rightly. But in cases like this of the John- 
 soniad, such is the dark grandeur of that " time element," 
 wherein man's soul here below lives imprisoned, the poet's 
 task is, as it were, done to his hand : time itself, which is the 
 outer veil of eternity, invests, of its own accord, with an 
 authentic, felt " infinitude" whatsoever it has once embraced in 
 its mysterious folds. 'Consider all that lies in that one word 
 Fast ! What a pathetic, sacred, in every sense poetic, meaning 
 is implied in it ; a meaning growing ever the clearer, the far- 
 ther we recede in time — the more of that same past we have 
 to look through ! On which ground indeed must Sauerteig 
 have built, and not without plausibility, in that strange thesis of 
 his : " That history, after all, is the true poetry ; that reality, 
 if rightly interpreted, is grander than fiction ; nay that even in 
 the right interpretation of reality and history does genuine 
 poetry consist." 
 
 Thus for Boswell's "Life of Johnson" has time done, is 
 time still doing, what no ornament of art or artifice could have 
 done for it. Rough Samuel and sleek wheedling James were, 
 and are not. Their life and whole personal environment has 
 melted into air. The Mitre Tavern still stands in Fleet Street ; 
 but where now is its scot-and-lot paying, beef-and-ale loving, 
 cocked-hatted, pot-bellied landlord ; its rosy-faced assiduous 
 landlady, with all her shining brass-pans, waxed tables, well- 
 filled larder-shelves ; her cooks, and bootjacks, and errand- 
 boys, and watery-mouthed hangers-on ? Gone ! gone ! The 
 becking waiter who, with wreathed smiles, was wont to spread 
 for Samuel and Bozzy their supper of the gods, has long since 
 pocketed his last sixpence ; and vanished, sixpences and all, 
 like a ghost at cock-crowing. The bottles they drank out of 
 are all broken, the chairs they sat on all rotted and burnt ; the 
 very knives and forks they ate with have rusted to the heart, 
 and become brown oxide of iron, and mingled with the indis- 
 criminate clay. All, all has vanished ; in very deed and 
 
BOSWELL'S Lim 0F_ yOHNSON. ^h'J 
 
 truth, like that baseless fabric of Prospero's air-vision. Of the 
 Mitre Tavern nothing but the bare walls remain there : of 
 London, of England, of the world, nothing but the bare walls 
 remain ; and these also decaying (were they of adamant), only 
 slower. The mysterious river of existence rushes on : a new 
 billow thereof has arrived, and lashes wildly as ever round 
 the old embankments ; but the former billow, with its loud, 
 mad eddyings, where is it ? Where ! Now this book of 
 Boswell's, this is precisely a revocation of the edict of Des- 
 tiny ; so that time shall not utterly, not so soon by several 
 centuries, have dominion over us. A little row of naphtha- 
 lamps, with its line of naphtha-light, burns clear and holy 
 through the dead night of the past : they who are gone are 
 still here ; though hidden they are revealed, though dead they 
 yet speak. There it shines, that little miraculously lamplit 
 pathway ; shedding its feebler and feebler twilight into the 
 boundless dark oblivion — for all that our Johnson touched has 
 become illuminated for us : on which miraculous little pathway 
 we can still travel, and see wonders. 
 
 It is not speaking with exaggeration, but with strict meas- 
 ured sobriety, to say that this book of Boswell's will give us 
 more real insight into the history of England during those days 
 than twenty other books, falsely entitled " Histories," which 
 take to themselves that special aim. What good is it to me 
 though innumerable Smolletts and Belshams keep dinning in my 
 ears that a man named George the Third was born and bred 
 up, and a man named George the Second died ; that Walpole, 
 and the Pelhams, and Chatham, and Rockingham, and Shel- 
 burne, and North, with their Coalition or their Separation 
 Ministries, all ousted one another ; and vehemently scrambled 
 for "the thing they called the rudder of government, but 
 which was in reality the spigot of taxation " ? That debates 
 were held, and infinite jarring and jargoning took place ; and 
 road-bills, and enclosure-bills, and game-bills, and India-bills, 
 and laws which no man can number, which happily few men 
 needed to trouble their heads with beyond the passing moment, 
 were enacted, and printed by the king's stationer ? That he 
 who sat in Chancery, and rayed-out speculation irom the 
 Woolsack, was now a man that squinted, now a man that did 
 not squint ? To the hungry and thirsty mind all this avails 
 next to nothing. These men and these things, we indeed 
 know, did swim, by strength or by specific levity, as apples or 
 as horse-dung, on the top of the current ; but is it by painfully 
 noting the courses, eddyings. and bobbings hither and thither of 
 such drift-articles that you will unfold to me the nature of the 
 
388 CAHLYLE ON 
 
 current itselt ; of that mighty-rolling, loud-roaring life-current, 
 bottomless as the foundations of the universe, mysterious as its 
 Author ? The thing I want to see is not Redbook Lists, and 
 Court Calendars, and Parliamentary Registers, but the Life of 
 Man in England : what men did, thought, suffered, enjoyed ; 
 the form, especially the spirit, of their terrestrial existence, its 
 outward environment, its inward principle ; how and what it 
 was ; whence it proceeded, whither it was tending. 
 
 Mournful, in truth, is it to behold what the business 
 called ' ' History, ' ' in these so enlightened and illuminated times, 
 still continues to be. Can you gather from it, read till your 
 eyes go out, any dimmest shadow of an answer to that great 
 question : How men lived and had their being ; were it but 
 economically, as, what wages they got, and what they bought 
 with these ? Unhappily you cannot. History will throw no 
 light on any such matter. At the point where living memory 
 fails, it is all darkness ; Mr. Senior and Mr. Sadler must still 
 debate this simplest of all elements in the condition of the 
 past : Whether men were better off, in their mere larders and 
 pantries, or were worse off than now ! History, as it stands 
 all bound up in gilt volumes, is but a shade more instructive 
 than the wooden volumes of a backgammon-board. How my 
 prime minister was appointed is of less moment to me than 
 how my house servant was hired. In these days, ten ordi- 
 nary histories of kings and courtiers were well exchanged 
 against the tenth part of one good history of booksellers. 
 
 For example, I would fain know the history of Scotland : 
 who can tell it me? " Robertson," say innumerable voices ; 
 ' ' Robertson against the world. ' ' I open Robertson ; and find 
 there, through long ages too confused for narrative, and fit 
 only to be presented in the way of epitome and distilled 
 essence, a cunning answer and hypothesis, not to this ques- 
 tion : By whom, and by what means, when and how, was this 
 fair broad Scotland, with its arts and manufactures, temples, 
 schools, institutions, poetry, spirit, national character, created, 
 and made arable, verdant, peculiar, great, here as I can see 
 some fair section of it lying, kind and strong (like some Bac- 
 chus-tamed lion), from the Castle-hill of Edinburgh ? — but to 
 this other question : How did the king keep himself alive in 
 those old days ; and restrain so many butcher-barons and 
 ravenous henchmen from utterly extirpating one another, so 
 that killing went on in some sort of moderation ? In the one 
 little Letter of .lEneas Sylvius, from old Scotland, there is more 
 of history than in all this. At length, however, we come to a 
 luminous age, interesting enough : to the age of the Reforma- 
 
BOSWELL'S LIFE OP yOHNSON. 389 
 
 tion. All Scotland is awakened to a second higher life ; the 
 Spirit of the Highest stirs in every bosom, agitates every 
 bosom ; Scotland is convulsed, fermenting, struggling to body 
 itself forth anew. To the herdsman, among his cattle in 
 remote woods ; to the craftsman, in his rude, heath-thatched 
 workshop, among his rude guild-brethren ; to the great and to 
 the little, a new light has arisen : in town and hamlet groups 
 are gathered, with eloquent looks, and governed or ungovern- 
 able tongues ; the great and the little go forth together to do 
 battle for the Lord against the mighty. We ask, with breath- 
 less eagerness : How was it ; how went it on ? Let us under- 
 stand it, let us see it, and know it ! In reply, is handed us a 
 really graceful and most dainty little Scandalous Chronicle (as 
 for some Journal of Fashion) of two persons : Mary Stuart, a 
 beauty, but over light-headed ; and Henry Darnley, a booby 
 who had fine legs. How these first courted, billed, and cooed, 
 according to nature ; then pouted, fretted, grew utterly en- 
 raged, and blew one another up with gunpowder : this, and not 
 the history of Scotland, is what we good-naturedly read. Nay, 
 by other hands, something like a horse-load of other books 
 have been written to prove that it was the beauty who blew up 
 the booby, and that it was not she. Who or what it was, the 
 thing once for all being so effectually done, concerns us little. 
 To know Scotland, at that great epoch, were a valuable in- 
 crease of knowledge : to know poor Darnley, and see him with 
 burning candle, from centre to skin, were no increase of knowl- 
 edge at all. Thus is history written. 
 
 Hence, indeed, comes it that history, which should be ' ' the 
 essence of innumerable biographies," will tell us, question it as 
 we like, less than one genuine biography may do, pleasantly 
 and of its own accord ! The time is approaching when his- 
 tory will be attempted on quite other principles ; when the 
 court, the senate, and the battle-field, receding more and more 
 into the background, the temple, the workshop, and social 
 hearth will advance more and more into the foreground ; and 
 history will not content itself with shaping some answer to 
 that question : How were men taxed and kept quiet then ? but 
 will seek to answer this other infinitely wider and higher ques- 
 tion : How and what were men then ? Not our Government 
 only, or the ' ' house wherein our life was led, ' ' but the life 
 itself we led there, will be inquired into. Of which latter it 
 may be found that government, in any modern sense of the 
 word, is, after all, but a secondary condition : in the mere sense 
 of taxation and keeping quiet, a small, almost a pitiful one. 
 Meanwhile let us welcome such Boswells, each in his degree, as 
 
390 CAHLyiE OAT 
 
 bring us any genuine contribution, were it never s& inadequate, 
 so inconsiderable. 
 
 An exception was early taken against this ' ' Life of Johnson, 
 and all similar enterprises, which we here recommend ; and has 
 been transmitted from critic to critic, and repeated in their sev- 
 eral dialects, uninterruptedly, ever since : That such jottings- 
 down of careiess conversation are an infringement of social pri- 
 vacy ; a crime against our highest freedom, the freedom of 
 man's intercourse with man. To this accusation, which we 
 have read and heard oftener than enough, might it not be well 
 for once to offer the flattest contradiction, and plea of Not at 
 all guilty? Not that conversation is noted down, but that con- 
 versation should not deserve noting down, is the evil. Doubt- 
 less, if conversation be falsely recorded, then is it simply a 
 lie, and worthy of being swept, with all despatch, to the 
 father of lies. But if, on the other hand, conversation can 
 be authentically recorded, and any one is ready for the task, 
 let him by all means proceed with it ; let conversation be kept 
 in remembrance to the latest date possible. Nay, should the con- 
 sciousness that a man may be among us ' ' taking notes ' ' tend, 
 in any measure, to restrict those floods of idle, insincere speech, 
 with which the thought of mankind is well-nigh drowned, were 
 it other than the most indubitable benefit ? He who speaks 
 ■honestly cares not, needs not care, though his words be pre- 
 served to remotest time : for him who speaks (/whonestly, the 
 fittest of all punishments seems to be this same, which the 
 nature of the case provides. The dishonest speaker,' not he 
 only who purposely utters falsehoods, but he who does not pur- 
 posely, and with sincere heart, utter truth, and truth alone ; 
 who babbles he knows not what, and has clapped no bridle on 
 his tongue, but lets it run racket, ejecting chatter and futility — 
 is among the most indisputable malefactors omitted, or insert- 
 ed, in the Criminal Calendar. To him that will well consider 
 it, idle' speaking is precisely the beginning of all hollowness, 
 halfness, infidelity (want of faithfulness) ; the genial atmos- 
 phere in which rank weeds of every kind attain the mastery 
 over noble fruits in man's life, and utterly choke them out : 
 one of I the most crying maladies of these days, and to be testi- 
 fied against, and in all ways to the uttermost withstood. Wise, 
 of a wisdom far beyond our shallow depth, was that old pre- 
 cept : Watch thy tongue ; out of it are the issues of life ! 
 " Man is properly an incarnated word : " the word that he 
 speaks is the man himself. Were eyes put into our head, that 
 we might see j or only that we might fancy, and plausibly pre- 
 tend, we had seen ? Was the tongue suspended there, that it 
 
SOS WELL'S L/PM OP yoHNSON. 391 
 
 might tell truly what we had seen, and make man the soul's- 
 brother of man ; or only that it might utter vain sounds, jar- 
 gon, soul-confusing, and so divide man, as by enchanted walls 
 of darkness, from union with man ? Thou who wearest that 
 cunning, heaven-made organ, a tongue, think well of this. 
 Speak not, I passionately entreat thee, till thy thought hath 
 silently matured itself, till thou have other than mad and mad- 
 making noises to emit : hold thy tongue (thou hast it a-holding) 
 till some meaning lie behind to set it wagging. Consider the 
 significance of Silence ; it is boundless, never by meditating 
 to be exhausted ; unspeakably profitable to thee ! Cease that 
 chaotic hubbub, wherein thy own soul runs to waste, to con- 
 fused suicidal dislocation and stupor : out of silence comes thy 
 strength. " Speech is silvern, silence is golden ; speech is 
 human, silence is divine. ' ' Fool ! thinkest thou that because 
 no Boswell is there with ass-skin and blacklead to note thy jar- 
 gon, it therefore dies and is harmless ? Nothing dies, nothing 
 can die. No idlest word thou speakest but is a seed cast into 
 time, and grows through all eternity ! The recording angel, 
 consider it well, is no fable, but the truest of truths : the paper 
 tablets thou canst burn ; of the ' ' iron leaf ' ' there is no burning. 
 Truly, if we can permit God Almighty to note down our con- 
 versation, thinking it good enough for him, any poor Boswell 
 need not scruple to work his will of it. -- 
 
 Leaving now this our English ' ' Odyssey, ' ' with its singer and 
 scholiast, let us come to the Ulysses ; that great Samuel John- 
 son himself, the far-experienced, " much-enduring man," whose 
 labors and pilgrimage are here sung. A full-length image of 
 his existence has been preserved for us : and he, perhaps of 
 all living Englishmen, was the one who best deserved that hon- 
 or. For if it is true, and now almost proverbial, that " the 
 life of the lowest mortal, if faithfully recorded, would be in- 
 teresting to the highest ;" how much more when the mortal in 
 question was already distinguished in fortune and natural qual- 
 ity, so that his thinkings and doings were not significant of 
 himself only, but of large masses of mankind ! ' ' There is not 
 a man whom I meet on the streets, ' ' says one, ' ' but I could 
 like, were it otherwise convenient, to know his biography :" 
 nevertheless, could an enlightened curiosity be so far gratified, 
 it must be owned the biography of most ought to be, in an 
 extreme degree, summary. In this world there is so wonder- 
 fully little self-subsistence among men ; next to no originality 
 (though never absolutely none) : one life is too servilely the 
 copy of another ; and so in whole thousands of them you find 
 
392 CARLYLE ON 
 
 little that is properly new ; nothing but the old song sung by a 
 new voice, with better or worse execution, here and there an or- 
 namental quaver, and false notes enough : but the fundamental 
 tune is ever the same ; and for the words, these, all that they 
 meant stands written generally on the churchyard stone : Natus 
 sum ; esuriebam, quwrebam ; nunc repletus requiesco. Mankind 
 sail their life-voyage in huge fleets, following some single 
 whale-fishing or herring-fishing commodore : the log-book of 
 each differs not, in essential purport, from that of any other : 
 nay the most have no legible log-book (reflection, observation 
 not being among their talents) ; keep no reckoning, only keep 
 in sight of the flagship— and fish. Read the commodore's 
 papers (know his life) ; and even your lover of that street 
 biography will have learned the most of what he sought after. 
 
 Or, the servile imitancy, and yet also a nobler relationship 
 and mysterious union to one another which lies in such imi- 
 tancy, of mankind might be illustrated under the different fig- 
 ure, itself nowise original, of a flock of sheep. Sheep go in 
 flocks for three reasons : first, because they are of a gregarious 
 temper, and love to be together ; secondly, because of their 
 cowardice — they are afraid to be left alone ; thirdly, because 
 the common run of them are dull of sight, to a proverb, and 
 can have no choice in roads ; sheep can in fact see nothing ; in 
 a celestial luminary, and a scoured pewter tankard, would 
 discern only that both dazzled them, and were of unspeakable 
 glory. How like their fellow-creatures of the human species ! 
 Men, too, as was from the first maintained here, are gregarious ; 
 then surely faint-hearted enough, trembling to be left by them- 
 selves ; above all, dull-sighted, down to the verge of utter 
 blindness. Thus are we seen ever running in torrents, and 
 mobs, if we run at all ; and after what foolish scoured tank- 
 ards, mistaking them for suns ! Foolish turnip-lanterns like- 
 wise, to all appearance supernatural, keep whole nations quak- 
 ing, their hair on end. Neither know we, except by blind 
 habit, where the good pastures lie : solely when the sweet grass 
 is between our teeth, we know it, and chew it ; also when grass 
 is bitter and scant, we know it — and bleat and butt : these last 
 two facts we know of a truth and in very deed. Thus do men 
 and sheep play their parts on this nether earth ; wandering 
 restlessly in large masses, they know not whither ; for most 
 part each following his neighbor, and his own nose. 
 
 Nevertheless, not always ; look better, you shall find cer- 
 tain that do, in some small degree, know whither. Sheep have 
 their bell-wether ; some ram of the folds, endued with more 
 valor, with clearer vision than other sheep ; he leads them 
 
BOSWELVS LIFE OF yoHbTSON. 393 
 
 through the wolds, by height and hollow, to the woods and 
 water-courses, for covert or for pleasant provender ; courage- 
 ously marching, and if need be leaping, and with hoof and 
 horn doing battle, in the van : him they courageously and with 
 assured heart follow. Touching it is, as every herdsman will 
 inform you, with what chivalrous devotedness these woolly 
 hosts adhere to their wether ; and rush after him, through 
 good report and through bad report, were it into safe shelters 
 and green thymy nooks, or into asphaltic lakes and the jaws of 
 devouring lions. Ever also must we recall that fact which we 
 owe Jean Paul's quick eye : " If you hold a stick before the 
 wether, so that he, by necessity, leaps in passing you, and then 
 withdraw your stick, the flock will nevertheless all leap as he 
 did ; and the thousandth sheep shall be found impetuously 
 vaulting over air, as the first did over an otherwise impassable 
 barrier." Reader, wouldst thou understand society, ponder 
 well those ovine proceedings ; thou wilt find them all curiously 
 significant. 
 
 Now if sheep always, how much more must men always, 
 have their chief, their guide ! Man too is by nature quite 
 thoroughly gregarious : nay ever he struggles to be something 
 more, to be sociai ; not even when society has become impossi- 
 ble does that deep-seated tendency and effort forsake him. 
 Man, as if by miraculous magic, imparts his thoughts, his 
 mood of mind to man ; an unspeakable communion binds all 
 past, present, and future men into one indissoluble whole, 
 almost into one living individual. Of which high, mysterious 
 truth, this disposition to imitate, to lead and be led, this im- 
 possibility not to imitate, is the most constant, and one of the 
 simplest manifestations. To imitate ! which of us all can meas- 
 ure the significance that lies in that one word ? By virtue of 
 which the infant man, born at Woolsthorpe, grows up not to 
 be a hairy savage, and chewer of acorns, but an Isaac New- 
 ton and discoverer of solar systems ! Thus, both in a celestial 
 and terrestrial sense, are we z. flock, such as there is no other : 
 nay, looking away from the base and ludicrous to the sublime 
 and sacred side of the matter (since in every matter there are 
 two sides), have not we also a Shepherd, "if we will b.ut hear 
 his voice" ? Of those stupid multitudes there is no one but 
 has an immortal soul within him ; a reflex and living image of 
 God's whole universe : strangely, from its dim environment, 
 the light of the Highest looks through him ; for which reason, 
 indeed, it is that we claim a brotherhood with him, and so love 
 to know his history, and come into clearer and clearer union 
 with all that he feels, and says, and does. 
 
394 CAHLVLM ON' 
 
 However, the chief thing to be noted was this : Amid those 
 dull millions, who, as a dull flock, roll hither and thither, 
 whithersoever they are led ; and seem all sightless and slavish, 
 accomplishing, attempting Httle save what the animal instinct 
 in its somewhat higher kind might teach, to keep themselves 
 and their young ones alive, are scattered here and there supe- 
 rior natures, whose eye is not destitute of free vision, nor their 
 heart of free volition. These latter, therefore, examine and 
 determine, not what others do, but what it is right to do ; 
 towards which, and which only, will they, with such force as is 
 given them, resolutely endeavor : for if the machine, living or 
 inanimate, is merely fed, or desires to be fed, and so works, 
 the person can will, and so do. These are properly our men, 
 our great men ; the guides of the dull host, which follows 
 them as by an irrevocable decree. They are the chosen of the 
 world ; they had this rare faculty not only of " supposing" and 
 " inclining to think," but of knowing and believing ; the nature 
 of their being was, that they lived not by hearsay, but by clear 
 vision ; while others hovered and swam along, in the grand 
 Vanity-fair of the world, blinded by the mere shows of things, 
 these saw into the things themselves, and could walk as men 
 having an eternal loadstar, and with their feet on sure paths. 
 Thus was there a reality in their existence ; something of a 
 perennial character ; in virtue of which indeed it is that the 
 memory of them is perennial. Whoso belongs only to his own 
 age, and reverences only its gilt Popinjays or soot-smeared 
 Mumbojumbos, must needs die with it : though he have been 
 crowned seven times in the Capitol, or seventy-and-se\'en 
 times, and Rumor have blown his praises to all the four 
 winds, deafening every ear therewith, it avails not ; there was 
 nothing universal, nothing eternal in him ; he must fade away, 
 even as the Popinjay-gildings and scarecrow-apparel, which 
 he could not see through. The great man does, in good truth, 
 belong to his own age ; nay more so than any other man ; be- 
 ing properly the synopsis and epitome of such age with its 
 interests and influences : but belongs likewise to all ages, other- 
 wise he is not great. What was transitory in him passes away ; 
 and an immortal part remains, the significance of which is in 
 strict speech inexhaustible — as that of every real object is. 
 Aloft, conspicuous, on his enduring basis, he stands there, 
 serene, unaltering ; silently addresses to every new generation 
 a new lesson and monition. Well is his life worth writing, 
 worth interpreting ; and ever, in the new dialect of new times, 
 of rewriting and reinterpreting. 
 
 Of such chosen men was Samuel Johnsoh : not ranking 
 
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 395 
 
 among the highest, or even the high, yet distinctly admitted 
 into that sacred band ; whose existence was no idle dream, 
 but a reality which he transacted awake j nowise a clothes- 
 horse and patent digester, but a genuine man. By nature he 
 was gifted for the noblest of earthly tasks, that of priesthood, 
 and guidance of mankind ; by destiny, moreover, he was ap- 
 pointed to this task, and did actually, according to strength, 
 fulfil the same : so that always the question. How j in what 
 spirit J under what shape ? remains for us to be asked and 
 answered concerning him. For as the highest gospel was a 
 biography, so is the life of every good man still an indubita- 
 ble gospel, and preaches to the eye and heart and whole man, 
 so that devils even must believe and tremble, these gladdest 
 tidings : ' ' Man is heaven-born ; not the thrall of circum- 
 stances, of necessity, but the victorious subduer thereof : be- 
 hold how he can become the ' announcer of himself and of his 
 freedom ; ' and is ever what the thinker has named him, ' the 
 Messias of Nature.' " Yes, reader, all this that thou hast so 
 often heard about ' ' force of circumstances, " " the creature of 
 the time, " " balancing ot motives, ' ' and who knows what melan- 
 choly stuff to the like purport, wherein thou, as in a nightmare 
 dream, sittest paralyzed, and hast no force left, was in very 
 truth, if Johnson and waking men are to be credited, little 
 other than a hag-ridden vision of death-sleep ; some half-i&ct, 
 more fatal at times than a whole falsehood. Shake it off ; 
 awake ; up and be doing, even as it is given thee ! 
 
 The contradiction which yawns wide enough in every life, 
 which it is the meaning and task of life to reconcile, was in 
 Johnson's wider than in most. Seldom, for any man, has the 
 contrast between the ethereal heavenward side of things and 
 the dark sordid earthward been more glaring : whether we- 
 look at Nature's work with him or Fortune's, from first to last, 
 heterogeneity, as of sunbeams and miry clay, is on all hands 
 manifest. Whereby indeed, only this was declared. That much 
 life had been given him ; many things to triumph over, a great 
 work to do. Happily also he did it ; better than the most. 
 
 Nature had given him a high, keen-visioned, almost poetic 
 soul ; yet withal imprisoned it in an inert, unsightly body : he 
 that could never rest had not limbs that would move with him, 
 but only roll and waddle : the inward eye, all-penetrating, all- 
 embracing, must look through bodily windows that were dim, 
 half -blinded ; he so loved men, and "never once saw the 
 human face divine" ! Not less did he prize the love of men ; 
 he was eminently social ; the approbation of his fellows was 
 dear to him, " valuable," as he owned, " if from the meanest of 
 
396 CARLYLE ON 
 
 human beings ;" yet the first impression he produced on every 
 man was to be one of aversion, almost of disgust. By nature 
 it was further ordered that the imperious Johnson should be 
 born poor : the ruler-soul, strong in its native royalty, gener- 
 ous, uncontrollable, like the lion of the woods, was to be 
 housed, then, in such a dwelling-place : of disfigurement, dis- 
 ease, and, lastly, of a poverty which itself made him the servant 
 of servants. Thus was the born king likewise a born slave : 
 the divine spirit of music must awake imprisoned amid dull- 
 croaking universal discords ; the Ariel finds himself encased in 
 the coarse hulls of a Caliban. So is it more or less, we know 
 (and thou, O reader, knowest and feelest even now), with all 
 men : yet with the fewest men in any such degree as with 
 Johnson. 
 
 Fortune, moreover, which had so managed his first appear- 
 ance in the world, lets not her hand lie idle, or turn the other 
 way, but works unweariedly in the same spirit, while he is jour- 
 neying through the world. What such a mind, stamped of na- 
 ture's noblest metal, though in so ungainly a die, was specially 
 and best of all fitted for, might still be a question. To none 
 of the world's few incorporated guilds could he have adjusted 
 himself without difficulty, without distortion ; in none been a 
 guild-brother well at ease. Perhaps, if we look to the strictly 
 practical nature of his faculty, to the strength, decision, method 
 that manifests itself in him, we may say that his calling was 
 rather towards active than speculative life ; that as statesman 
 (in the higher, now obsolete sense), lawgiver, ruler, in short 
 as doer of the work, he had shone even more than as speaker 
 of the word. His honesty of heart, his courageous temper, the 
 value he set on things outward and material, might have made 
 .him a king among kings. Had the golden age of those new 
 French prophets, when it shall be a chacun selon sa capacM, a 
 chaque capacM selon ses muvres, but arrived ! Indeed, even in 
 our brazen and Birmingham-lacquer age, he himself regretted 
 that he had not become a lawyer, and risen to be Chancellor, 
 which he might well have done. However, it was otherwise 
 appointed. To no man does Fortune throw open all the king- 
 doms of this world, and say : It is thine ; choose where thou 
 wilt dwell ! To the most she opens hardly the smallest cranny 
 or doghutch, and says, not without asperity : There, that is 
 thine while thou canst keep it ; nestle thyself there, and bless 
 Heaven ! Alas, men must fit themselves into many things : 
 some forty years ago, for instance, the noblest and ablest man 
 in all the British lands might be seen not swaying the royal 
 sceptre, or the pontiff's censer, on the pinnacle of the world, 
 
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 39/ 
 
 but gauging ale-tubs in the little burgh of Dumfries ! Johnson 
 came a little nearer the mark than Burns : but with him too 
 "strength was mournfully denied its arena;" he too had to 
 fight Fortune at strange odds all his hfe long. 
 
 Johnson's disposition for royalty (had the Fates so ordered 
 it) is well seen in early boyhood. ' ' His favorites, ' ' says Bos- 
 well, " used to receive very liberal assistance from him ; and 
 such was the submission and deference with which he was 
 treated, that three of the boys, of whom Mr. Hector was some- 
 times one, used to come in the morning as his humble attend- 
 ants, and carry him to school. One in the middle stooped, 
 while he sat upon his back, and one on each side supported 
 him ; and thus was he borne triumphant. ' ' The purfly, sand- 
 blind lubber and blubber, with his open mouth, and face of 
 bruised honeycomb ; yet already dominant, imperial, irresisti- 
 ble ! Not in the " king's-chair" (of human arms), as we see, 
 do his three satellites carry him along : rather on the tyrant' s- 
 saddle, the back of his fellow-creature, must he ride prosper- 
 ous ! The child is father of the man. He who had seen fifty 
 years into coming time would have felt that little spectacle of 
 mischievous schoolboys to be a great one. For us, who look 
 back on it, and what followed it, now from afar, there arise 
 questions enough : How looked these urchins ? What jackets 
 and galligaskins had they ; felt headgear, or of dogskin 
 leather ? What was old Lichfield doing then ; what thinking ? 
 — and soon, through the whole series of Corporal Trim's " aux- 
 iliary verbs." A picture of it all fashions itself together — 
 only unhappily we have no brush and no fingers. 
 
 Boyhood is now past ; the ferula of pedagogue waves harm- 
 less in the distance : Samuel has struggled up to uncouth bulk 
 and youthhood, wrestling with disease and poverty, all the 
 way ; which two continue still his companions. At college we 
 see little of him ; yet thus much, that things went not well. A 
 rugged wild man of the desert, awakened to the feeling of him- 
 self ; proud as the proudest, poor as the poorest ; stoically shut 
 up, silently enduring the incurable : what a world of blackest 
 gloom, with sun-gleams and pale tearful moon-gleams, and 
 flickerings of a celestial and an infernal splendor, was this 
 that now opened for him ! But the weather is wintry ; and the 
 toes of the man are looking through his shoes. His muddy fea- 
 tures grow of a purple and sea-green color ; a flood of black 
 indignation mantling beneath. A truculent, raw-boned figure ! 
 Meat he has probably little ; hope he has less : his feet, as we 
 said, have come into brotherhood with the cgld roire, 
 
39^ CARLYLE ON 
 
 " Shall I be particular," inquires Sir John Hawkins, " and relate a cir. 
 cumstance of his distress, that cannot be imputed to him as an effect oi 
 his own extravagance or irregularity, and consequently reflects no dis- 
 grace on his memory ? He had scarce any change of raiment, and, in a 
 short time after Corbet left him, but one pair of shoes, and those so old 
 that his feet were seen through them ; a gentleman of his college, the 
 father of an eminent clergyman now living, directed a servitor one morn- 
 ing to place a new pair at the door of Johnson's chamber,; who seeing 
 them upon his first going out, so far forgot himself and the spirit which 
 must have actuated his unknown benefactor, that, with all the indignation 
 of an insulted man, he threw them away." 
 
 Hovir exceedingly surprising ! The Rev. Dr. Hall remarks : 
 " As far as we can judge from a cursory view of the weekly 
 account in the buttery-books, Johnson appears to have lived as 
 well as other commoners and scholars. ' ' Alas ! such ' ' cursory 
 view of the buttery-books, ' ' now from the safe distance of a cen- 
 tury, in the safe chair of a College Mastership, is one thing ; 
 the continual view of the empty or locked buttery itself was 
 quite a different thing. But hear our knight, how he further dis- 
 courses. " Johnson," quoth Sir John, could "not at this early 
 period of his life divest himself of an idea that poverty was dis- 
 graceful ; and was very severe in his censures of that economy 
 in both our universities, which exacted at meals the attendance 
 of poor scholars, under the several denominations of servitors 
 in the one, and sizars in the other : he thought that the schol- 
 ar's, like the Christian life, levelled all distinctions of rank and 
 worldly pre-eminence ; but in this he was mistaken : civil 
 polity," etc., etc. Too true I It is man's lot to err. 
 
 However, destiny, in all ways, means to prove the mis- 
 taken Samuel, and see what stuff is in him. He must leave 
 these butteries of Oxford, Want, like an armed man, compelling 
 him ; retreat into his father's mean home ; and there abandon 
 himself for a season to inaction, disappointment, shame, and 
 nervous melancholy nigh run mad : he is probably the wretch- 
 edest man in wide England. In all ways he too must ' ' become 
 perfect through suffering." High thoughts have visited him ; 
 his college exercises have been praised beyond the walls of 
 college ; Pope himself has seen that Translation, and approved 
 of it : Samuel had whispered to himself : I too am " one and 
 somewhat." False thoughts ; that leave only misery behind ! 
 The fever-fire of ambition is too painfully extinguished (but 
 not cured) in the frost-bath of poverty. Johnson has knocked 
 at the gate, as one having a right ; but there was no opening : 
 the world lies all encircled as with brass ; nowhere can he find 
 or force the smallest entrance. An ushership at Market Bos- 
 worth, and ' ' a disagreement between him and feir Wolstan 
 Dixie, the patron of the schoo^ yields him bread Qf affliction 
 
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 399 
 
 and water of affliction ; but so bitter, that unassisted human 
 nature cannot swallow them. Young Samson will grind no 
 more in the Philistine mill of Bosworth ; quits hold of Sir 
 Wolstan, and the ' ' domestic chaplaincy, so far at least as to say 
 grace at table, ' ' and also to be " treated with what he repre- 
 sented as intolerable harshness ;" and so, after " some months 
 of such complicated misery, ' ' f eeHng doubtless that there are 
 worse things in the world than quick death by famine, " relin- 
 quishes a situation, which all his life afterwards he recollected 
 with the strongest aversion, and even horror." Men like John- 
 son are properly called the forlorn hope of the world : judge 
 whether his hope was forlorn or not, by this letter to a dull 
 oily printer who called himself Sylvanus Urban : 
 
 " Sir : As you appear no less sensible than your readers of the defect 
 of your poetical article, you will not be displeased if (in order to the im- 
 provement of it) I communicate to you the sentiments of a person who will 
 undertake, on reasonable terms, sometimes to fill a column. 
 
 " His opinion is, that the public would," etc. etc. 
 
 " If such a correspondence will be agreeable to you, be pleased to in- 
 form me in two posts what the conditions are on which you shall expect 
 it. Your late offer (for a Prize Poem) gives me no reason to distrust your 
 generosity. If you engage in any literary projects besides this paper, I 
 have other designs to impart." 
 
 Reader, the generous person, to whom this letter goes ad- 
 dressed, is " Mr. Edmund Cave, at St. John's Gate, London ;" 
 the addresser of it is Samuel Johnson, in Birmingham, War- 
 wickshire. 
 
 Nevertheless, life rallies in the man ; reasserts its right to be 
 lived, even to be enjoyed. "Better a small bush," say the 
 Scotch, "than no shelter;" Johnson learns to be contented 
 with humble human things ; and is there not already an actual 
 realized human existence, all stirring and living on every hand 
 of him ? Go thou and do likewise ! In Birmingham itself, 
 with his own purchased goose-quill, he can earn " five guineas ;" 
 nay, finally, the choicest terrestrial good : a friend, who will 
 be wife to him ! Johnson's marriage with the good Widow Por- 
 ter has been treated with ridicule by many mortals, who ap- 
 parently had no understanding thereof. That the purblind, 
 seamy-faced wild man, stalking lonely, woe-stricken, like some 
 Irish gallowglass with peeled club, whose speech no man 
 knew, whose look all men both laughed at and shuddered at, 
 should find any brave female heart to acknowledge, at first 
 sight and hearing of him, "' This is the most sensible man I 
 ever met with ;" and then, with generous courage, to take him 
 to itself, and say. Be thou mine ; be thou warmed here, and 
 thawed to life !— in all this, in the kind widow's love and pity 
 
400 CARLYLE ON 
 
 for him, in Johnson's love and gratitude, there is actually no 
 matter for ridicule. Their wedded life, as is the common lot, 
 was made up of drizzle and dry weather ; but innocence and 
 worth dwelt in it ; and when death had ended it, a certain 
 sacredness : Johnson's deathless affection for his Tetty was 
 always venerable and noble. 
 
 However, be all this as it might, Johnson is now minded to 
 wed ; and will live by the trade of pedagogy, for by this also 
 may life be kept in. Let the world therefore take notice : " At 
 Edial near Lichfield, in Staffordshire, young gentlemen are 
 boarded, and taught the Latin and Greek languages, by — Sam- 
 uel Johnson." Had this Edial enterprise prospered, how 
 different might the issue have been ! Johnson had lived a life 
 of unnoticed nobleness, or swoln into some amorphous Dr. 
 Parr, of no avail to us ; Bozzy would have dwindled into offi- 
 cial insignificance, or risen by some other elevation ; old Auch- 
 inleck had never been afflicted with " ane that keeped a 
 schule," or obliged to violate hospitality by a " Cromwell do ? 
 God, sir, he gart kings ken that there was a lith in their 
 neck!" But the Edial enterprise did not prosper; destiny 
 had other wprk appointed for Samuel Johnson ; and young 
 gentlemen got board where they could elsewhere find it. This 
 man was to become a teacher of grown gentlemen, in the most 
 surprising way ; a man of letters, and ruler of the British 
 nation for some time — not of their bodies merely but of their 
 minds, not over them but in them. 
 
 The career of literature could not, in Johnson's day, any 
 more than now, be said to lie along the shores of a Pactolus : 
 whatever else might be gathered there, gold-dust was nowise 
 the chief produce. The world, from the times of Socrates, St. 
 Paul, and far earlier, has always had its teachers ; and always 
 treated them in a peculiar way. A shrewd town-clerk (not of 
 Ephesus), once, in founding a burgh-seminary, when the ques- 
 tion came, How the schoolmasters should be maintained ? 
 delivered this brief counsel : ' ' D — n them, keep them poor !' ' 
 Considerable wisdom may lie in this aphorism. At all events, 
 we see, the world has acted on it long, and indeed improved on 
 it, putting many a schoolmaster of its great burgh-seminary 
 to a death which even cost it something. The world, it is true, 
 had for some time been too busy to go out of its way, and put 
 any author to death ; however, the old sentence pronounced 
 against them was found to be pretty sufficient. The first 
 writers, being monks, were sworn to a vow of poverty ; the 
 modern authors had no need to swear to it. This was the 
 
BOSWELVS LIFE OF JOHNSON. 40 1 
 
 epoch when an Otway could still die of hunger ; not to speak 
 of your innumerable Scrogginses, whom " the Muse found 
 stretched beneath a rug," with " rusty grate unconscious of a 
 fire," stocking-nightcap, sanded-floor, and all the other escutch- 
 eons of the craft, time out of mind the heirlooms of author- 
 ship. Scroggins, however, seems to have been but an idler ; 
 not at all so diligent as worthy Mr. Boyce, whom we might 
 have seen sitting up in bed, with his wearing-apparel of blanket 
 about him, and a hole slit in the same, that his hand might be 
 at liberty to work in its vocation. The worst was, that too 
 frequently a blackguard recklessness of temper ensued, incapa- 
 ble of turning to account what good the gods even here had 
 provided : your Boyces acted on some stoico-epicurean princi- 
 ple of carpe diem, as men do in bombarded towns, and seasons 
 of raging pestilence ; and so had lost not only their life and 
 presence of mind, but their status as persons of respectability. 
 The trade of author was at about one of its lowest ebbs when 
 Johnson embarked on it. 
 
 Accordingly we find no mention of illuminations in the 
 city of London when this same ruler of the British nation 
 arrived in it : no cannon-salvos are fired ; no flourish of drums 
 and trumpets greets his appearance on the scenes He enters 
 quite quietly, with some copper halfpence in his pocket ; 
 creeps into lodgings in Exeter Street, Strand ; and has a coro- 
 nation pontiff also, of not less peculiar equipment, whom, with 
 all submissiveness, he must wait upon, in his Vatican of St. 
 John's Gate. This is the dull oily printer alluded to above. 
 
 ' ' Cave's temper, ' ' says our Knight Hawkins, ' ' was phlegmatic : though 
 he assumed, as the publisher of the Magazine, the name of Sylvanus 
 Urban, he had few of those qualities that constitute urbanity. Judge of 
 his want of them by this question, which he once put to an author : ' Mr. 
 
 , I hear you have just published a pamphlet, and am told there is a 
 
 very good paragraph in it upon the subject of music : did you write that 
 yourself ? ' His discernment was also slow ; and as he had already at his 
 command some writers of prose and verse, who, in the language of book- 
 sellers, are called good hands, he was the backwarder in making advan'^es, 
 or courting an intimacy with Johnson. Upon the first approach of a 
 stranger, his practice was to continue sitting ; a posture in which he was 
 ever to be found, and for a few minutes to continue silent : if at any time 
 he was inclined to begin the discourse, it was generally by putting a leaf 
 of the Magazine, then in the press, into the hand of his visitor, and asking 
 his opinion of it. 
 
 " He was so incompetent a judge of Johnson's abilities, that meaning at 
 one time to dazzle him with the splendor of some of those luminaries in 
 literature who favored him with their correspondence, he told him that 
 if he would, in the evening, be at a certain alehouse in the neighborhood 
 of Clerkenwell, he might have a chance of seeing Mr. Browne and an- 
 other or two of those illustrious contributors : Johnson accepted the mvi- 
 
405 
 
 CARLYLE ON 
 
 tation ; and being introduced by Cave, dressed in a loose horseman's coat, 
 and such a great bushy wig as he constantly wore, to the sight of Mr. 
 Browne, whom he found sitting at the upper end of a long table, in a, 
 cloud of tobacco-smoke, had his curiosity gratified. ' ' ' 
 
 In fact, if we look seriously into the condition of author- 
 ship at that period, we shall find that Johnson had undertaken 
 one of the ruggedest of all possible enterprises ; that here as 
 elsewhere fortune had given him unspeakable contradictions 
 to reconcile. For a man of Johnson's stamp, the problem was 
 twofold : First, not only as the humble but indispensable con- 
 dition of all else, to keep himself, if so might be, alive j but, 
 secondly, to keep himself alive by speaking forth the truth that 
 was in him, and speaking it truly, that is, in the clearest and 
 fittest utterance the heavens had enabled him to give it, let the 
 earth say to this what she liked. Of which twofold problem 
 if it be hard to solve either member separately, how incalcula- 
 bly more so to solve it, when both are conjoined, and work 
 with endless complication into one another ! He that finds 
 himself already kept alive can sometimes (unhappily not always) 
 speak a little truth ; he that finds himself able and willing, to 
 all lengths, to speak lies, may, by watching how the wind sits, 
 scrape together a liveHhood, sometimes of great splendor : he, 
 again, who finds himself provided with neither endowment, has 
 but a ticklish game to play, and shall have praises if he win it. 
 Let us look a little at both faces of the matter ; and see what 
 front they then offered our adventurer, what front he offered 
 them. 
 
 At the time of Johnson's appearance on the field, litera- 
 ture, in many senses, was in a transitional state ; chiefly in this 
 sense, as respects the pecuniary subsistence of its cultivators. 
 It was in the very act o'f passing from the protection of patrons 
 into that of the public ; no longer to supply its necessities by 
 laudatory dedications to the great, but by judicious bargains 
 with the booksellers. This happy change has been much sung 
 and celebrated ; many a " lord of the lion heart and eagle eye" 
 looking back with scorn enough on the bygone system of de- 
 pendency : so that now it were perhaps well to consider, for a 
 moment, what good might also be in it, what gratitude we owe 
 it. That a good was in it, admits not of doubt. Whatsoever 
 has existed has had its value : without some truth and worth 
 lying in it, the thing could not have hung together, and been 
 the organ and sustenance and method of action for men that 
 reasoned and were alive. Translate a falsehood which is 
 wholly false into practice, the result comes out zero ; there is 
 ' Hawkins, pp. 46-50. 
 
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 403 
 
 no fruit or issue to be derived from it. That in an age, when 
 a nobleman was still noble, still with his wealth the protector 
 of worthy and humane things, and still venerated as such, a 
 poor man of genius, his brother in nobleness, should, with 
 unfeigned reverence, address him and say, " I have found 
 wisdom here, and would fain proclaim it abroad ; wilt thou, of 
 thy abundance, afford me the means ?' ' — in all this there was 
 no baseness ; it was wholly an honest proposal, which a free 
 man might make, and a free man listen to. So might a Tasso, 
 with a Gerusalemme in his hand or in his head, speak to a Duke 
 of Ferrara ; so might a Shakespeare to his Southampton ; and 
 continental artists generally to their rich protectors, in some 
 countries, down almost to these days. It was only when the 
 reverence became feigned, that baseness entered into the trans- 
 action on both sides ; and, indeed, flourished there with rapid 
 luxuriance, till that became disgraceful for a Dryden which a 
 Shakespeare could once practise without offence. 
 
 Neither, it is very true, was the new way of bookseller 
 Maecenasship worthless ; which opened itself at this juncture, 
 for the most important of all transport-trades, now when the 
 old way had become too miry and impassable. Remark, more- 
 over, how this second sort of Maecenasship, after carrying us 
 through nearly a century of literary time, appears now to 
 have well-nigh discharged its function also ; and to be working 
 pretty rapidly towards some third method, the exact conditions 
 of which are yet nowise visible. Thus all things have their 
 end ; and we should part with them all, not in anger, but in 
 peace. The bookseller-system, during its peculiar century, 
 the whole of the eighteenth, did carry us handsomely along ; 
 and many good works it has left us, and many good men it 
 maintained : if it is now expiring by Puffery, as the patron- 
 age-system did by Flattery (for lying is ever the forerunner 
 of death, nay is itself death), let us not forget its benefits ; 
 how it nursed literature through boyhood and school-years, as 
 patronage had wrapped it in soft swaddling-bands ; till now 
 we see it about to put on the toga virilis, could it but find any 
 such ! 
 
 There is tolerable travelling on the beaten road, run how it 
 may ; only on the new road not yet levelled and paved, and on 
 the old road all broken into ruts and quagmires, is the travel- 
 ling bad or impracticable. The difficulty hes always in the 
 transition from one method to another. In which state it was 
 that Johnson now found Uterature ; and out of which, let us 
 also say, he manfully carried it. What remarkable mortal first 
 paid copyright in England we have not ascertained ; perhaps, 
 
404 carlvle on 
 
 for almost a century before, some scarce visible or ponderable 
 pittance of wages had occasionally been yielded by the seller 
 of books to the writer of them : the original covenant, stipu- 
 lating to produce " Paradise Lost" on the one hand, and 
 ' ' five pounds sterling' ' on the other, still lies (we have been 
 told) in black-on-white, for inspection and purchase by the 
 curious, at a bookshop in Chancery Lane. Thus had the mat- 
 ter gone on, in a mixed confused way, for some threescore 
 years ; as ever, in such things, the old system mierlaps the 
 new, by some generation or two, and only dies quite out when 
 the new has got a complete organization and weather-worthy 
 surface of its own. Among the first authors, the very first of 
 any significance, who lived by the day's wages of his craft, and 
 composedly faced the world on that basis, was Samuel John- 
 son. 
 
 At the time of Johnson's appearance there were still two 
 ways on which an author might attempt proceeding : there 
 were the Maecenases proper in the West End of London ; and 
 the Maecenases virtual of St. John's Gate and Paternoster 
 Row. To a considerate man it might seem uncertain which 
 method were preferable : neither had very high attractions ; 
 the patron's aid was now well-nigh necessarily polluted by 
 sycophancy, before it could come to hand : the bookseller's 
 was deformed with greedy stupidity, not to say entire wooden- 
 headedness and disgust (so that an Osborne even required to 
 be knocked down by an author of spirit), and could barely 
 keep the thread of life together. The one was the wages of 
 suffering and poverty ; the other, unless you gave strict heed 
 to it, the wages of sin. In time, Johnson had opportunity of 
 looking into both methods, and ascertaining what they were ; 
 but found, at first trial, that the former would in nowise do for 
 him. Listen, once again, to that far-famed blast of doom, 
 prqclaiming into the ear of Lord Chesterfield, and, through 
 him, of the listening world, that patronage should be no 
 more ! 
 
 " Seven years, my Lord, have now past, since I waited in your outward 
 rooms, or was repulsed from your door ; during which time I have been 
 pushing on my work ' through difficulties, of which it is useless to com- 
 plain, and have brought it at last to the verge of publication, without one 
 act of assistance, ' one word of encouragement, or one smile of favor. 
 
 * The Knglish Dictionary. 
 
 " Were time and printer's space of no value, it were easy to wash away certain foolish 
 soot -stains dropped here as *' notes ;" especially two : the one on this word and on Bos- 
 well's note to it; the other on the paragraph which follows. Let " Ed. " look a second 
 time ; he will find that Johnson's sacred regard for truth is the only thing to be " noted " 
 in the former case ; also, in the latter, that this of " Love' being a native of the rocks'' 
 actually has a '^ meaning." 
 
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 405 
 
 " The Shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love and found 
 him a native of the rocks. 
 
 " Is not a patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man 
 struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground encum- 
 bers him with help ? The notice which you have been pleased to take of 
 my labors, had it been early, had been kind ; but it has been delayed till 
 I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it ; till I am solitary and cannot impart 
 it ; till I am known and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical 
 asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received ; 
 or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a 
 patron which Providence has enabled me to do for myself. 
 
 " Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to any 
 favorer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I should conclude 
 it, if less be possible, with less ; for I have long been awakened from that 
 dream of hope in which I once boasted myself with so much exaltation, 
 
 " My Lord, your Lordship's most humble, most obedient servant, 
 
 " Sam. Johnson." 
 
 And thus must the rebellious " Sam. Johnson" turn him to 
 the bookselling guild, and the virondrous chaos of " author by 
 trade ;" and, though ushered into it only by that dull oily 
 printer, "with loose horseman's coat and such a great bushy 
 wig as he constantly wore, ' ' and only as subaltern to some com- 
 manding officer ' ' Browne, sitting amid tobacco-smoke at the 
 head of a long table in the alehouse at Clerkenwell ' ' — gird 
 himself together for the warfare ; having no alternative I 
 
 Little less contradictory was that other branch of the two- 
 fold problem now set before Johnson : the speaking forth ot 
 truth. Nay, taken by itself, it had in those days become so 
 complex as to puzzle strongest heads, with nothing else im- 
 posed on them for solution ; and even to turn high heads of 
 that sort into mere hollow vizards, speaking neither truth nor 
 falsehood, nor any thing but what the prompter and player 
 {vnoxpirrji) put into them. Alas ! for poor Johnson, contra- 
 diction abounded ; in spirituals and in temporals, within and 
 without. Born with the strongest unconquerable love of just 
 insight, he must begin to live and learn in a scene where pre- 
 judice flourishes with rank luxuriance. England was all con- 
 fused enough, sightless and yet restless, take it where you 
 would ; but figure the best intellect in England nursed up to 
 manhood in the idol-cavern of a poor tradesman's house, in 
 the cathedral city of Lichfield ! What is truth ? said jesting 
 Pilate. What is truth ? might earnest Johnson much more 
 emphatically say. Truth, no longer, like the phoenix, in rain- 
 bow plumage, poured, from her glittering beak, such tones of 
 sweetest melody as took captive every ear : the phoenix (wax- 
 ing old) had well-nigh ceased her singing, and empty wearisome 
 cuckoos, and doleful monotonous owls, innumerable jays also, 
 
4o6 CARLYLE ON 
 
 and twittering sparrows on the housetop, pretended they were 
 repeating her. 
 
 It was wholly a divided age, that of Johnson ; unity exist- 
 ed nowhere, in its heaven or in its earth. Society, through 
 every fibre, was rent asunder ; all things, it was then becoming 
 visible, but could not then be understood, were moving on- 
 wards, with an impulse received ages before, yet now first with 
 a decisive rapidity, towards that great chaotic gulf, where, 
 whether in the shape of French Revolutions, Reform Bills, or 
 what shape soever, bloody or bloodless, the descent aiid engulf- 
 ment assume, we now see them weltering and boiling. Al- 
 ready Cant, as once before hinted, had begun to play its won- 
 derful part, for the hour was come : two ghastly apparitions, 
 unreal simulacra both. Hypocrisy and Atheism are already, 
 in silence, parting the world. Opinion and action, which 
 should live together as wedded pair, " one flesh," more properly 
 as soul and body, have commenced their open quarrel, and are 
 suing for a separate maintenance, as if they could exist sepa- 
 rately. To the earnest mind, in any position, firm footing and 
 a life of truth was becoming daily more difficult : in John- 
 son's position it was more difficult than in almost any other. 
 
 If, as for a devout nature was inevitable and indispensable, 
 he looked up to religion, as to the polestar of his voyage, 
 already there was no fixed polestar any longer visible ; but two 
 stars, a whole constellation of stars, each proclaiming itself as 
 the true. There was the red portentous comet-star of infidel- 
 ity ; the dim fixed-star, burning ever dimmer, uncertain now 
 whether not an atmospheric meteor, of orthodoxy : which of 
 these to choose ? The keener intellects of Europe had, almost 
 without exception, ranged themselves under the former : for 
 some half century, it had been the general effort of European 
 speculation to proclaim that destruction of falsehood was the 
 only truth ; daily had denial waxed stronger and stronger, 
 belief sunk more and more into decay. From our Boling- 
 brokes and Tolands the sceptical fever had passed into France, 
 into Scotland ; and already it smouldered, far and wide, 
 secretly eating out the heart of England. Bayle had played 
 his part ; Voltaire, on a wider theatre, was playing his — John- 
 son's senior by some fifteen years : Hume and Johnson were 
 children almost of the same year.' To this keener order of 
 intellects did Johnson's indisputably belong ; was he to join 
 them ; was he to oppose them ? A complicated question ; for, 
 alas ! the Church itself is no longer, even to him, wholly of true 
 adamant, but of adamant and baked mud conjoined : the zeal- 
 
 ' Johnson, September 1709 ; Hume, April 1711, 
 
BOSWELL'S LIFE. OP yOHNSON. 407 
 
 ously devout has to find his Church tottering ; and pause 
 amazed to see, instead of inspired priest, many a swine-feeding 
 TruUiber ministering at her altar. It is not the least curious 
 of the incoherences which Johnson had to reconcile, that, 
 though by nature contemptuous and incredulous, he was, at 
 that time of day, to find his safety and glory in defending, with 
 his whole might, the traditions o£ the elders. 
 
 Not less perplexingly intricate, and on both sides hollow or 
 questionable, was the aspect of politics. Whigs struggling 
 blindly forward, Tories holding blindly back ; each with some 
 forecast of a half truth ; neither with any forecast of the 
 whole ! Admire here this other contradiction in the life of 
 Johnson ; that, though the most ungovernable, and in practice 
 the most independent of men, he must be a Jacobite, and wor- 
 shipper of the ^divine right. In politics also there are 
 Irreconcilables enough for him. As, indeed how could it be 
 otherwise ? For when religion is torn asunder, and the very 
 heart of man's existence set against itself, then in all subordi- 
 nate departments there must needs be hollowness, incoherence. 
 The English nation had rebelled against a tyrant ; and, by 
 the hands of religious tyrannicides, exacted stern vengeance of 
 him : Democracy had risen iron-sinewed, and, " like an infant 
 Hercules, strangled serpents in its cradle. ' ' But as yet none 
 knew the meaning or extent of the phenomenon : Europe was 
 not ripe for it ; not to be ripened for it but by the culture and 
 various experience of another century and a half. And now, 
 when the king-killers were all swept away, and a milder second 
 picture was painted over the canvas of . the first, and betitled 
 " Glorious Revolution," who doubted but the catastrophe was 
 over, the whole business finished, and Democracy gone to its 
 long sleep ? Yet was it like a business finished and not fin- 
 ished ; a lingering uneasiness dwelt in all minds : the deep- 
 lying, resistless tendency, which had still to be obeyed, could no 
 longer be recognized ; thus was there halfness, insincerity, un- 
 certainty in men's ways ; instead of heroic Puritans and heroic 
 Cavaliers, came now a dawdling set of argumentative Whigs, 
 and a dawdling set of deaf-eared Tories ; each half-foolish, 
 each half -false. The Whigs were false and without basis ; 
 inasmuch as their whole object was resistance, criticism, 
 demolition — they knew not why, or towards what issue. In 
 Whiggism, ever since a Charles and his Jeffries had ceased to 
 meddle with it, and to have any Russel or Sydney to meddle 
 with, there could be no divineness of character ; not till, in 
 these latter days, it took the figure of a thorough-going, all- 
 defying Radicalism, was there any solid footing for it to stand 
 
4o8 CARLYLE ON 
 
 on. Of the like uncertain, half-hollow nature had Toryism 
 become in Johnson's time ; preaching forth indeed an everlast- 
 ing truth, the duty of loyalty ; yet now, ever since the final 
 expulsion of the Stuarts, having no person, but only an office 
 to be loyal to ; no living soul to worship, but only a dead vel- 
 vet-cushioned chair. Its attitude, therefore, was stiff-necked 
 refusal to move ; as that of Whiggism was clamorous command 
 to move — let rhyme and reason, on both hands, say to it what 
 they might. The consequence was, immeasurable floods of 
 contentious jargon, tending nowhither ; false conviction ; false 
 resistance to conviction ; decay (ultimately to become decease) 
 of whatsoever was once understood by the words principle or 
 honesty of heart ; the louder and louder triumph of halfne%% 
 and plausibility over wholeness and truth ; at last, this all- 
 overshadowing efflorescence of Quackery, which we now see, 
 with all its deadening and killing fruits, in all its innumerable 
 branches, down to the lowest. How, between these jarring 
 extremes, wherein the rotten lay so inextricably intermingled 
 with the sound, and as yet no eye could see through the ulte- 
 rior meaning of the matter, was a faithful and true man to 
 adjust himself ? 
 
 That Johnson, in spite of all drawbacks, adopted the Con- 
 servative side ; stationed himself as the unyielding opponent of 
 innovation, resolute to hold fast the form of sound words, 
 could not but increase, in no small measure, the difficulties he 
 had to strive with. We mean the moral difficulties ; for in 
 economical respects, it might be pretty equally balanced ; the 
 Tory servant of the public had perhaps about the same chance 
 of promotion as the Whig : and all the promotion Johnson 
 aimed at was the privilege to live. But, for what, though 
 unavowed, was no less indispensable, for his peace of con- 
 science, and the clear ascertainment and feeling of his duty as 
 an inhabitant of God's world, the case was hereby rendered 
 much more complex. To resist innovation is easy enough on 
 one condition : that you resist inquiry. This is, and was, the 
 common expedient of your common Conservatives ; but it 
 would not do for Johnson : he was a zealous recommender and 
 practiser of inquiry ; once for all, could not and would not 
 believe, much less speak and act, a falsehood : the form of 
 sound words, which he held fast, must have a meaning in it. 
 Here lay the difficulty : to behold a portentous mixture of 
 true and false, and feel that he must dwell and fight there ; 
 yet to love and defend only the true. How worship, when 
 you cannot and will not be an idolater ; yet cannot help dis- 
 cerning that the symbol of your divinity has half become idol- 
 
BO SWELL'S LIFE OF yOHNSOrf. 409 
 
 atrous ? This was the question, which Johnson, the man both 
 of clear eye and devout believing heart, must answer — at peril 
 of his life. The Whig or sceptic, on the other hand, had a 
 much simpler part to play. To him only the idolatrous side of 
 things, nowise the divine one, lay visible : not worship, there- 
 fore, nay in the strict sense not heart-honesty, only at most lip- 
 and hand-honesty, is required of him. What spiritual force is 
 his, he can conscientiously employ in the work of cavilling, of 
 pulling-dowD what is false. For the rest, that there is or can 
 be any truth of a higher than sensual nature, has not occurred 
 to him. The utmost, therefore, that he as man has to aim at, 
 is Respectability, the suffrages of his fellow-men. Such 
 suffrages he may weigh as well as count, or count only, 
 according as he is a Burke or a Wilkes. But beyond these 
 there lies nothing divine for him ; these attained, all is 
 attained. Thus is his whole world distinct and rounded-in ; a 
 clear goal is set before him ; a firm path, rougher or smoother ; 
 at worst a firm region wherein to seek a path : let him gird up 
 his loins, and travel on without misgivings ! For the honest 
 Conservative, again, nothing is distinct, nothing rounded-in : 
 Respectability can nowise be his highest Godhead ; not one 
 aim, but two conflicting aims to be continually reconciled by 
 him, has he to strive after. A difificult position, as we said ; 
 which accordingly the most did, even in those days, but half 
 defend : by the surrender, namely, of their own too cumber- 
 some honesty, or even understanding ; after which the com- 
 pletes! defence was worth little. Into this difficult position 
 Johnson, nevertheless, threw himself : found it indeed full of 
 difficulties ; yet held it out manfully, as an honest-hearted, 
 open-sighted man, while life was in him. 
 
 Such was that same " twofold problem" set before Samuel 
 Johnson. Consider all these moral difficulties ; and add to 
 them the fearful aggravation, which lay in that other circum- 
 stance, that he needed a continual appeal to the public, must 
 continually produce a certain impression and conviction on the 
 public ; that if he did not, he ceased to have " provision for 
 the day that was passing over him, ' ' he could not any longer 
 live ! How a vulgar character, once launched into this wild 
 element ; driven onwards by fear and famine ; without other 
 aim than to clutch what provender (of enjoyment in any kind) 
 he could get, always if possible keeping quite clear of the gal- 
 lows and pillory — that is to say, minding heedfully both " per- 
 son' ' and ' ' character' ' — would have floated hither and thither 
 in it ; and contrived to eat some three repasts daily, and wear 
 some three suits yearly, and then to depart and disappear, having 
 
410 CARLYLE ON 
 
 consumed his last ration : all this might be worth knowing, but 
 were in itself a trivial knowledge. How a noble man, resolute 
 for the truth, to whom shams and lies were once for all an 
 abomination, was to act in it : here lay the mystery. By what 
 methods, by what gifts of eye and hand, does a heroic Samuel 
 Johnson, now when cast forth into that waste chaos of author- 
 ship, maddest of things, a mingled Phlegethon and Fleet-ditch, 
 with its floating lumber, and sea-krakens. and mud-spectres, 
 shape himself a voyage ; of the transient driftwood, and the 
 enduring iron, build him a seaworthy life-boat, and sail 
 therein, undrowned, unpolluted, through the roaring " mother 
 of dead dogs, ' ' onwards to an eternal landmark, and city that 
 hat h foundations ? This high question is even the one an- 
 swered in Boswell's book ; which book we therefore, not so 
 falsely, have named a " heroic poem ;" for in it there lies the 
 whole argument of such. Glory to our brave Samuel ! He 
 accomplished this wonderful problem ; and now through long 
 generations we point to him. and say : Here also was a man ; 
 let the world once more have assurance of a man ! 
 
 Had there been in Johnson, now when afloat on that con- 
 fusion worse confounded of grandeur and squalor, no light but 
 an earthly outward one, he too must have made shipwreck. 
 With his diseased body, and vehement voracious heart, how 
 easy for him to become a carpe-diem philosopher, like the rest, 
 and live and die as miserably as any Boyce of that brother- 
 hood ! But happily there was a higher light for him ; shining 
 as a lamp to his path ; which, in all paths, would teach him to 
 act and walk not as a fool, but as wise, and in those evil days 
 too ' ' redeeming the time. ' ' Under dimmer or clearer manifes- 
 tations, a truth had been revealed to him : I also am a man ; 
 even in this unutterable element of authorship, I may live as 
 beseems a man ! That wrong is not only different from 
 right, but that it is in strict scientific terms infinitely different ; 
 even as the gaining of the whole world set against the losing of 
 one's own soul, or (as Johnson had it) a Heaven set against a 
 Hell ; that in all situations out of the pit of Tophet, wherein a 
 living man has stpod or can stand, there is actually a prize of 
 quite infinite value placed within his reach — namely, a duty for 
 him to do : this highest gospel, which forms the basis and 
 worth of all other gospels whatsoever, had been revealed to 
 Samuel Johnson ; and the man had believed it, and laid it 
 faithfully to heart. Such knowledge of the transcendental, im- 
 measurable character of duty we call the basis of all gospels, 
 the essence of all religion : he who with his whole soul knows 
 not this as yet knows nothing, as yet is properly nothing. 
 
BOSWELVS LIFE OF JOHNSON: \M 
 
 This, happily for him, Johnson was one of those th^t 
 knew ; under a certain authentic symbol it stood forever pres- 
 ent to his eyes : a symbol, indeed, waxing old as doth a gar- 
 ment ; yet which had guided forward, as their banner and celes- 
 tial pillar of fire, innumerable saints and witnesses, the fathers 
 of our modern world ; and for him also had still a sacred sig- 
 nificance. It does not appear that at any time Johnson was 
 what we call irreligious : but in his sorrows and isolation, when 
 hope died away, and only a long vista of suffering and toil lay 
 before him to the end, then first did religion shine forth in its 
 meek, everlasting clearness ; even as the stars do in black 
 night, which in the daytime and dusk were hidden by inferior 
 lights. How a true man, in the midst of errors and uncertain- 
 ties, shall work out for himself a sure life-truth ; and adjust- 
 ing the transient to the eternal, amid the fragments of ruined 
 temples build up, with toil and pain, a little altar for himself, 
 and worship there ; how Samuel Johnson, in the era of Vol- 
 taire, can purify and fortify his soul, and hold real communion 
 with the Highest, " in the Church of St. Clement Danes :" 
 this too stands all unfolded in his biography, and is among the 
 most touching and memorable things there ; a thing to be 
 looked at with pity, admiration, awe. Johnson's religion was 
 as the light of life to him ; without it his heart was all sick, 
 dark, and had no guidance left. 
 
 He is now enlisted, or impressed, into that unspeakablfe 
 shoeblack-seraph army of authors ; but can feel hereby that 
 he fights under a celestial flag, and will quit him like a man. 
 The first grand requisite, an assured heart, he therefore has : 
 what his outward equipments and accoutrements are, is the 
 next question ; an important, though inferior one. His intel- 
 lectual stock, intrinsically viewed, is perhaps inconsiderable : 
 the furnishings of an English school and English university ; 
 good knowledge of the Latin tongue, a more uncertain one of 
 Greek : this is a rather slender stock of education wherewith 
 to front the world. But then it is to be remembered that his 
 world was England ; that such was the culture England com- 
 monly supplied and expected. Besides, Johnson has been a 
 voracious reader, though a desultory one, and oftenest in 
 strange scholastic, too obsolete libraries ; he has also rubbed 
 shoulders with the press of actual life for some thirty years 
 now : views or hallucinations of innumerable things are welter- 
 ing to and fro in him. Above all, be his weapons what they 
 may, he has an arm that can wield them. Nature has given 
 him her choicest gift — an open eye and heart. He will look 
 on the world, wheresoever he can catch a glimpse of it, with 
 
412 CARL VLB ON' 
 
 eager curiosity : to the last, we find this a striking character- 
 istic of him ; for all human interests he has a sense ; the 
 meanest handicraftsman could interest him, even in extreme 
 age, by speaking of his craft : the ways of men are all interest- 
 ing to him ; any human thing that he did not know he wished 
 to know. Reflection, moreover, meditation, was what he 
 practised incessantly, with or without his will : for the mind of 
 the man was earnest, deep as well as humane. Thus would 
 the world, such fragments of it as he could survey, form itself, 
 or continually tend to form itself, into a coherent whole ; on 
 any and on all phases of which his vote and voice must be 
 well worth listening to. As a speaker of the word, he will 
 speak real words ; no idle jargon or hollow triviality will issue 
 from him. His aim, too, is clear, attainable ; that of working 
 for his wages ; let him do this honestly, and all else will follow 
 of its own accord. 
 
 With such omens, into such a warfare, did Johnson go 
 forth. A rugged hungry kerne or gallowglass, as we called 
 him : yet indomitable ; in whom lay the true spirit of a sol- 
 dier. With giant's force he toils, since such is his appoint- 
 ment, were it but at hewing of wood and drawing of water for 
 old sedentary bushy-wigged Cave ; distinguishes himself by 
 mere quantity, if there is to be no other distinction. He can 
 write all things ; frosty Latin verses, if these are the salable 
 commodity ; book-prefaces, political philippics, review arti- 
 cles, parliamentary debates : all things he does rapidly ; still 
 more surprising, all things he does thoroughly and well. How 
 he sits there, in his rough-hewn, amorphous bulk, in that 
 upper-room at St. John's Gate, and trundles off sheet after 
 sheet of those Senate-of-Lilliput Debates, to the clamorous 
 printer's devils waiting for them with insatiable throat, down- 
 stairs ; himself perhaps impransus all the while ! Admire also 
 the greatness of literature ; how a grain of mustard-seed cast 
 into its Nile-waters, shall settle in the teeming mould, and be 
 found, one day, as a tree, in whose branches all the fowls of 
 heaven may lodge. Was it not so with these Lilliput Debates ? 
 In that small project and act began the stupendous Fourth 
 Estate ; whose wide world-embracing influences what eye can 
 take in ; in whose boughs are there not already fowls of strange 
 feather lodged ? Such things, and far stranger, were done in 
 that wondrous old portal, even in latter times. And then 
 figure Samuel dining "behind the screen," from a trencher 
 covertly handed in to him, at a preconcerted nod from the 
 "great bushy wig;" Samuel too ragged to show face, yet 
 ' ' made a happy man of " by hearing his praise spoken. I£ 
 
SOS WELL'S LIFE OF yOHNSON. 41 3 
 
 to Johnson himself, then much more to us, may that St. John's 
 Gate be a place we can " never pass without veneration." ' 
 
 Poverty, distress, and as yet obscurity, are his compan- 
 ions ; so poor is he that his wife must leave him, and seek 
 shelter aniong other relations ; Johnson's household has ac- 
 commodation for one inmate only. To all his ever-varying, 
 ever-recurring troubles, moreover, must be added this contin- 
 ual one of ill-health, and its concomitant depressiveness : a 
 galling load, which would have crushed most common mortals 
 into desperation, is his appointed ballast and life-burden ; he 
 ' ' could not remember the day he had passed free from pain. ' ' 
 Nevertheless, life, as we said before, is always life : a healthy 
 soul, imprison it as you will, in squalid garrets, shabby coat, 
 
 ' All Johnson's places of resort and abode are venerable, and now in- 
 deed to the many as well as to the few ; for his name has become great ; 
 and, as we must often with a kind of sad admiration recognize, there is, 
 even to the rudest man, no greatness so venerable as intellectual, as 
 spiritual greatness ; nay, properly there is no other venerable at all. For 
 example, what soul-subduing magic, for the very clown or craftsman of 
 our England, lies in the word " scholar'' ! " He is a scholar :" he is a 
 man wiser than we ; of a wisdom to us boundless, infinite : who shall 
 speak his worth ! Such things, we say, fill us with a certain pathetic ad- 
 miration of defaced and obstructed yet glorious man ; archangel though 
 in ruins, or, rather, though in rubbish of encumbrances and mud-incrus- 
 tations, which also are not to be perpetual. 
 
 Nevertheless, in this mad-whirling, all-forgetting London, the haunts 
 of the mighty that were can seldom without a strange difficulty be discov- 
 ered. Will any man, for instance, tell us which bricks it was in Lincoln's 
 Inn Buildings that Ben Jonson's hand and trowel laid ? No man, it is 
 to be feared — and also grumbled at. With Samuel Johnson may it prove 
 otherwise ! A gentleman of the British Museum is said to have made 
 drawings of all his residences : the blessing of Old Mortality be upon him ! 
 We ourselves, not without labor and risk, lately discovered Gough 
 Square, between Fleet Street and Holborn (adjoining both to Bolt 
 Court and to Johnson's Court) ; and on the second day of search, the 
 very house there, wherein the English Dictionary was composed. It is 
 the first or corner house on the right hand, as you enter through the 
 arched way from the North-west. The actual occupant, an elderly, well- 
 washed, decent-looking man, invited us to enter ; and courteously under- 
 took to be cicerone ; though in his memory lay nothing but the foolishest 
 jumble and hallucination. It is a stout, old-fashioned, oak-balustraded 
 house : " I have spent many a pound and penny on it since then, ' ' said 
 the worthy landlord : " here, you see, this bedroom was the Doctor's 
 Study ; that was the garden" (a plot of delved ground somewhat larger 
 than a bed-quilt), " where he walked for exercise ; these three garret bed- 
 rooms" (where his three copyists sat and wrote) " were the place he 
 kept \as—fupils in" ! Tempus edax rerum I Yet ferax also : for our 
 friend now added, with a wistful look, which strove to seem merely histori- 
 cal : "I let it all in lodgings, to respectable gentlemen ; by the quarter 
 or the month ; it's all one to me."—" To me also," whisper?(l. the ghosl. 
 of Samuel, as we went pensively our ways. 
 
414 CARLYLE ON 
 
 bodily sickness, or whatever else, will assert its heaven-granted 
 indefeasible freedom, its right to conquer difficulties, to do 
 work, even to feel gladness. Johnson does not whine over his 
 existence, but manfully makes the most and best of it. " He 
 said, a man might live in a garret at eighteenpence a week : 
 few people would inquire where he lodged ; and if they did, it 
 was easy to say, ' Sir, I am to be found at such a place. ' By 
 spending threepence in a coffee-house, he might be for some 
 hours every day in very good company ; he might dine for six- 
 pence, breakfast on bread-and-milk for a penny, and do with- 
 out supper. On dean-shirt day he went abroad and paid 
 visits." Think by whom and of whom this was uttered, and 
 ask then. Whether there is more pathos in it than in a whole cir- 
 culating-library of Giaours and Harolds, or less pathos ? 
 On another occasion, " when Dr. Johnson, one day, read his 
 own Satire, in which the life of a scholar is painted, with the 
 various obstructions thrown in his way to fortune and to fame, 
 he burst into a passion of tears : Mr. Thrale's family and Mr. 
 Scott only were present, who, in a jocose way, clapped him on 
 the back, and said, ' What's all this, my dear sir ? Why, you 
 and I and Hercules, you know, were all troubled with melan- 
 choly. ' He was a very large man, and made-out the triumvi- 
 rate with Johnson and Hercules comically enough." These 
 were sweet tears ; the sweet victorious remembrance lay in them 
 of toils indeed frightful, yet never flinched from, and now tri- 
 umphed over. " One day it shall delight you also to remember 
 labor done !" Neither, though Johnson is obscure and poor, 
 need the highest enjoyment of existence, that of heart freely 
 communing with heart, be denied him. Savage and he wan- 
 der homeless through the streets ; without bed, yet not without 
 friendly converse ; such another conversation not, it is like, 
 producible in the proudest drawing-room of London. Nor, 
 under the void night, upon the hard pavement, are their own 
 woes the only topic : nowise ; they ' ' will stand by their coun- 
 try," they there, the two " Backwoodsmen" of the Brick 
 Desert ! 
 
 Of all outward evils obscurity is perhaps in itself the least. 
 To Johnson, as to a healthy-minded man, the fantastic article, 
 sold or given under the title of Fame, had little or no value 
 but its intrinsic one. He prized it as the means of getting 
 him employment and good wages ; scarcely as any thing more. 
 His light and guidance came from a loftier source ; of which, 
 in honest aversion to all hypocrisy or pretentious talk, he 
 spoke not to men ; nay perhaps, being of a healthy mind, had 
 never spoken to himself. We reckon it a striking fact in John: 
 
BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 41 5 
 
 son's history, this carelessness of his to fame. Most authors 
 speak of their ' ' fame " as if it were a quite priceless matter ; 
 the grand ultimatum, and heavenly Constantine's-banner they 
 had to follow, and conquer under. Thy " fame " ! Unhappy 
 mortal, where will it and thou both be in some fifty years ? 
 Shakespeare himself has lasted but two hundred ; Homer 
 (partly by accident) three thousand : and does not already an 
 Eternity encircle every Me and every Thee ? Cease, then, to 
 sit feverishly hatching on that " fame" of thine ; and flapping 
 and shrieking with fierce hisses, like brood-goose on her last 
 egg, if man shall or dare approach it ! Quarrel not with me, hate 
 me not, my brother : make what thou canst of thy egg, and 
 welcome : God knows, I will not steal it ; I believe it to be 
 addle. Johnson, for his part, was no man to be killed by a re- 
 view ; concerning which matter, it was said by a benevolent 
 person : If any author can be reviewed to death, let it be, with, 
 all convenient despatch, done. Johnson thankfully receives any 
 word spoken in his favor ; is nowise disobliged by a lampoon, 
 but will look at it, if pointed out to him, and show how it 
 might' have been done better : the lampoon itself is indeed noth- 
 ing, a soap-bubble that next moment will become a drop of 
 sour suds ; but in the meanwhile, if it do any thing, it keeps 
 him more in the world's eye, and the next bargain will be all 
 the richer : ' ' Sir, if they should cease to talk of me, I must 
 starve. ' ' Sound heart and understanding head : these fail no 
 man, not even a man of letters ! 
 
 Obscurity, however, was, in Johnson's case, whether a light 
 or heavy evil, likely to be no lasting one. He is animated by 
 the spirit of a true workman, resolute to do his work well ; and 
 he does his work well ; all his work, that of writing, that of liv- 
 ing. A man of this stamp is unhappily not so common in the 
 literary or in any other department of the world, that he can 
 continue always unnoticed. By slow degrees, Johnson emerges ; 
 looming, at first, huge and dim in the eye of an obser- 
 vant few ; at last disclosed, in his real proportions, to the eye 
 of the whole world, and encircled with a " light-nimbus" of 
 glory, so that whoso is not blind must and shall behold him. 
 By slow degrees, we said ; for this also is notable ; slow but 
 sure : as his fame waxes not by exaggerated clamor of what 
 he seems to be, but by better and better insight of what he is, 
 so it will last and stand wearing, being genuine. Thus mdeed 
 is it always, or nearly always, with true fame. The heavenly 
 'luminary rises amid vapors ; star-gazers enough must scan it 
 with critical telescopes ; it makes no blazing, the world can 
 either look at it, or forbear looking at it ; not till after a Wxas. 
 
4l6 CARLYLE ON 
 
 and times does its celestial eternal nature become indubi- 
 table. Pleasant, on the other hand, is the blazing of a tar-bar- 
 rel ; the crowd dance merrily round it, with loud huzzaing, 
 , universal three-times-three, and, like Homer's peasants, " bless 
 the useful light :" but unhappily it so soon ends in darkness, 
 foul choking smoke ; and is kicked into the gutters, a nameless 
 imbroglio of charred staves, pitch-cinders, and vomissement du 
 diable ! 
 
 But indeed, from of old, Johnson has enjoyed all, or nearly 
 all, that fame can yield any man : the respect, the obedience 
 of those that are about him and inferior to him ; of those 
 whose opinion alone can have any forcible impression on him. 
 A little circle gathers round the wise man ; which gradually 
 enlarges as the report thereof spreads, and more can come to 
 see and to believe ; for wisdom is precious, and of irresistible 
 attraction to all. "An inspired-idiot," Goldsmith, hangs 
 strangely about him ; though, as Hawkins says, ' ' he loved not 
 Johnson, but rather envied him for his parts ; and once en- 
 treated a friend to desist from praising him, ' for in doing so,' 
 said he, ' you harrow up my very soul ! ' " Yet, on the whole, 
 there is no evil in the " gooseberry-fool ;" but rather much 
 good ; of a finer, if of a weaker, sort than Johnson's ; and all 
 the more genuine that he himself could never become conscious 
 of it, though unhappily never cease attempting to become so : 
 the author of the genuine ' ' Vicar of Wakefield, ' ' nill he, will he, 
 must needs fly towards such a mass of genuine manhood ; aiid 
 Dr. Minor keep gyrating round Dr. Major, alternately at- 
 tracted and repelled. Then there is the chivalrous Topham 
 Beauclerk, with his sharp wit, and gallant courtly ways : there 
 is Bennet Langton, an orthodox gentleman, and worthy ; 
 though Johnson once laughed, louder almost than mortal, at 
 his last will and testament ; and ' ' could not stop his merriment, 
 but continued it all the way till he got without the Temple- 
 gate ; then burst into such a fit of laughter that he appeared to 
 be almost in a convulsion ; and, in order to support himself, 
 laid hold of one of the posts at the side of the foot-pavement, 
 and sent forth peals so loud that, in the silence of the night, 
 his voice seemed to resound from Temple-bar to Fleet-ditch !" 
 Lastly comes his solid-thinking, solid-feeding Thrale, the well- 
 beloved man ; with Thralia, a bright papilionaceous creature, 
 whom the elephant loved to play with, and wave to and fro 
 upon his trunk. Not to speak of a reverent Bozzy, for what 
 need is there farther ? Or of the spiritual luminaries, with 
 tongue or pen, who made that age remarkable ; or of Highland 
 lairds' drinking, in fierce usquebaugh, "Your health, Toctor 
 
BOS WELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON: 417 
 
 Shonson !" Still less of many such as that poor " Mr. F. 
 Lewis," older in date, of whose birth, death, and whole terres- 
 trial res gesfce, this only, and strange enough this actually, sur- 
 vives : " Sir, he lived in London, and hung loose upon soci- 
 ety !" Stat Parvi nominis umbra. 
 
 In his fifty-third year he is beneficed, by the royal bounty, 
 with a pension of three-hundred pounds. Loud clamor is 
 always more or less insane : but probably the insanest of all 
 loud clamors in the eighteenth century was this that was 
 raised about Johnson's pension. Men seem to be led by the 
 noses : but, in reality, it is by the ears, as some ancient slaves 
 were, who had their ears bored ; or as some modern quadru- 
 peds may be, whose ears are long. Very falsely was it said, 
 " Names do not change things." Names do change things ; 
 nay, for most part they are the only substance which mankind 
 can discern in things. The whole sum that Johnson, during 
 the remaining twenty-two years of his life, drew from the pub- 
 He funds of England, would have supported some supreme 
 priest for about half as many weeks ; it amounts very nearly to 
 the revenue of our poorest Church-overseer for one twelve- 
 month. Of secular administrators of provinces, and horse- 
 subduers, and game-destroyers, we shall not so much as speak : 
 but who were the Primates of England, and the Primates of 
 all England, during Johnson's days ? No man has remjember- 
 ed. Again, is the Primate of all England something, or is he 
 nothing ? If something, then what but the man who, in the 
 supreme degree, teaches and spiritually edifies, and leads to- 
 wards Heaven by guiding wisely through the earth, the living 
 souls that inhabit England ? We touch here upon deep matters ; 
 which but remotely concern us, and might lead us into still 
 deeper : clear, in the mean while, it is that the true Spiritual 
 Edifier and Soul's Father of all England was, and till very 
 lately continued to be, the man named Samuel Johnson — 
 whom this scot-and-lot-paying world cackled reproachfully to see 
 remunerated like a supervisor of excise ! 
 
 If Destiny had beaten hard on poor Samuel, and did 
 never cease to visit him too roughly, yet the last section of his 
 life might be pronounced victorious, and on the whole happy. 
 He was not idle ; but now no longer goaded- on by want ; the 
 light which had shone irradiating the dark haunts of poverty 
 now illuminates the circles of wealth, of a certain culture and 
 elegant intelligence ; he who had once been admitted to speak 
 with Edmund Cave and Tobacco Browne, now admits a Rey- 
 nolds and a Burke to speak with him. Loving friends are 
 there ; listeners, even answerers ; the fruit of his long labors 
 
4l8 CARLYLE ON 
 
 lies round him in fair legible writings, of philosophy, elo- 
 quence, morality, philology ; some excellent, all worthy and 
 genuine works ; for which, too, a deep, earnest murmur of 
 thanks reaches him from all ends of his Fatherland. Nay, there 
 are works of goodness, of undying mercy, which even he has 
 possessed the power to do : " What I gave I have ; what I spent 
 I had !" Early friends had long sunk into the grave ; yet in his 
 soul they ever lived, fresh and clear, with soft pious breathings 
 towards them, not without a still hope of one day meeting them 
 again in purer union. Such was Johnson's life : the victorious 
 battle of a free, true man. Finally he died the death of the 
 free and true : a dark cloud of death, solemn and not untinged 
 with haloes of immortal Hope, ' ' took him away, ' ' and our eyes 
 could no longer behold him ; but can still behold the trace 
 and impress of his courageous honest spirit, deep-legible in the 
 ■world's business, wheresoever he walked and was. 
 
 To estimate the quantity of work that Johnson performed, 
 how much poorer the world were had it wanted him, can, as 
 in all such cases, never be accurately done ; cannot, till after 
 some longer space, be approximately done. All work is as 
 seed sown ; it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew, and 
 so, in endless palingenesia, lives and works. To Johnson's 
 writings, good and solid, and still profitable as they are, we 
 have already rated his life and conversation as superior. By 
 the one and by the other, who shall compute what effects have 
 been produced, and are still, and into deep Time, producing ? 
 
 So much, however, we can already see : It is now some three 
 quarters of a century that Johnson has been the prophet of the 
 English ; the man by whose light the English people, in pub- 
 lic and in private, more than by any other man's, have guided 
 their existence. Higher light than that immediately practical 
 one ; higher virtue than an honest Prudence, he could not 
 then communicate ; nor perhaps could they have received : 
 such light, such virtue, however, he did communicate. How 
 to thread this labyrinthic Time, the fallen and falling ruin of 
 Times ; to silence vain scruples, hold firm to the last the frag- 
 ments of old belief, and with earnest eye still discern some 
 glimpses of a true path, and go forward thereon, " in a world 
 where there is much to be done, and little to be known :" this 
 is what Samuel Johnson, by act and word, taught his nation ; 
 what his nation received and learned of him, more than of any 
 other. We can view him as the preserver and transmitter of 
 whatsoever was genuine in the spirit of Toryism ; which gen- 
 uine spirit, it is now becoming manifest, must again embody 
 
sostVELrs upn op yoMNSON. \\^ 
 
 itself in all new forms of society, be what they may, that are 
 to exist, and have continuance — elsewhere than on paper. 
 The last in many things, Johnson was the last genuine Tory ; 
 the last of Englishmen who, with strong voice and wholly-be- 
 lieving heart, preached the doctrine of standing-still ; who, 
 •without selfishness or slavishness, reverenced the existing 
 powers, and could assert the privileges of rank, though himself 
 poor, neglected, and plebeian ; who had heart-devoutness with 
 heart-hatred of cant, was orthodox-religious with his eyes 
 open ; and in all things and everywhere spoke out in plain Eng- 
 lish, from a soul wherein Jesuitism could find no harbor, and 
 with the front and tone not of a diplomatist but of a man. 
 
 The last of the Tories was Johnson : not Burke, as is often 
 said ; Burke was essentially a Whig, and only, on reaching the 
 verge of the chasm towards which Whiggism from the first was 
 inevitably leading, recoiled ; and, like a man vehement rather 
 than earnest, a resplendent far-sighted rhetorician rather than 
 a deep, sure thinker, recoiled with no measure, convulsively, 
 and damaging what he drove back with him. 
 
 In a world which exists by the balance of antagonisms the 
 respective merit of the conservator and the innovator must 
 ever remain debatable. Great, in the meanwhile, and un- 
 doubted for both sides, is the merit of him who, in a day of 
 change, walks wisely, honestly. Johnson's aim was in itself 
 an impossible one : this of stemming the eternal flood of 
 Time ; of clutching all things and anchoring them down, and 
 saying, Move not ! — how could it or should it ever have suc- 
 cess ? The strongest man can but retard the current par- 
 tially and for a short hour. Yet even in such shortest retar- 
 dation may not an inestimable value lie ? If England has 
 escaped the blood-bath of a French Revolution ; and may yet, 
 in virtue of this delay and of the experience it has given, work 
 out her deliverance calmly into a new era, let Samuel John- 
 son, beyond all contemporary or succeeding men, have the 
 praise for it. We said above that he was appointed to be 
 ruler of the British nation for a season : whoso will look 
 beyond the surface, into the heart of the world's moviements, 
 may find that all Pitt administrations, and continental subsi- 
 dies, and Waterloo victories rested on the possibility of mak- 
 ing England, yet a little while, Toryish, loyal to the old ; and 
 this again on the anterior reality, that the wise had found 
 such loyalty still practicable, and recommendable. England, 
 had its Hume, as France had its Voltaires and Diderots ; but 
 the Johnson was peculiar to us. 
 
 If we ask now, by what endowment it mainly was that 
 
4!tO CARLVLE ON 
 
 Johnson realized such a life for himself and others ; what qual- 
 ity of character the main phenomena of his life may be most 
 naturally deduced from, and his other qualities most naturally 
 subordinated to in our conception of him, perhaps the answer 
 were : The quality of Courage, of Valor ; that Johnson was a 
 brave man. The courage that can go forth, once and away, 
 to Chalk-Farm, and have itself shot, and snuffed out, with 
 decency, is nowise wholly what we mean here. Such courage 
 we indeed esteem an exceeding small matter ; capable of coex- 
 isting with a life full of falsehood, feebleness, poltroonery, and 
 despicability. Nay oftener it is cowardice rather that pro- 
 duces the result : for consider. Is the Chalk-Farm pistoleer 
 inspired with any reasonable belief and determination ; or is 
 he hounded on by haggard indefinable fear — how he will be cut 
 at public places, and ' ' plucked geese of the neighborhood ' ' will 
 wag their tongues at him a plucked goose ? If he go then, and 
 be shot without shrieking or audible uproar, it is well for him : 
 nevertheless there is nothing amazing in it. Courage to man- 
 age all this has not perhaps been denied to any man, or to any 
 woman. Thus, do not recruiting sergeants drum through the 
 streets of manufacturing towns, and collect ragged losels 
 enough ; every one of whom, if once dressed in red, and 
 trained a little, will receive fire cheerfully for the small sum of 
 one shilling per diem, and have the soul blown out of him at 
 last, with perfect propriety. The courage that dares only die 
 is on the whole no sublime affair ; necessary indeed, yet univer- 
 sal ; pitiful when it begins to parade itself. On this globe of 
 ours there are some thirty-six persons that manifest it, seldom 
 with the smallest failure, during every second of time. Nay, 
 look at Newgate : do not the offscourings of creation, when 
 condemned to the gallows, as if they were not men but vermin, 
 walk thither with decency, and even to the scowls and hootings 
 of the whole universe, give their stern good-night in silence ? 
 What is to be undergone only once, we may undergo ; what 
 must be, comes almost of its own accord. Considered as 
 duellist, what a poor figure does the fiercest Irish Whiskerando 
 make in comparison with any English game-cock, such as you 
 may buy for fifteenpence ! 
 
 The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die 
 decently, but to live manfully. This, when by God's grace it 
 has been given, lies deep in the soul ; like genial heat, fosters 
 all other virtues and gifts ; without it they could not live. In 
 spite of our innumerable Waterloos and Peterloos, and such 
 campaigning as there has been, this courage we allude to and 
 cr.ll the only true one, is perhaps rarer in these last ages than it 
 
ioswszi'S LIFE OF yottNSoN: 421 
 
 has been in any other since the Saxon Invasion under Hengist. 
 Altogether extinct it can never be among men ; otherwise the 
 species Man were no longer for this world : here and there, in 
 all times, under various guises, men are sent hither not only to 
 demonstrate but exhibit it, and testify, as from heart to heart, 
 that it is still possible, still practicable. 
 
 Johnson, in the eighteenth century, and as man of letters, 
 was one of such ; and, in good truth, ' ' the bravest of the 
 brave. ' ' What mortal could have more to war with ? Yet, as 
 we saw, he yielded not, faltered not ; he fought, and even, such 
 was his blessedness, prevailed. Whoso will understand what 
 it is to have a man's heart may find that, since the time of John 
 Milton, no braver heart had beat in any English bosom than 
 Samuel Johnson now bore. Observe, too, that he never called 
 himself brave, never felt himself to be so ; the more completely 
 was so. No Giant Despair, no Golgotha Death-dance or Sor- 
 cerer's-Sabbath of " Literary Life in London," appals this pil- 
 grim ; he works resolutely for deliverance ; in still defiance 
 steps stoutly along. The thing that is given him to do, he can 
 make himself do ; what is to be endured, he can endure in si- 
 lence. 
 
 How the great soul of old Samuel, consuming daily his 
 own bitter unalleviable allotment of misery and toil, shows be- 
 side the poor flimsy little soul of young Boswell ; one day 
 flaunting in the ring of vanity, tarrying by the wine-cup and 
 crying, Aha, the wine is red ; the next day deploring his down- 
 pressed, night-shaded, quite poor estate, and thinking it unkind 
 that the whole movement of the universe should go on, while 
 his .digestive-apparatus had stopped ! We reckon Johnson's 
 "talent of silence" to be among his great and too rare gifts. 
 Where there is nothing farther to be done, there shall nothing 
 farther be said : like his own poor blind Welshwoman, he ac- 
 complished somewhat, and also " endured fifty years of 
 wretchedness with unshaken fortitude." How grim was life to 
 him ; a sick prison-house and Doubting-castle ! " His great 
 business, ' ' he would profess, ' ' was to escape from himself. ' ' Yet 
 towards all this he has taken his position and resolution ; can 
 dismiss it all " with frigid indifference, having little to hope or 
 to fear. ' ' Friends are stupid, and pusillanimous, and parsimo- 
 nious ; " wearied of his stay, yet off ended at his departure ; " it 
 is the manner of the world. " By popular delusion," remarks 
 he with a gigantic calmness, ' ' illiterate writers will rise into re- 
 ^lown :" it is portion of the history of English literature ; a 
 perennial thing, this same popular delusion ; and will — alter 
 the character of the language. 
 
422 CARLYLE Oif 
 
 Closely connected with this quality of valor, partly as 
 springing from it, partly as protected by it, are the more recog- 
 nizable qualities of truthfulness in word and thought, and 
 honesty in action. There is a reciprocity of influence here : 
 for as the realizing of truthfulness and honesty is the life-light 
 and great aim of valor, so without valor they cannot, in 
 anywise, be realized. Now, in spite of all practical shortcom- 
 ings, no one that sees into the significance of Johnson will say 
 that his prime object was not truth. In conversation, doubt- 
 less, you may observe him, on occasion, fighting as if for vic- 
 tory ; and must pardon these ebulliences of a careless hour, 
 which were not without temptation and provocation. Remark 
 likewise two things : that such prize-arguings were ever on 
 merely superficial debatable questions ; and then that they were 
 argued generally by the fair laws of battle and logic-fence, by 
 one cunning in that same. If their purpose was excusable, 
 their effect was harmless, perhaps beneficial : that of taming 
 noisy mediocrity, and showing it another side of a debatable 
 matter ; to see both sides of which was, for the first time, to see 
 the truth of it. In his writings themselves are errors enough, 
 crabbed prepossessions enough ; yet these also of a quite ex- 
 traneous and accidental nature, nowhere a wilful shutting of 
 the eyes to the truth. Nay, is there not everywhere a heart- 
 felt discernment, singular, almost admirable, if we consider 
 through what confused conflicting lights and hallucinations it 
 had to be attained, of the highest everlasting truth, and begin- 
 ning of all truths : this namely, that man is ever, and even in 
 the age of Wilkes and Whitefield, a revelation of God to man ; 
 and lives, moves, and has his being in truth only ; is either 
 true, or, in strict speech, is not at all ? 
 
 Quite spotless, on the other hand, is Johnson's love of 
 truth, if we look at it as expressed in practice, as what we have 
 named honesty of action. " Clear your mind of cant ;" clear 
 it, throw cant utterly away : such was his emphatic, repeated 
 precept ; and did not he himself faithfully conform to it ? The 
 life of this man has been, as it were, turned inside out, and 
 examined with microscopes by friend and foe ; yet was there 
 no lie found in him. His doings and writings are not shows 
 but performances : you may weigh them in the balance, and 
 they will stand weight. Not a line, not a sentence is dishonestly 
 done, is other than it pretends to be. Alas ! and he wrote not 
 out of inward inspiration, but to earn his wages : and with that 
 grand perennial tide of ' ' popular delusion' ' flowing by ; in whose 
 waters he nevertheless refused to fish, to whose rich oyster-beds 
 the dive was too muddy for him. Observe, again, with what 
 
BOSWEtns LIFE OP yOHNSON. 423 
 
 innate hatred of cant, he takes for himself, and offers to others, 
 the lowest possible view of his business, which he followed with 
 such nobleness. Motive for writing he had none, as he often 
 said, but money ; and yet he wrote so. Into the region of 
 Poetic Art he indeed never rose ; there was no ideal without 
 him avowing itself in his work : the nobler was that unavowed 
 ideal which lay within him, and commanded saying, Work out 
 thy artisanship in the spirit of an artist ! They who talk 
 loudest about the dignity of art, and fancy that they too are 
 artistic guild-brethren, and of the celestials, let them con- 
 sider well what manner of man this was. who felt himself tO' be 
 only a hired day-laborer. A laborer that was worthy of his 
 hire ; that has labored not as an eye-servant, but as one found 
 faithful ! Neither was Johnson in those days perhaps wholly a 
 unique. Time was when, for money, you might have ware : 
 and needed not, in all departments, in that of the epic poem, in 
 that of the blacking-bottle, to rest content with the mere persua- 
 sion that you had ware. It was a happier time. But as yet the 
 seventh Apocalyptic Bladder (of Puffery) had not been rent 
 open, to whirl and grind, as in a West-Indian tornado, all 
 earthly trades and things into wreck, and dust, and consumma- 
 tion — and regeneration. Be it quickly, since it must be ! 
 
 That mercy can dwell only with valor, is an old sentiment 
 or proposition ; which in Johnson again receives confirmation. 
 Few men on record have had a more merciful, tenderly affec- 
 tionate nature than old Samuel. He was called the Bear ; and 
 did indeed too often look, and roar, like one ; being forced to 
 it in his own defence : yet within that shaggy exterior of his 
 there beat a heart warm as a mother's, soft as a little child's. 
 Nay generally, his very roaring was but the anger of affection : 
 the rage of a bear, if you will ; but of a bear bereaved of her 
 whelps. Touch his religion, glance at the Church of Eng- 
 land, or the divine right ; and he was upon you ! These 
 things were his symbols of all that was good and precious for 
 men ; his very Ark of the Covenant : whoso laid hand on them 
 tore asunder his heart of hearts. Not out of hatred to the op- 
 ponent, but of love to the thing opposed, did Johnson grow 
 cruel, fiercely contradictory : this is an important distinction ; 
 never to be forgotten in our censure of his conversational out- 
 rages. But observe also with what humanity, what openness of 
 love, he can attach himself to all things : to a blind old woman, 
 to a Doctor Levett, to a cat " Hodge." " His thoughts in the 
 latter part of his life were frequently employed on his deceased 
 friends ; he often muttered these or suchlike sentences : 
 ' Poor man ! and then he died.' " How he patiently converts 
 
424 CARLVLE ON- 
 
 his poor home into a Lazaretto ; endures, for long years, the 
 contradiction of the miserable and unreasonable ; with him un- 
 connected, save that they had no other to yield them r«fuge ! 
 Generous old man ! Worldly possession he has little ; yet of 
 this he gives freely ; from his own hard-earned shilling, the 
 halfpence for the poor, that " waited his coming out," are not 
 withheld : the poor ' ' waited the coming out ' ' ef one not quite 
 so poor ! A Sterne can write sentimentalities on dead asses : 
 Johnson has a rough voice ; but he finds the wretched daugh- 
 ter of vice fallen down in the streets, carries her home on his 
 own shoulders, and like a good Samaritan gives help to the help- 
 needing, worthy or unworthy. Ought not Charity, even in 
 that sense, to cover a multitude of sins ? No Penny-a-week 
 Committee-lady, no manager of soup-kitchens, dancer at 
 charity-balls, was this rugged, stern-visaged man ; but where, 
 in all England, could there have been found another soul so 
 full of pity, a hand so heavenlike bounteous as his ? The 
 widow's mite, we know, was greater than all the other gifts. 
 
 Perhaps it is this divine feeling of affection, throughout 
 manifested, that principally attracts us towards Johnson. A true 
 brother of men is he ; and filial lover of the earth ; who, with 
 little bright spots of attachment, ' ' where lives and works some 
 loved one," has beautified " this rough solitary earth into a peo- 
 pled garden." Lichfield, with its mostly dull and limited in- 
 habitants, is to the last one of the sunny islets for him : Salve 
 magna parens ! Or read those letters on his mother's death : 
 what a genuine solemn grief and pity lies recorded there ; a 
 looking back into the Past, unspeakably mournful, unspeakably 
 tender. And yet calm, sublime ; for he must now act, not 
 look : his venerated mother has been taken from him ; but he 
 must now write a " Rasselas" to defray her funeral ! Again in 
 this little incident, recorded in his Book of Devotion, are not 
 the tones of sacred sorrow and greatness deeper than in many a 
 blank-verse tragedy ; as, indeed, ' ' the fifth act of a tragedy, ' ' 
 though unrhymed, does ' ' lie in every death-bed, were it a pea- 
 sant's, and of straw :" 
 
 " Sunday, October 18, 1767. Yesterday, at about ten in the morning, 
 I took my leave forever of my dear old friend, Catherine Chambers, who 
 came to live with my mother about 1724, and has been but little parted 
 from us since. She buried my father, my brother, and my mother. She 
 is now fifty-eight years old. 
 
 " I desired all to withdraw ; then told her that we were to part forever ; 
 that as Christians, we should part with prayer ; and that I would, it she 
 was willing, say a short prayer beside her. She expressed great desire to 
 hear me ; and held up her poor hands as she lay in bed, with great fer- 
 vor, while I prayed kneeling by her 
 
soswMzL's LIFE OF yoffi</soN: ^25 
 
 " I then kissed her. She told me that to part was the greatest pain she 
 had ever felt, and that she hoped we should meet again in a better place. 
 I expressed, with swelled eyes and great emotion of tenderness, the same 
 hopes. We kissed and parted ; I humbly hope, to meet again, and to 
 part no more. ' ' 
 
 Tears trickling down the granite rock : a soft well of pity- 
 springs within ! Still more tragical is this other scene : " John- 
 son mentioned that he could not in general accuse himself of 
 having been an undutiful son. ' Once, indeed, ' said he, ' I 
 was disobedient : I refused to attend my father to Uttoxeter 
 market. Pride was the source of that refusal, and the remem- 
 brance of it was painful. A few years ago I desired to atone 
 for this fault. ' ' ' But by what method ? What method was 
 now possible ? Hear it ; the words are again given as his own, 
 though here evidently by a less capable reporter : 
 
 " Madam, I beg your pardon for the abruptness of my departure in the 
 morning, but I was compelled to it by conscience. Fifty years ago, mad- 
 am, on this day, I committed a breach of filial piety. My father had been 
 in the habit of attending Uttoxeter market, and opening a stall there for 
 the sale of his books. Confined by indisposition, he desired me, that day, 
 to go and attend the stall in his place. My pride prevented me ; I gave 
 my father a refusal. And now to-day I have been at Uttoxeter ; I went 
 into the market at the time of business, uncovered my head, and stood 
 with it bare, for an hour, on the spot where my father's stall used to 
 stand. In contrition I stood, and I hope the penance was expiatory." 
 
 Who does not figure to himself this spectacle, amid the 
 " rainy weather, and the sneers," or wonder, " of the bystand- 
 ers" ? The memory of old Michael Johnson, rising from the far 
 distance; sad-beckoning in the " moonlight of memory :" how 
 he had toiled faithfully hither and thither ; patiently among the 
 lowest of the low ; been buffeted and beaten down, yet ever 
 risen again, ever tried it anew — -And oh, when the wearied old 
 man, as bookseller, or hawker, or tinker, or whatsoever it 
 was that Fate had reduced him to, begged help of thee for one 
 day, how savage, diabolic, was that mean vanity, which an- 
 swered, No ! He sleeps now ; after life's fitful fever, he sleeps 
 well : but thou, O Merciless, how now wilt thou still the sting 
 of that remembrance ? The picture of Samuel Johnson stand- 
 ing bareheaded in the market there, is one of the grandest and 
 saddest we can paint. Repentance ! repentance ! he pro- 
 claims, as with passionate sobs : but only to the ear of Heaven, 
 if Heaven will give him audience : the earthly ear and heart, 
 that should have heard it, are now closed, unresponsive forever. 
 
 That this so keen-loving, soft-trembling affectionateness, 
 the inmost essence of his being, must have looked forth, in one 
 
426 CAkLYLE ON 
 
 form or anothef, through Johnson's whole character, practical 
 and intellectual, modifying both, is not to be doubted. Yet 
 through what singular distortions and superstitions, moping 
 melancholies, blind habits, whims about "entering with the 
 right foot," and " touching every post as he walked along:" 
 and all the other mad chaotic lumber of a brain that, with sun- 
 clear intellect, hovered forever on the verge of insanity, must 
 that same inmost essence have looked forth ; unrecognizable 
 to all but the most observant ! Accordingly it was not recog- 
 nized ; Johnson passed not for a fine nature, but for a dull, d- 
 most brutal one. Might not, for example, the first-fruit of 
 such a lovingness, coupled with his quick insight, have been 
 expected to be a peculiarly courteous demeanor as man among 
 men? In Johnson's "Politeness," which he often, to the 
 wonder of some, asserted to be great, there was indeed some- 
 what that needed explanation. Nevertheless, if he insisted al- 
 ways on handing lady-visitors to their carriage ; though with 
 the certainty of collecting a mob of gazers in Fleet Street, as 
 might well be, the beau having on, by way of court-dress, " his 
 rusty brown morning suit, a pair of old shoes for slippers, a 
 little shrivelled wig sticking on the top of his head, and the 
 sleeves of his shirt and the knees of his breeches hanging 
 loose :" in all this we can see the spirit of true politeness, 
 only shining through a strange medium. Thus again, in his 
 apartments, at one time, there were unfortunately no chairs. 
 " A gentleman who frequently visited him whilst writing his 
 ' Idlers, ' constantly found him at his desk, sitting on one with 
 three legs ; and on rising from it, he remarked that Johnson 
 never forgot its defect ; but would either hold it in his hand, or 
 place it with great composure against some support ; taking no 
 notice of its imperfection to his visitor, ' ' who meanwhile, we 
 suppose, sat upon folios, or in the sartorial fashion. " It was 
 remarkable in Johnson, ' ' continues Miss Reynolds {Renny dear), 
 ' ' that no external circumstances ever prompted him to make any 
 apology, or to seem even sensible of their existence. Whether 
 this was the effect of philosophic pride, or of some partial 
 notion of his respecting high-breeding, is doubtful;" That it 
 ■was, for one thing, the effect of genuine politeness, is nowise 
 doubtful. Not of the Pharisaical Brummellean politeness, 
 which would suffer crucifixion rather than ask twice for soup : 
 but the noble universal politeness of a man that knows the 
 dignity of men, and feels his own ; such as may be seen in the 
 patriarchal bearing of an Indian sachem ; such as Johnson 
 himself exhibited, when a sudden chance brought him into dia- 
 logue with his king. To us, with our view of the man, it no- 
 wise appears ' ' strange' ' that he should have boasted himself 
 
BO SWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 427 
 
 cunning in the laws of politeness ; nor " stranger still," habit- 
 ually attentive to practise them. 
 
 More legibly is this influence of the loving heart to be 
 traced in his intellectual character. What, indeed, is the be- 
 ginning of intellect, the first inducement to the exercise there- 
 of, but attraction towards somewhat, affection for it ? Thus, 
 too, who ever saw, or will see, any true talent, not to speak of 
 genius, the foundation of which is not goodness, love ? From 
 Johnson's strength of affection we deduce many of his intel- 
 lectual peculiarities ; especially that threatening array of per- 
 versions, known under the name of "Johnson's Prejudices." 
 Looking well into the root from which these sprang, we have 
 long ceased to view them with hostility, can pardon and rever- 
 ently pity them. Consider with what force early-imbibed 
 opinions must have clung to a soul of this affection. Those 
 evil-famed prejudices of his, that Jacobitism, Church-of-Eng- 
 landism, hatred of the Scotch, belief in witches, and suchlike, 
 tvhat were they but the ordinary beliefs of well-doing, well- 
 meaning provincial Englishmen in that day ? First gathered 
 by his father's hearth ; round the kind " country fires," of na- 
 tive Staffordshire ; they grew with his growth and strengthened 
 with his strength : they were hallowed by fondest sacred recol- 
 lections ; to part with them was parting with his heart's blood. 
 If the man who has no strength of affection, strength of be- 
 lief, have no strength of prejudice, let him thank Heaven for 
 it, but to himself take small thanks. 
 
 Melancholy it was, indeed, that the noble Johnson could 
 not work himself loose from these adhesions ; that he could 
 only purify them, and wear them with some nobleness. Yet let 
 us understand how they grew out from the very centre of his 
 being : nay, moreover, how they came to cohere in him with 
 what formed the business and worth of his life, the sum of 
 his whole spiritual endeavor. For it is on the same ground 
 that he became throughout an edifier and repairer, not, as 
 the others of his make were, a puller-down ; that in an agS of 
 universal scepticism, England was still to produce its believer. 
 Mark, too, his candor even here ; while a Dr. Adams, with 
 placid surprise, asks, " Have we not evidence enough of the 
 soul's immortality ?" Johnson answers, " I wish for more." 
 
 But the truth is, in prejudice, as in all things, Johnson was 
 the product of England ; one of those good yeomen whose 
 limbs were made in England : alas, the last of such Invincibles, 
 their day being now done ! His culture is wholly English ; 
 that not of a thinker but of a "scholar:" his interests are 
 wholly English ; he sees and knows nothing but England ; he 
 is the John Bull of spiritual Europe : let him live, love him, 
 
428 CARLYLE ON 
 
 as he was and could not but be ! Pitiable it is, no doubt, that 
 a Samuel Johnson must confute Hume's irreligious philosophy 
 by some " story from a Clergyman of the Bishoprick of Dur- 
 ham ;" should see nothing in the great Frederick but " Vol- 
 taire's lackey ;" in Voltaire himself but a man acerrimi in- 
 genii, paucarum literarum ; in Rousseau but one worthy to be 
 hanged ; and in the universal, long-prepared, inevitable ten- 
 dency of European thought but a green-sick milkmaid's crotch- 
 et of, for variety's sake, "milking the bull". Our good, 
 dear John ! Observe, too, what it is that he sees in the city of 
 Paris : no feeblest glimpse of those D'Alemberts and Diderots, 
 or of the strange questionable work they did ; solely some Bene- 
 dictine priests, to talk kitchen-latin with them about Editiones 
 Principes. ' ' Monsheer Nongtongpaw /' ' Our dear, foolish 
 John : yet is there a lion's heart within him ! Pitiable all these 
 things were, we say ; yet nowise inexcusable ; nay, as basis or 
 as foil to much else that was in Johnson, almost venerable. 
 Ought we not, indeed, to honor England, and English institu- 
 tions and way of life, that they could still equip such a man ; 
 could furnish him in heart and head to be a Samuel Johnson, 
 and yet to love them, and unyieldingly fight for them ? What 
 truth and living vigor must such institutions once have had, 
 when, in the middle of the eighteenth century, there was still 
 enough left in them for this ! 
 
 It is worthy of note that, in our little British isle, the two 
 grand antagonisms of Europe should have stood embodied, 
 under their very highest concentration, in two men produced 
 simultaneously among ourselves. Samuel Johnson and David 
 Hume, as was observed, were children nearly of the same year : 
 through life they were spectators of the same life-movement ; 
 often inhabitants of the same city. Greater contrast, in all 
 things, between two great men, could not be. Hume, well- 
 born, competently provided for, whole in body and mind, of 
 his own determination forces a way into literature : Johnson, 
 poor, moonstruck, diseased, forlorn, is forced into it ' ' with 
 the bayonet of necessity at his back. ' ' And what a part did 
 they severally play there ! As Johnson became the father of all 
 succeeding Tories ; so was Hume the father of all succeeding 
 Whigs, for his own Jacobitism was but an accident, as worthy to 
 be named prejudice as any of Johnson's. Again, if Johnson's 
 culture was exclusively English ; Hume's, in Scotland, became 
 European ; for which reason, too, we find his influence spread 
 deeply over all quarters of Europe, traceable deeply in all specu- 
 lation, French, German, as well as domestic ; while Johnson's 
 name, out of England, is hardly anywhere to be met with. In 
 spiritual stature they are almost equal ; both great, among the 
 
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 429 
 
 greatest ; yet how unlike in likeness! Hume has the widest, 
 methodizing, comprehensive eye ; Johnson the keenest for 
 perspicacity and minute detail : so had, perhaps chiefly, their 
 education ordered it. Neither of the two rose into poetry ; 
 yet both to some approximation thereof : Hume to something 
 of an epic clearness and method, as in his delineation of the 
 Commonwealth Wars ; Johnson to many a deep lyric tone 
 of plaintiveness and impetuous graceful power, scattered 
 over his fugitive compositions. Both, rather to the general 
 surprise, had a certain rugged humor shining through their 
 earnestness : the indication, indeed, that they were earnest 
 men, and had subdued their wild world into a kind of tem- 
 porary home and safe dwelling. Both were, by principle 
 and habit. Stoics : yet Johnson with the greater merit, for he 
 alone had very much to triumph over ; farther, he alone 
 ennobled his Stoicism into devotion. To Johnson life was 
 as a prison, to be endured with heroic faith ; to Hume it was 
 little more than a foolish Bartholomew-Fair show-booth, with 
 the foolish crowdings and elbowings of which it was not worth 
 while to quarrel ; the whole would break up, and be at liberty, 
 so soon. Both realized the highest task of manhood, that of 
 living like men ; each died not unfitly, in his way : Hume • as 
 one, with factitious, half-false gayety, taking leave of what was 
 itself wholly but a lie : Johnson as one, with awe-struck, yet 
 resolute and piously expectant heart, taking leave of a reality, 
 to enter a reality stili higher. Johnson had the harder prob- 
 lem of it, from first to last : whether, with some hesitation, we 
 can admit that he was intrinsically the better-gifted, may re- 
 main undecided. 
 
 These two men now rest ; the one in Westminster Abbey 
 here ; the other in the Calton-Hill Churchyard of Edinburgh. 
 Through life they did not meet : as contrasts, " like in unlike," 
 love each other ; so might they two have loved, and communed 
 kindly, had not the terrestrial dross and darkness that was in 
 them withstood ! One day, their spirits, what truth was in each, 
 wifl be found working, living in harmony and free union, even 
 here below. They were the two half-men of their time : whoso 
 should combine the intrepid candor and decisive scientific 
 clearness of Hume, with the reverence, the love, and devout 
 humility of Johnson, were the whole man of a new time. Till 
 such whole man arrive for us, and the distracted time admit of 
 such, might the Heavens but bless poor England with half-men 
 worthy to tie the shoe-latchets of these, resembling these even 
 from afar ! Be both attentively regarded, let the true effort of 
 both prosper ; and for the present, both take our affectionate 
 farewell ! 
 
NOTES. 
 
 JOHNSON. 
 
 Page xviJ. Politian. — Politian (1454-1494), the friend of Lorenzo de' 
 Medici and tutor to his children, was one of the leaders of the Italian 
 Renascence. His Latin poems were famous, and have been repeatedly 
 printed. 1 
 
 Page xxxii. Ben. — The dramatist and poet, Ben Jonson (1574-1637). 
 
 Page xli. MaUme. — Edmund Malone {1741-1812), a celebrated critic, 
 and among the best of the commentators on Shakespeare. 
 
 Pagexliii. Windham. — William Windham (i 750-1810), Secretary for 
 War in Lord Grenville's ministry of " The Talents." 
 
 lb. Frances Burney. — The authoress of Evelina and Cecilia. She was 
 bom in 1752, married in 1793 M. d'Arblay, a French emigrant, and died 
 in 1840. 
 
 MILTON. 
 
 Page 3. Mr. Fentoiis elegant Abridgement. — Elijah Fenton (1683-1730), 
 who assisted Pope in translating Homer's Odyssey, " undertook," says 
 Johnson in his Life of Fenton, " to revise the punctuation of Milton's 
 poems, which, as the author neither wrote the original copy nor corrected 
 the press, was supposed capable of amendment. To this edition he pre- 
 fixed a short and elegant account of Milton's life, written at once with 
 tenderness and integrity." 
 
 Page 4. Alabaster's Roxana. — William Alabaster, an English scholar 
 and divine, brought out the Latin tragedy of " Roxana" in 1632. It was 
 acted in the hall of Trinity College, Cambridge. Alabaster died in 1640. 
 
 Page 7. " A quo." — These lines are from the Roman poet Propertius, 
 and mean that Homer is a perpetual source of inspiration to all poets. 
 
 lb. Sir Henry Wotton. — Wotton (1568-1639), a scholar, diplomatist, 
 and poet, died Provost of Eton. His life was written by Izaak Walton. 
 
 lb. Grotius. — Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), a scholar, theologian, and 
 diplomatist; one of the most celebrated men whom Holland has produced. 
 
 Page 13. Hell grows darker. — 
 
 "So frown'd the mighty combatants, that Hell 
 Grew darker at their frown," — Paradise Lost, ii. 719. 
 
 Page 14. Two Sonnets. — The tenth and eleventh of Milton's Sonnets. 
 
 Page 16. A treatise. — This treatise, entitled The Tenure of Kings and 
 Magistrates, was first published in the month following the King's execu- 
 tion, and was afterwards enlarged. 
 
432 NOTES. 
 
 lb. Icon BasiliJie.— This famous literary forgery, TAe Picture of a 
 King, was published by Dr. Gauden, afterwards Bishop of Exeter, from a 
 manuscript said to have been entrusted to him by Charles I. himself, and 
 became very popular. Milton answered it by his Iconoclastes. 
 
 Page 17. Which he performed. — By writing his Defensio pro Populo 
 Anglicano. 
 
 Page 21. Arthur was reserved. — Fenton here refers to Blackmore's 
 heroic poem of Prince Arthur, published in 1695; — a poem once famous, 
 but now forgotten. 
 
 Page 24. Seemly arts and affairs. — See page 12. 
 
 lb. Bated no jot, etc. — These words are from Milton's twenty-second 
 Sonnet. 
 
 lb. Harrington. — James Harrington (1611-1677), a writer on govern- 
 ment and author of Oceana, was for a time groom of the bed-chamber to 
 Charles I., and attended him on the scaffold. 
 
 Page 25. Goodwin. — Thomas Goodwin (1600-1679), a leading Indepen- 
 dent minister and theologian, was made President of Magdalen College, 
 Oxford, by Cromwell, and attended him on his death-bed. 
 
 lb. Betterton — Davenant. — Thomas Betterton (1635-1710), a celebrated 
 actor when the stage regained popularity after the Restoration; Sir Wil- 
 liam Davenant (1605-1668), Ben Jonson's successor in the poet-laureate- 
 ship, author of the heroic poem of Gondebert, and also a popular writer for 
 the stage, and theatre-manager. 
 
 Page 29. Hellibore. — The ancients thought hellibore a. cure for mad- 
 ness and mental delusion. 
 
 Page 30. An age too late. — The reference is to what Milton says in his 
 Tract, The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty (1642). 
 
 lb. Climate. — The reference is to the same Tract. Milton's words are: 
 " If that there be nothing adverse in our climate, or the fate of this age." 
 In the same Tract he declares his hope that he " might perhaps leave 
 something so written to after times, as they should not willingly let die." 
 
 Page 41. Queen Caroline. — Caroline of Anspach, wife of George II. 
 
 Jb. Tonson. — A celebrated publisher of the last century, whose great- 
 uncle and predecessor in business, Jacob Tonson, " the prince of book- 
 sellers," and the first of the great English publishers, is mentioned in the 
 Life of Dryden. This Jacob died in 1736; his great-nephew in 1767. 
 
 Page 47. Bossu. — A French critic of the seventeenth century, whose 
 dissertation on the laws of epic poetry was famous in its day, and was 
 translated into English. 
 
 Page 52. The Cyanean Rocks. — These rocks, more commonly called 
 the Symplegades, were islands of rock in the Euxine Sea, fabled to close 
 upon ships passing between them. 
 
 Page 59. Butler. — The author of Hudibras. He died in 1680. 
 
 DRYDEN. 
 
 Page 77. Lee. — Nathaniel Lee (165 7-1692), a dramatic poet, of whose 
 thirteen tragedies Alexander the Great is the best known. 
 
 Page 81. Lopez de Vega. — A very famous Spanish poet (1562-1635), 
 who wrote, he tells us himself, more than 1,500 dramas, one hundred of 
 . which were composed in as many days. 
 
NOTES. 433 
 
 Page 85. Lord Shaftesbury's escape. — Anthony Ashley Cooper (1621- 
 1683), Lord Chancellor in 1672, was zealous for the exclusion of the Duke 
 of York, afterwards James II., from the succession to the throne. The 
 Court party had him tried for high treason in 1681, but he was acquitted. 
 
 Page 88. LUtle Bayes. — For the play of The Rehearsal and Bayes, see 
 ante, page 82. 
 
 Page 106. Statins. — A Latin poet of the first century after Christ. His 
 Thebais is his chief work. 
 
 lb. Gorbuduc. — The earliest known tragedy in English, by Sackville, 
 afterwards Lord Buckhurst. It was brought out in 1562. 
 
 Page no. Horace. — Ben Jonson (see note to p. xxxii) translated the 
 Ars Poetica of Horace, and one or two of the Odes. Jonson's contem- 
 porary, Owen Feltham, was the author of a book very popular in its day, 
 and which still has readers : Resolves, Divine, Political, and Moral. 
 
 lb. Sandys. — George Sandys (15 77-1643), son of Archbishop Sandys, 
 translated Ovid's Metamorphoses. 
 
 lb. Holyday. — Barten Holyday (1593-1661), Archdeacon of Oxford, 
 translated Juvenal and Persius. 
 
 Page 114. Malherbe. — Francois de Malherbe (1555-1628), a famous 
 French poet, the first man, says the great critic Boileau, who in France 
 wrote verse with correctness. 
 
 Page 116. — The poem on the Civil War of Rome. — The PAarsalia ot 
 Lucan, a Latin poet of the first century after Christ. 
 
 Page 128. The Pollio. — Virgil's Fourth Eclogue. 
 
 Page 132. Trapp. — ^Joseph Trapp (1679-1747), the first professor of 
 poetry at Oxford. 
 
 Page 138. The Alexandrine. — By this in English poetry is meant 
 merely a twelve-syllable line. By the Alexandrine metre is meant a poem 
 in couplets of such lines, rhyming together. If is the celebrated metre of 
 French tragedy, and takes its name from the Alexandreis, a popular 
 romance poem in French on Alexander the Great, published in 1184. 
 
 Page 140. Davis. — Sir John Davies (1570-1626), Attorney-general in 
 Ireland, and afterwards Chief- Justice in England, wrote a powerful philo- 
 sophical poem, entitled Nosce Teipsum. ■ 
 
 Page 142. Rymer. — Thomas Rymer (1638-1714) is best known as a 
 historical antiquary, but was also a poet and critic. 
 
 lb. Rapin. — Renfe Rapin (1621-1687), a French Jesuit, author of a 
 good Latin poem on gardens, and of worls of literary criticism famous in 
 their day, is to be distinguished from Paul de Rapin, Sieur de Theyras, 
 the Protestant and historian, who was protected by William III. 
 
 Page 145. He meant. — Rymer meant, not what Dryden says, but what 
 is true — that Sophocles improved the tragic drama by " bringing a third 
 interlocutor to the two who before alone appeared on the scene at once." 
 
 SWIFT. 
 
 Page 151. Haivkesworth. — John Hawkesworth brought out in 1752 
 The Adventurer, and afterwards edited Swift's works, with a life pre- 
 fixed. He died in 1773. 
 
 Page 155. In Prance.— Chaxks Perrault brought out, between 1688 
 
434 NOTES. 
 
 and 1696, his Parallhk des Anciens et des Modernes, in which he assigns 
 the superiority to the modems. He was answered by Bojleau. 
 
 Page 156. Mr. Harley. — The Tory prime minister under Queen Anne, 
 afterwards Earl of Oxford. He died in 1724. 
 
 Page 165. The Duchess of Munster. — The German mistress of 
 George I. 
 
 Page 172. At lasi.— Johnson here refers to the measures for the re- 
 moval of restrictions on Irish trade and for the partial relief of Irish 
 Catholics, which were carried between 1778 and 1782, 
 
 ADDISON, 
 
 Page 179. The Chartreux. — Charterhouse School. 
 
 Page 181. ^<7«te^«.— Charles Montague (1661-1715), afterwards 
 Lord Halifax. 
 
 Page 183. Lord Godolphin. — Prime minister from the accession of 
 Queen Anne until August, 1710. 
 
 lb. Birmingham's Tower. — The Birmingham Tower is within the 
 precincts of Dublin Castle. It was once a state prison, but is now, as in 
 Addison's time it had already become, a Record Office. 
 
 Page 185. Casa and Castiglione.—G:\.ova.nn\ della Casa (1503-1556), an 
 Italian, author of Galateo, or, Art of Living in the World, a book which 
 was translated into most of the European languages; Baldassare Castig- 
 lione (1478-1529), also an Italian, author of Cortegiano {the Courtier), a 
 book called by his countrymen The Book of Gold. 
 
 li. La BruyMs Manners of the Age. — ^The work meant is the Char- 
 acters of Jean de la Bruy^re (1644-1696), a celebrated French writer, and 
 still, like Addison himself, a classic. 
 
 Page 187. "Para mi," etc. — "For me only was Don Quixote bom 
 and I for him." 
 
 Page 189. Dennis. — John Dennis (1657-1734), a play-writerand critic, 
 whose criticism made much noise in its day. 
 
 lb. The Distrest Mother. — By Ambrose Philips, Addison's friend. 
 
 Page 191. Strada's Prolusions. — Famiano Strada (1572-1649), a critic 
 and historian, was professor of rhetoric in the Gregorian College at Rome. 
 
 Page ig6. Little Dicky. — Macaulay has conclusively shown that John- 
 son was wrong in supposing that by ' ' little Dicky" Addison meant Steele. 
 In an article in the Edinburgh Review (July, 1843), on Miss Aikin's Life 
 and Writings of Addison, Macaulay says: — " It is asserted in the Biogra- 
 phia Britannica that Addison designated Steele as ' little Dicky. ' This as- 
 sertion was repeated by Johnson, who had never seen The Old Whig, and 
 was therefore excusable. It is true that the words ' little Dicky ' occur in 
 The Old Whig, and that Steele's name was Richard. It is equally true 
 that the words ' little Isaac ' occur in The Duenna, and that Newton's 
 name was Isaac. But we confidently affirm that Addison's ' little Dicky ' 
 had no more to do with Steele than Sheridan's ' little Isaac ' with Newton. 
 If we apply the words ' little Dicky ' to Steele, we deprive a very lively 
 and ingenious passage not only of all its wit but of all its meaning. 
 ' Little Dicky ' was evidently the nickname of some comic actor who 
 played the usurer Gomez, then a most popular part, in Dryden's Spanish 
 Friar." 
 
/fOT£s. 435 
 
 Shortly afterwards, in a letter to Mr. Napier, the editor of the Edin- 
 tiuigh Review, Hacaulay writes as follows : — " I am much pleased with 
 one thing. You may remember how confidently I asserted that ' little 
 Dicky,' in The Old Whig, was the nickname of some comic actor. Several 
 people thought that I risked too much in assuming this so strongly on 
 mere internal evidence. I have now, by an odd accident, found out who 
 the actor was. An old prompter of Drury Lane theatre, named Chet- 
 wood, published, in 1749, ^ small volume containing an account of all the 
 famous performers he remembered, arranged in alphabetical order. This 
 little volume I picked up yesterday, for sixpence, at a. bookstall in Hol- 
 bom; and the first name on which I opened was that of Henry Norris, a 
 favourite comedian, who was nicknamed ' Dicky ' because he first obtained 
 celebrity by acting the part of Dicky in the Trip to the Jubilee. It is 
 added that his figure was very diminutive. He was, it seems, in the 
 height of his popularity at the very time when The Old Whig was written. 
 You will, I think, agree with me that this is decisive. I am a little vain 
 of my sagacity, which I really think would have dubbed me a vir clarissi- 
 mus, if it had been shewn on a point of Greek or Latin learning; but I am 
 still more pleased that the vindication of Addison from an unjust charge, 
 which has been universally believed since the publication of the Lives of 
 the Poets, should thus be complete. Should you have any objection to 
 inserting a short note at the end of the next Number?" 
 
 Page aoi. MandevilU. — Author of the Fable of the Bees. He died in 
 I733. 
 
 Page 202. A great writer. — Bishop Warburton. 
 
 Page 206. The late cotteOion. — Of English Poets. 
 
 POPE. 
 
 Page 221. Ogylb/s Homer and Sandys's Ovid. — ^John Ogylby (iCoo- 
 1676) was patronised by Lord Strafford, and after Strafford's death trans- 
 lated both Virgil and Homer. For Sandys, see note to page no. 
 
 Page 223. The Thebais. — See note to page 106. 
 
 Page 228. Hamilton. — Anthony Hamilton (1646-1720) wrote the Me- 
 moirs of Count Grammont, in which the Court of Charles II. is described. 
 
 Page 232. Lord Lansdowne. — George Granville, Lord Lansdowne 
 (1643-1735), a verse-writer whose life is in Johnson's Lives of the Poets. 
 
 Page 236. La Valterie and Dader. — La Valterie, a French abb6 in the 
 latter half of the seventeenth century, translated Homer, Juvenal and Per- 
 sius; the more celebrated Madame Dacier (1645-1720) translated both the 
 Iliad and the Odyssey into French prose. 
 
 lb. Chapman, Hobbes, and Ogylby. — The translation of Homer by 
 George Chapman, who died in 1604, is still read. Thomas Hobbes, of 
 Malmesbury (i 588-1679) translated Homer and Thucydides, but his fame 
 is due to his philosophical work. Leviathan. For Ogylby, see note to 
 page 221. 
 
 Page 237. Eustathius. — Archbishop of Thessalonica in the 12th cen- 
 tury, and famoiis as a commentator on Homer. 
 
 lb. Jortin. — John Jortin (1698-1770), known by his Life of Erasmus. 
 
 Page 252. Trial of Bishop Atterbury.—Fra,ncis Atterbury, Bishop of 
 Rochester, was tried for correspondence with the Pretender, and di«l in 
 exile at Paris, 1731. 
 
43^ NOTES. 
 
 Page 254. Ralph. — ^James Ralph, a poet and journalist, attacked Pope 
 in a piece called Sawney. Pope alludes to him and to a poem of his on 
 Night in two famous lines of the Dunciad : — 
 
 " Silence, ye wolves, while Ralph to Cynthia howls, 
 And makes night hideous — Answer him, ye owls !" 
 
 Page 264. Warburton. — William Warburton (1698-1779), Bishop of 
 Gloucester, a celebrated critic and controversialist. See p. 202, and note. 
 
 Page 266. Mr. Murray. — Afterwards Lord Mansfield, the well-known 
 Chief -Justice. He died in 1783. 
 
 lb. Benson. — William Benson, Surveyor of Buildings to George I., 
 "endeavoured," says a note to the Dunciad, "to raise himself to fame by 
 erecting monuments, striking coins, setting up heads, and procuring 
 translations of Milton." 
 
 Page 267. The inscription on the Monument. — This inscription attri- 
 butes the Fire of London to the Catholics; and therefore Pope says that 
 the Monument, 
 
 " Like some tall bully, lifts its head and lies.'' 
 
 Page 270. The verses, — The famous lines on Sporus, beginning : — 
 " Let Sporus tremble." 
 
 Page 271. History of Mr. Ouffle. — " A History of the Ridiculous Ex- 
 travagancies of Monsieur Oufle," London, 1711. This was a translation 
 from a French work, of which the author, the Abb6 Bordelon, sought to 
 do for witchcraft what Cervantes had done for knight-errantry. 
 
 Page 272. Gibber. — Colley Gibber (1671-1757), actor, dramatist, and 
 poet-laureate, wrote an Apology for his own life. 
 
 Page 277. The Patriot King. — This and the Letter to Sir William 
 Windham are the most famous of Bolingbroke's political writings. He 
 died in 1751. 
 
 Page 287. Paracelsus. — An empiric and alchemist, bom in Switzerland 
 in 1493. He died in 1541. 
 
 Page 292. Cooper's Hill. — The poem to which Sir John Denham (1615- 
 t668) owes his reputation. 
 
 Page 295. Perrault. — See note to page 155. 
 
 Page 298. The learned author, etc. — Joseph Warton (1722-1800). His 
 brother, the Rev. Thomas Warton, was professor of poetry at Oxford and 
 author of the History of English Poetry. 
 
 Page 302. The javelin of Priam. — See Virgil's i£neid, ii. 544. 
 
 Page 308. The Visitor. — ' ' The Universal Visiter and Monthly Memo- 
 rialist," 1756. This was a magazine which lived for one year only, but to 
 which Johnson contributed. 
 
 Page 309. Charles, Earl of Dorset. — A wit and poet, author of the 
 well-known song beginning, " To all you ladies now on land." He died 
 in 1706. 
 
 Page 311. Bernadi. — Major Bemardi, who was arrested in 1696 as a 
 partisan of James H., and confined in Newgate until his death in 1736. 
 See Gentleman's Magazine, Vol. 50, p. 125. 
 
 Page 313. Mr. Rowe. — Nicholas Rowe (1673-1718), poet-laureate, 
 author of The Fair Penitent, Jane Shore, and a translation of Lucan's 
 Pharsalia. 
 
 Page 317. The wit of man, etc. — Pope had probably in his mind 
 
NOTES. 437 
 
 I Corinthians, xiv., 20 : " In malice be ye children, but in understanding 
 be men." But Dryden, also, had said of Mrs. Killigrew: " Her wit was 
 more than man, her innocence a child." 
 
 Page 319. Areosti. — Ludovico Anosto (1474-1533), one of the most 
 famous of Italian poets, author of Orlando Furioso. The sense of the 
 Latin lines in the text is as follows : — 
 
 ' ' The bones of Ludovico Ariosto lie buried under this stone, or under 
 this sod, or under whatsoever his kind heir chose, or a comrade kinder than 
 his heir, or a traveller lighting by good hap on his remains. For what 
 would befall him he could not tell, but neither did he esteem his empty 
 carcase enough to desire to provide for it an urn in his lifetime: how- 
 beit in his lifetime he provided this inscription for his sepulchre, if any 
 sepulchre he was hereafter to have." 
 
 GRAY. 
 
 Page 322. Mr. Mason. — William Mason (i 725-1 797), author of the 
 tr^edy of Caractacus, published a Life of Gray and some of his Letters. 
 
 Page 326. Buxom health. — Buxom means originally " easily bended," 
 thence nimble and brisk; it is often erroneously used as if it meant stout 
 and florid. 
 
 lb. " O Diva" etc. — The Ode to Fortune, the thirty-fifth in the First 
 Book of Horace's Odes. 
 
 Page 328. The prophecy of Nereus.. — In the fifteenth Ode of the First 
 Book of Horace's Odes. 
 
 Page 329. Heard with scorn. — Johnson is seen at his worst in his 
 criticism of " the two Sister Odes ;" but it is instructive to read him on 
 Gray, and to weigh for oneself the value of what he says. Gray's Pro- 
 gress of Poesy gives, with admirable skill, a poetical history of Poetry; 
 his Bard gives, with like skill, a poetical history of England. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 "Absalom and Achitophel," iv, 
 84, 99, 120 
 
 Addison, Joseph, iii, x, xxvi, 
 41, 49. 58. 65, 84, 129, 157, 160, 
 231, 245, 246, 269, 292. 353 ; his 
 birth and education, 179 ; his 
 friendship with Steele, 180 ; his 
 Latin compositions, 180 ; his 
 first essays in English verse, 
 181 ; becomes a court-favorite, 
 
 181 ; travels on the Continent, 
 
 182 ; " Cato," 182, 188 ; his re- 
 turn to England, 182 ; is select- 
 ed to celebrate the victory of 
 Blenheim in verse, 183 ; conse- 
 quent political prefetment, 183 ; 
 writes for the " Tatler," 184; 
 and the " Spectator," 185, 192 ; 
 at the zenith of his reputa- 
 tion, 188 ; production of " Cato," 
 i8g, 200, 206 ; writes for the 
 "Guardian," 191; his political 
 and controversial writings, 192 ; 
 the " Freeholder," 193 ; his mar- 
 riage, 194 ; becomes secretary 
 of state, 194 ; but speedily re- 
 signs and resumes his literary 
 occupations, 195 ; quarrels with 
 Steele, 196 ; his death, 198 ; his 
 habits and manners, 198, 201 ; 
 his humor and conversation, 
 199; sources of his literary 
 power, 199 ; his mode of life, 
 200; his services to morality 
 and literature, 202 ; his poetry, 
 202 ; his criticism, 217 ; his 
 prose, 219 
 
 "Albion and Albanius," Dry- 
 den's, 77 
 Alexandrine verse, 138, 140, 305 
 "All for Love," Dryden's, 78, 81, 
 
 120 
 " Amboyna," Dryden's, 76 
 " Amphytrion," Dryden's, 79 
 
 " Annus Mirabilis," Dryden s, 64, 
 116 
 
 Arbuthnot, Dr., 176, 257, 261, 269, 
 271 
 
 " Arcades," Milton's, 7 
 
 " Areopagitica," Milton's, 14 
 
 Ariosto, 52, 57, 132, 319 
 
 Aristotle, 142, 212, 229 
 
 Ascham, Roger, 4 
 
 " Assignation, or Love in a Nun- 
 nery," Dryden's, 76, 81 
 
 •■ Astrea Redux," 62 
 
 Athenian culture, 366 
 
 Athenian Society, the, 153 
 
 Atterbury, 37, 224, 249, 252 
 
 " Aurung Zebe," Dryden's, 78, 120 
 
 Aylmer, Brabazon, 33 
 
 Babylonian Isaiah, ii 
 
 Barberini, Cardinal, 8 
 
 Barrow, vii 
 
 " Battle of the Books,'' Swift's, 
 iv, 153. 155 
 
 Baudius, 39 
 
 Beattie, Dr., 323 
 
 Beauclerk, Topham, xxxiii, 353, 
 368, 416 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, xxxii, 70 
 
 Behn, Mrs. Afra, 97 
 
 Bentley, xxxix, 54, 57, 155. 285, 
 293. 302 
 
 Berkeley, Earl of, 154 
 
 Betterton, 233 
 
 Biography, Johnson on the diffi- 
 culties of, 197 
 
 Birch, Dr., 16, 92 
 
 Blackmore, Sir Richard, 91,98 
 
 Blank verse, 60 
 
 Blount, Martha, 275, 278 
 
 Boileau, 91, 92, 116, 180, 269, 271, 
 
 297. 303. 305^ ^ ^ ,, 
 
 Bolipgbroke, Lord, 102, 160, 166, 
 177, 189, 261, 263, 265, 275, 27' 
 354 
 
446 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Bossu, 47 
 
 Boswell, James, v, xxxiv, 348, 
 
 378, 421 ; his " Life of Johnson," 
 
 XXXV, 348, 373 
 Boulter, Archbishop, 166 
 Bowyer, Sir William, 149 
 Boyce, xxi, 401 
 Brady, Dr., 131 
 
 Broome, William, 237, 252, 301 
 Brown, Thomas, 88, 100 
 Bruce, King Robert, xvi. 
 Buckingham, Duke of, 78, 81, 94, 
 
 318 
 Budgell, Eustace, 187, 200 
 Burke, Edmund, xxix, xxxiii, 
 
 xliii, 353. 357. 369. 37i. 4i7. 4I9 
 Burnet, vii, 87, 154, 159, 250 
 Burney, Frances, xliii 
 Burns, Robert, 396 
 Busby, Dr., 61, 107 
 Butler, Samuel, 81 
 Byng, Admiral, 336 
 Byron, Lord, 351 
 
 "Campaign," Addison's, 183, 203, 
 
 292 
 Campbell, Thomas, anecdote of, 
 
 362 
 Carte, Thomas, 97 
 Caryl, John, 230 
 Castiglione, 185 
 "Cato," Addison's, 182, 188, 200, 
 
 206, 232 
 Cave, Edward, xix, 399, 401 
 Chambers, Catharine, 424 
 Chandos, Duke of, 257, 285 
 Chapman, George, 106, 138, 236 
 Character, Dr. Johnson on, 267, 
 
 314 
 
 Charles IL, vii, ix, 62, 64, 80, 
 108, 121, 194 
 
 Chaucer, 132, 292 
 
 Chesterfield, Earl of, xxiii, xxvii, 
 91, 404 
 
 Chillingworlh, vii, 86 
 
 Christina of Sweden, 17 
 
 Churchill, Charles, xxxi 
 
 Cibber, CoUey, xl, 272, 323 
 
 Clarendon, Lord Chancellor, 114 
 
 Clarges, Sir Thomas, 25 
 
 Clark, Abraham, 41 
 
 "Cleomenes," Dryden's, 79 
 
 CliflFord, Martin, 72, 81 
 
 Climate, Milton's idea concerning 
 the influence of upon imagin- 
 ative work, 30 
 
 Coleridge on the difference be. 
 
 tween poetry and prose, viii 
 Collier, Jeremy, 98 
 Collins, William, 357 
 Composition, Milton's methods 
 
 of, 29, 30; Virgil's, III ; 
 "Comus," Milton's "Mask of," 
 
 6, 41, 45. 59. „ , , 
 
 " Conduct of the Allies, Swift s, 
 
 158 
 Congreve, William, 92, 94, 95 99, 
 
 103, 132, 160, i8i, 245, 282, 324, 
 
 353 
 " Conquest of Granada," Dryden's, 
 
 71, 81, 120 
 Corbet, Mrs., Pope's epitaph on, 
 
 313 
 Courage, Carlyle on, 420 
 " Coverley Papers," iv, 187 
 Cowley, Abraham, xli, 4, 39, 43, 
 
 61. 72. 75. 81, 84, 104, 107, no, 
 
 135. 138, 139, 181, 223, 225 
 Craggs, James, Pope's epitaph 
 
 on, 312 
 Creech, Thomas, 96, 128 
 Criticism, 104 ; Pope's essay on, 
 
 226, 287, 294 
 Croft, Sir Herbert, 333 
 Croker's edition of Boswell's 
 
 "Life of Johnson,'' v; Mac- 
 
 aulay's essay on, 333 ; Carlyle's, 
 
 373 
 Cromwell, 18, 62 
 Crousaz, Jean Pierre de, 263 
 Curll, 259 
 
 Dati, Carlo, 8 
 
 Davenant, 25, 64, 65, 66, 82, 112, 
 
 116, 200 
 Davies, Sir John, 140 
 Davies, Tom, 343 
 Delany, Dr., 162, 164, 168, 173, 
 
 176, 177 
 Denham, Sir John, 109, 138, 365 
 Dennis, John, 189, 190, 206, 225, 
 
 226, 232, 250, 257, 292, 297 
 Derrick, biographer of Dryden, 
 
 61, 102 
 Derrick, master of ceremonies at 
 
 Bath, 333 
 Desmoulins, Mrs., xxxvi 
 " Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry," 
 
 Dryden's, 65, 104 
 Dictionary of the English Lan- 
 guage, Johnson's, xxiii, xxvii 
 
moEX. 
 
 441 
 
 Digby, Robert and Mary, Pope's 
 epitaph on, 314 
 
 Digby, Sir Kenelm, 86 
 
 Diodati, Charles, Milton's epi- 
 taph on, 9 
 
 Divorce, Milton's pamphlets on, 
 
 13 
 
 Dodington, Bubb, xxv 
 
 " Don Sebastian," Dryden's, 79, 
 go, 120 
 
 Dorset, Duke of, 65, 90 
 
 Dorset, Earl of. Pope's epitaph 
 on, 309 ; Macaulay on, 354 
 
 Douglas, James, 336 
 
 Drapier Letters, the, 165 
 
 Drayton, Michael, 139 
 
 Dryden, John, iii, x, 153, 403 ; 
 Milton's opinion of, 39 ; his 
 criticism on " Paradise Lost," 
 50, 52, 57 ; his birth and educa- 
 tion, 61 ; his poems on Crom- 
 well and Charles II., 62, 112 ; 
 his dramas, 63, 65 ; his " Annus 
 Mirabilis," 64, 115 ; his " Dia- 
 logue on Dramatic Poetiy," 65, 
 104 ; he becomes poet-laureate, 
 65 ; his alteration of Shake- 
 speare's " Tempest," 66 ; his 
 quarrel with Elkanah Settle, 66, 
 72 ; his later dramatic works, 
 70, 76; his "Conquest of Gra- 
 nada," 71 ; his discourse on 
 "The Grounds of Criticism in 
 Tragedy," 76 ; his theory ol 
 dramatic writing, 76 ; his first 
 mention of a design to write an 
 epic poem, 78 ; his dedications, 
 77, 80, 91, 97 ; state of the stage 
 in his time and profits of dra- 
 matic composition, 80 ; his lite- 
 ral}' criticisms, 80, 103, 108, 142; 
 his prologues, 81 ; his fertility, 
 81 ; his critics and rivals, '81 ; 
 his towering reputation, 83 ; his 
 translations, 84, 90, no, 127; 
 his "Absalom and Achitophel," 
 84, 120 ; the answers to it, 85 ; 
 " The Medal," 85, 121 ; his con- 
 version to popery and writings 
 in defence of it, 85, 100; "The 
 Hind and the Panther," 88, 125 ; 
 his removal from the laureate- 
 ship, 89; his "Mac Flecknoe," 
 go; his theory of epic poetry, 
 90 ; his translation of Virgil, 
 91 ; his parallel between poetry 
 
 and painting, gl ; his " Fables," 
 92, 132 ; his death, 92 ; curious 
 story regarding his funeral, 92 ; 
 his family, 94 ; his character 
 and manners, 95 ; his conversa- 
 tion, 96 ; his morality, 97, gg ; 
 his servility and adulation of the 
 great, gS, 127 ; his quarrels and 
 controversies, 98 ; his dislike 
 of the priesthood, 100 ; his pov- 
 erty, 100, III ; his relation with 
 booksellers, 102 ; his profits 
 from his poems, 102 ; his habits 
 and amusements, 103 ; his de- 
 ficiency of learning, 106 ; his 
 wide knowledge, 107 ; his style, 
 108 ; his services to English 
 poetry, 109, 138 ; his versifica- 
 tion, 112, 120, I2S, 138 ; his 
 " Threnodia Augustalis," 122 ; 
 his "Ode for St. Cecilia's Day," 
 123, 133 ; his translation of Vir- 
 gil, 128, 150 ; sources and qual- 
 ity of his genius, 133 ; letter to 
 his sons, 148 ; compared with 
 Pope, 289 
 
 " Duke of Guise," Dryden's, 77 
 
 Du Moulin, Peter, ig 
 
 " Dunciad," Pope's, 90, 250, 254, 
 272, 301 
 
 Education, mistakes in, i, iv ; 
 Milton's scheme of, 5 ; John- 
 son's views on, 10 
 
 " Elegy in a Country Churchyard," 
 Gray's iv, 322, 329 
 
 "Eleonora," Dryden's, 123 
 
 "Eloisato Abelard," Pope's, 232, 
 298 
 
 Elwood, Thomas, 27, 32, 35 
 
 "Empress of Morocco," Elkanah 
 Settle's, 66 ; Dryden's fierce 
 onslaught upon, 66 ; his answer, 
 72 
 
 English Literature, study of, ii, 
 iv 
 
 English prose, changes in, vi 
 
 Epic poetry, Dryden's theory of, 
 90 
 
 " Epitaphs," Pope's, 308, 365 
 
 Erasmus, 39, 228 
 
 " Essay on Criticism," Pope's,^ 
 226, 287, 294 
 
 " Essay on Man," Pope's, 261, 302 
 
 Essay-writing in England, John- 
 son's history of, 186 
 
442 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Euripides, 39, 56. 
 
 " Examiner," the, 157 
 
 " Fables,'' Dryden's, 92, 102, ro6, 
 
 132, 223 
 Farquhar, George. 94 
 Feltham, Owen, no 
 Fenton, Elijah, 140, 252, 316 
 Fermor, Mrs. Arabella, 230 
 Fielding, Henry, xviii, 357, 365 
 Finch, Earl of Nottingham, viii 
 Fletcher, John, 146, 147 
 Forbes, Sir William, 334 
 Foster, Thomas, 41 
 Francini's ode to Milton, 8 
 " Freeholder," the, 193 
 French prose and poetry, ix 
 Fresnoy's " Art of Painting," 91 
 
 Galileo, Milton's visit to, 9 
 Garrick, David, xvii, xxiv, xxxiii, 
 
 142, 323, 353 
 Garth, Dr., 93, 245 
 Gay, John, 175, 176, 197, 258, 317, 
 
 354 
 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 35 
 George I., 342 
 Gibbon, Edward, xxxiii, 337, 353, 
 
 357, 371 
 Goldsmith, Oliver, xxxiii, 350, 
 
 353. 359. 365. 370, 416 
 
 " Gondibert," Davenant's, 64, 112 
 
 Government, Johnson's views on, 
 362 
 
 Gray, Thomas, xli ; his birth and 
 education, 321 ; his travels on 
 the Continent, 321 ; his earliest 
 poetical works, 322 ; his " Elegy 
 in a Country Churchyard," 322, 
 329 ; his later writings, 323 ; his 
 travels and studies, 323 ; his 
 death, 324; his character, 323 ; 
 his qualities as a writer, 325 
 
 Gregory, Dr., 37 
 
 Grotius, 7 
 
 " Guardian," the, 191 
 
 " Gulliver's Travels," 167, 177 
 
 Gunpowder, first appearance of in 
 poetry, 116 
 
 Gwyn, Eleanor, 97 
 
 Halifax, Earl of, 88, 92, 182, 183, 
 
 245 
 Halifax, Marquis of, 80 
 Hall, Bishop of Norwich, 11 
 Hall's " Satires." 138, 306 
 
 Hampden, John, xx 
 
 Hampton, translator of Polybius, 
 
 4 
 Harcourt, Simon, Pope's epitaph 
 
 on, 311 
 Harley, Earl of Oxford, 156, 157, 
 
 161, 234. 251, 354 
 Harte, Walter, 120, 233 
 Hastings, Lord, Dryden's lines 
 
 on, 61 
 Hawkesworth, Dr., 151, 163 
 Hawkins, Sir John, 346, 398, 401 
 Hervey, Henry, xvi, xviii 
 Hervey, Lord, 270 
 Hill, Aaron, 257, 285 
 "Hind and Panther,'' Dryden's, 
 
 88, 125 
 History, Johnson's contempt for, 
 
 368 ; Carlyle on the deficiencies 
 
 of, 387 
 Holstenius, 8 
 Homer, 60, 92, 128, 143, 299, 365, 
 
 415 
 Home's " Douglas," Johnson's 
 
 opinion of, 339 
 Horace, iv, xxi, xxiv, 96, 97, in, 
 
 204 
 Howard, Lady Elizabeth, 92 
 Howard, Sir Robert, 63, 64, 82, 
 
 149 
 Hume, David, 428 ; his " History 
 
 of England," 348 
 
 " Idler," the, xxxiii 
 
 *' Iliad," Pope's translation of the, 
 
 234, 247, 299, 306 
 "II Penseroso," 15, 43 
 " Indian Emperor," Dryden's, 63, 
 
 65, 120 
 " Indian Queen," Howard's, 63 
 " Irene," Johnson's, xvii, xxiv 
 
 James II., 90, loi 
 Jefferies, Judge, 85 
 Jefferies, Lord, his curious con- 
 duct at Dryden's funeral, 92 
 " Jerusalem Delivered," 52 
 Jervas, the painter, 233, 247, 287 
 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, iii ; his 
 "Lives of the Poets," ii ; his 
 remark on reading many books, 
 iv ; Boswell's Life of, v, 333, 
 348, 373 ; his remark to Boswell 
 on changes in literary style, vi.; 
 his own style, vii ; his poetry 
 and criticism of poetry, ix ; 
 
INDEX. 
 
 443 
 
 Matthew Arnold's summary of 
 his character, xi ; his birth and 
 parentage, xiii ; his bodily in- 
 firmities, xiii ; his studies and 
 reading, xiv, 411 ; his residence 
 at Oxford, xiv, 398 ; his strug- 
 gle with poverty, xv, 397, 413 ; 
 his eccentricities, xv, 427 ; his 
 attempts at teaching and writ- 
 ing, xvi, 400 ; his marriage, 
 xvii, 399 ; seeks his fortune In 
 London, xvii ; state of literature 
 at the time, xviii, 353, 400 ; his 
 privations and sufferings, xviii, 
 357 ; his personal appearance, 
 habits, and manners, xix, 358, 
 426 ; engaged to write the par- 
 liamentary debates for the 
 "Gentleman's Magazine," xix ; 
 his political opinions, xx, 362, 
 407 ; his aversion to the Scotch, 
 XX, xxxvii ; his poem of " Lon- 
 don," xxi ; his lot contrasted 
 with Pope's, xxi ; his friends 
 and associates, xxii ; his " Life 
 of Savage," xxii ; his " Diction- 
 ary," xxiii, xxvii ; his " Vanity 
 of Human Wishes," xxiii ; the 
 " Rambler," xxv ; death of Mrs. 
 Johnson, xxvi ; his letter to 
 Chesterfield, xxvii, 404 ; his 
 literary drudgery, xxxiii ; the 
 "Idler," xxviii ; death of his 
 mother, xxviii; " Rasselas," 
 xxix ; Johnson receives a pen- 
 sion, XXX, 417 ; his edition of 
 Shakespeare, xxxi ; his inter- 
 view with the king, xxxii ; his 
 conversation, xxxiii, 369 ; the 
 Literary Club, xxxiii ; his ac- 
 quaintance with Boswell.xxxiv; 
 and with the Thrales, xxxv ; his 
 household in Bolt Court, 
 xxxvi, 424 ; his tour to the 
 Hebrides, xxxvi, 368 ; his po- 
 litical pamphlets, xxxix ; his 
 "Lives of the Poets," xl ; his 
 literary judgments, xl, 363 ; his 
 literary gains, xli ; his estrange- 
 ment from Mrs. Thrale, xiii ; 
 his illness and death, xliii ; his 
 writings and character, xliv, 
 369, 412, 418 ; our knowledge 
 of him through Boswell, xliv, 
 352 ; his intellectual qualities, 
 360, 411, 420, 427-; his religious 
 
 belief, 361, 411 ; his judgments 
 on men and manners, 366 ; his 
 intellectual narrowness, 368, 
 427 ; contrasts and contradic- 
 tions in his nature, 395, 406 ; 
 his services to literature, 403 ; 
 his indilFerenc.3 to fame, 414 ; 
 his courage, 420 ; his truthful- 
 ness and honesty, 422 ; his 
 tenderness of heart, 423 ; con- 
 trasted with Hume, 428 
 Jones, Sir William, his distich on 
 the division of a lawyer's time, 
 
 343 
 Jonson, Ben, xxxii, 44, 59, 65, 70, 
 
 104, no 
 Jortin, John, 237 
 Juvenal, xxi, 90, 95, 127, 340 
 Juxon, Dr., 16 
 
 Killigrew, Mrs., Dryden's ode on 
 
 the death of, 123, 133 
 "Kind Keeper." Dryden's, 79 
 " King Arthur," Dryden's, 80 
 Kneiler, Sir Godfrey, Pope's epi- 
 taph on, 315 
 
 La Bruyere, 185 
 
 La Fontaine, 350 
 
 " L'Allegro,"'i5, 43 
 
 Langbaine, 65, 76, 81, 100 
 
 Langton, Bennet, xxxiv, xliii, 371, 
 416 
 
 Latin, pronunciation of, 27 
 
 Laud, Archbishop, xx 
 
 Leigh, Lady Margaret, 13 
 
 Letters, Johnson's opinion of, 282 
 
 Levett, Robert, xxxvi 
 
 Lintot, Bernard, 234, 252, 259 
 
 Literary Club, the, xxxiii 
 
 "Lives of the Poets," Matthew 
 Arnold's opinion of, ii ; Bos- 
 well's opinion of, iv ; Macau- 
 lay's opinion of, xl 
 
 " London," Johnson's, xxi 
 
 Longinus, 104 
 
 Louis XIV., one of his mots, 160 
 
 " Love Triumphant," Dryden's, 80 
 
 " Lycidas," Milton's, 7, 42 
 
 Macaulay's life of Dr. Johnson, 
 xiii ; his essay on Boswell's life 
 of Johnson, 333 
 
 "Mac Flecknoe," Dryden's, go 
 
 Macpherson, xxxviii 
 
 Malherbe, 114 
 
444 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Manso, Marquis of Villa, 8 
 Marchmont, Earl of, 275, 277, 286 
 Marlborough, Duke of, 159, 183, 
 
 185, 205 
 " Marriage a-la-Mode," Dryden's, 
 
 76 
 Martin's "Account of the Hebri- 
 des," Johnson's remark on, vi 
 Marvell, Andrew, 77 
 Mattaire's " Senilia," 342 
 " Medal, The," Dryden's, 85, 121 
 Memory, art of, i 
 Milbourne, Luke, 91, 98, 129 
 Milton, John, 3 ; his ancestry and 
 parentage, 3 ; his birth and edu- 
 cation, 4 ; his precocity in poeti- 
 cal composition, 4 ; his career 
 at Cambridge University, 4 ; his 
 scheme of education, 5 ; his un- 
 willingness to become a clergy- 
 man, 6 ; his " Mask of Comus," 
 6, 45 ; his " Lycidas" and " Ar- 
 cades," 7, 42 ; his travels on the 
 sGontinent, 7 ; his career as a 
 schoolmaster in London, 9 ; his 
 mode of teaching, 10 ; his con- 
 troversial pamphlets, 11 ; his 
 confidence in his powers, 11 ; 
 his style, 12, 58 ; his marriage 
 and its consequences, 13 ; his 
 " Areopagitica," 14; his "Alle- 
 gro" and " Penseroso," 15, 43 ; 
 his political writings, 16-19 ! 
 his answer to Salmasius, 17 ; his 
 loss of sight, 17 ; his employ- 
 ment by Cromwell, 18 ; his 
 second marriage, 18 ; his liter- 
 ary projects, 20 ; " Paradise 
 Lost," 21, 47 ; his later contro- 
 versial writings, 24 ; his danger 
 at the Restoration, 25 ; his third 
 marriage, 26 ; origin of ' ' Para- 
 dise Lost," 27 ; his personal ap- 
 pearance and habits, 28, 37, 41 ; 
 his' methods of composition, 29, 
 30 ; his susceptibility to the in- 
 fluence of weather and the sea- 
 sons, 29 ; his fancy concerning 
 the influence of climate upon 
 imaginative work, 30; comple- 
 tion of " Paradise Lost," 32 ; its 
 sale and publication, 32 ; ex- 
 planation of its supposed slow 
 sale and tardy reputation, 33 ; 
 Milton's expedients for acquir- 
 ing knowledge in spite of his 
 
 blindness, 34 ; his daughters, 
 34, 41 ; his " History of Eng- 
 land," 35 ; his troubles with the 
 licenser, 35 ; his "Paradise Re- 
 gained" and "Samson Agonis- 
 tes," 35, 58 ; his " New Scheme 
 of Logic," 36 ; his " Treatise on 
 Toleration, etc.," 36; his "Fa- 
 miliar Epistles in Latin," 36 : 
 his death, 37 ; his memorial in 
 Westminster Abbey, 37 , his 
 estate, 38 ; his learning, 38 ; his 
 theological opinions, 39 ; his 
 political beliefs, 40 ; his family, 
 40 ; his diction and versification, 
 
 59 
 
 Milton, Sir Christopher, 3, 40 
 
 Minshul, Elizabeth, Milton's third 
 wife, 26 
 
 " Mock Astrologer," Dryden's, 70 
 
 Modena, Princess of, 77 
 
 Monk, General, Dryden's tribute 
 to,. 1 13 
 
 Montrose, Marquis of, his execu- 
 tion, 336 
 
 Moyle, Walter, 102 
 
 Music, Dryden's definition of, 305 
 
 Newcastle, Duke of, 70, 94 
 Newton, Dr., 41 
 
 Newton, Sir Isaac, Pope's epitaph 
 on, 318 
 
 " Ode for St. Cecilia's Day," Dry- 
 den's, 123, 133, 149 ; Pope's, 293 
 "Odyssey," Pope's translation of 
 
 the, 106, 252, 301 
 " CEdipus," Dryden's, 79 
 Ogylby, John, 130, 221, 236 
 Oldmixon, John, 194 
 Ormond, Duke of, 82, 97 
 Orrery, Lord, xl, 63, 153, 162, 174 
 Osborne, the bookseller, xix, 404 
 " Ossian," Johnson's opinion of, 
 
 339 
 
 Otway, Thomas, 134, 401 
 
 Ovid's " Epistles," 120 ; his " Meta- 
 morphoses," 39, 106 
 
 Paine, Tom, 349 
 
 " Paradise Lost,'' iv, 21, 27, 29, 
 
 32, 41, 47. 59 
 " Paradise Regained," 35, 58 
 Parnell, Thomas, 237, 251, 354 
 Peel, Sir Robert, 340 
 Percy, Dr., 73 
 
INDEX. 
 
 445 
 
 Petrarch, xiv 
 
 Phaer's translation of Virgil, 138 
 
 Philips, Edward, 3, g, 15, 29, 34, 
 
 37 
 
 Plague of London, 32 
 
 Poetic diction, Johnson's and Dry- 
 den's opinion of, 118 
 
 Poetry and prose, vi 
 
 Pope, Alexander, xviii, xxi, 84, 
 go, gi, 125, I2g, 132, 138, 140, 
 166, 167, i6g, 175 ; his anecdote 
 about Svrift, 175 ; about Addi- 
 son's " Cato," i8g, 200, 206 ; his 
 sayings about Addison, 195, igg ; 
 his birth and education, 221 ; 
 his precocity in verse-making, 
 
 222 ; his veneration for Oryden, 
 223, 28g ; his earliest writings, 
 
 223 ; wide range of his studies, 
 224 ; his letters, 225, 254, 283 ; 
 his reading, 226 ; his "Essay on 
 Criticism," 226, 287, 294 ; his 
 " Rape of the Lock," 230, 296 ; 
 his " Temple of Fame," 231, 
 292 ; his " Eloisa to Abelard," 
 232, 298; "Windsor Forest," 
 232, 29Z ; his attempt to become 
 a painter, 233 ; his translation 01 
 the " Iliad," 234, 247, 299 ; the 
 difficulties encountered in mak- 
 ing it, 235 ; its great success, 
 238 ; specimens of the author's 
 revisions, 239 ; his anecdote of 
 Lord Halifax, 245 ; his quarrel 
 with Addison, 246 ; his removal 
 to Twickenham, 249 ; publishes 
 his collected poems, 250 ; and 
 an edition of Shakespeare, 251 ; 
 his translation of the " Odyssey," 
 252 ; joins with Swift in publish- 
 ing some " Miscellanies," 253 ; 
 his '• Dunciad," 254, 272, 301 ; 
 his history of its origin, 255 ; his 
 poem on " Taste," 257 ; his filial 
 duty, 258 ; publication of his 
 letters, 259 ; his epistolary style, 
 261 ; his " Essay on Man," 261, 
 302 ; letter to Warburton, 265 ; 
 his miscellaneous writings, 266 ; 
 his quarrels, 270 ; his design of 
 an epic poem, 275 ; his death, 
 276 ; posthumous reproach, 277 ; 
 his personal appearance, 278 ; 
 his habits and manners, 279 ; his 
 conversation, 280 ; his frugality 
 and independence, 281 ; his so- 
 
 cial qualities, 282 ; his methods 
 o composition, 283, 288 ; his 
 aSectations, 284 ; his liberality 
 and fidelity to friendship, 286 ; 
 his religious faith, 286; bis va- 
 ried knowledge, 287 ; his dili- 
 gence in the cultivation of poetry, 
 288 ; compared with Dryden, 
 289 ; general survey of his works, 
 291 ; his versification, 305 ; one 
 of his letters, 307 ; his epitaph 
 on himself, 319 
 
 Porter, Mrs. Elizabeth, xvii, 
 xxvi, 399 
 
 Poverty, Johnson's opinion of the 
 effect of on authors, 11 1 
 
 Prior, Matthew, 65, 88, 125, 232, 
 
 304, 354 
 Printing, Johnson's opinion on 
 
 freedom of, 14 
 Prose and poetry, vi 
 Prose, English, vi ; French, ix 
 Psalmanazar, George, xxii 
 
 Racine, 78, 286 
 
 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 59 
 
 Ralph, James, 254 
 
 " Rambler," the, xxv 
 
 Ramsay, Allan, 334 
 
 " Rape of the»Lock," Pope's, 230 
 296 
 
 " Rasselas,'' xxix, 424 
 
 ■' Rehearsal, The," 64, 81, 273 
 
 Religious observances, Dr. John- 
 son's opinion of the importance 
 
 of, 39 
 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, xxxiii, 
 
 371, 417 
 Rhyme, 59, 64, 106, 120 
 Richardson, Samuel, xxv, 357, 365 
 " Rival Ladies," Dryden's, 63 
 Robertson, William, xli, 388 
 Rochester, Earl of, 76, 8r 
 Rousseau, 351, 428 
 Rowe, Nicholas, Pope's epitaph 
 
 on, 313 
 Rymer, Thomas, 64, 76, 105, 142, 
 
 365 
 
 Sacheverell, Henry, xx, 84, i3l 
 
 Salisbury, Earl of, 80 
 
 Salmasius, 16 
 
 Salsilli, 8 
 
 " Samson Agonistes," 35, 58 
 
 Sandys, George, no, 221 
 
 Savage, Richard, xxii, xl, 4ii^ 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Scudamore, Lord, 7 
 
 Seasons, influence of upon the 
 mind, 29 
 
 " Secret Love," Dryden's, 65 
 
 Sedley, Sir Charles, 76 
 
 Settle, Elkanah, 66, 72, 82, 85, 98 
 
 Shadwell, Thomas, 89 
 
 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 84, 85, 325 
 
 Shakespeare, viii, xxix, xxxi, 33, 
 39, 70, 104, 132, 142, 146, 251, 
 328, 403 
 
 Sharpe, Archbishop, 155, 157 
 
 Sheers, Sir Henry, 83 
 
 Sherburne, Sir Edward, in 
 
 Simmons, Samuel, publisher of 
 " Paradise Lost," 32, 35 
 
 "Sir Martin Mar- All," Dryden's, 
 65, 81 
 
 Smollett's prose, vi 
 
 Somers, Lord, 94, 182 
 
 " Sonnets," Milton's, 46 
 
 Southern, Thomas, 80, 81, 99 
 
 Spanheim, Frederick, 9 
 
 "Spanish Friar," Dryden's, 76 
 
 "Spectator," The, xxvi, 185, 192 
 
 Spence, Joseph, 106, 253 
 
 Spenser. 39, 59, 138, 181 
 
 Sprat, Dean of Westminster, 37, 
 72, 81, 92 
 
 " State of Innocence and Fall of 
 Man," Dryden's, 77, 81, 120 
 
 Steele, Sir Richard, 156, 157, i6i, 
 180, 183, 188, 191, 194, ig6, 199, 
 201, 229, 347, 354 
 
 " Stella," Swift's, 154, 161, 163, 
 164, 166, 167, 201 
 
 StiUingfleet, Bishop, 87 
 
 Subscription book-publishing, 234 
 
 Surrey, Earl of, 59 
 
 Swift, Jonathan, iii, x, 81, 139, 
 247, 253, 261, 271, 283, 285, 366 ; 
 his birth and education, 151 ; 
 his "Tale of a Tub," 151, 153, 
 I55> 172 ; he enters the service 
 of Sir William Temple, 152 ; 
 becomes acquainted with King 
 William, 152 ; contracts a griev- 
 ous malady, 152 ; takes a degree 
 at Oxford University, 153 ; 
 leaves Temple and enters the 
 church, 153 ; returns to Moor 
 Park, and begins literary work, 
 153 ; " The Battle of the Books," 
 153> 155 ! becomes literary exe- 
 cutor of Sir William Temple, 
 a,^<J edits his wprjf s, 154 ; disap- 
 
 pointed of preferment, 154 ! set- 
 tles at Laracor, 154; "Stella," 
 154, 161, 163, 164, 166 ; his lite- 
 rary work, 154; goes to London 
 and becomes the associate of 
 leading statesmen, 156 ; writes 
 for "The Examiner," 157 ; be- 
 comes an important political in- 
 fluence, 158, 161 ; "Conduct of 
 the Allies," 158 ; becomes the 
 favorite and confidant of the 
 ministry, 159 ; is made Dean of 
 St. Patrick's, 160 ; his political 
 pamphlets, 161 ; the ministry 
 shattered and his political influ- 
 ence ended, 162 ; he retires to 
 Ireland, 162 ; his mode of life, 
 162 ; his marriage with Mrs. 
 Johnson (Stella), 163, 169 ; " Va- 
 nessa, "164; the "D rapier Let- 
 ters," 165; " I he Dean," 166; 
 his popularity and power in Ire- 
 land, 166, 169 ; " Gulliver's Tra- 
 vels," 167, 177; death of "Stel- 
 la," 168 ; his solitude and as- 
 perity, 170; his avarice, 170, 
 174 ; his madness and death, 
 
 171 ; his powers as an author, 
 
 172 ; his style, 172 ; his political 
 and religious opinions, 173 ;his 
 personal appearance and man- 
 ners, 174; his humor, 175 ; his 
 conversation and social habits, 
 176; Dr. Delany's summary of 
 his character, 177 ; his poetical 
 works, 178 
 
 "Tale of a Tub," Swift's, 151, 153, 
 
 155,172 
 
 Tate, Nahum, 121 
 
 "Tatler," the, 156, 157, 184, 234 
 
 Tavistock, Lady, 359 
 
 "Tempest," the, Dryden's altera- 
 tion of, 66 
 
 Temple, Sir William, 152 
 
 Terence, 299 
 
 Theatre, state of in Dryden's time, 
 80 
 
 Themistocles on the art of mem- 
 ory, i 
 
 Theobald, 44, 251, 254, 264, 274, 301 
 
 Thomson, James, xviii, 357, 365 
 
 Thrale, Mrs., xxxv, xlii, 334, ' 
 346, 353, 416 
 
 " Threnodia Augustalis," Dry- 
 den's, 122 
 
INDEX. 
 
 447 
 
 Tickell, Thomas, i8i, 190 193, 
 ig8, 201, 248, 342, 354 
 
 Tillotson, vii, igi, 
 
 Tindal, Matthew, 156 
 
 Toland, 29, 156 
 
 Toleration, Milton's treatise on, 36 
 
 Tonson, Jacob, 33, 41, 92, loi, 
 149, 194 
 
 Tooke, Home, xxvii 
 
 Townshend, Charles, 336 
 
 Tragedy, Dryden's view of the es- 
 sentials of, 143 ; Aristotle's, 
 144, 212 
 
 Translation, art of, 84, no, 128, 
 299 
 
 Trapp, Joseph, 100, 105, 132 
 
 Travelling, Johnson's opinion of, 
 368 
 
 Trumbull, Sir William, 224, 310 
 
 "Tyrannic Love," Dryden's, 70, 
 
 120 
 
 Usher, Bishop of Armagh, 11 
 
 "Vanessa," 164 
 
 "Vanity of Human Wishes," 
 
 Johnson's, xxiii 
 Varillas's " History of Heresies," 
 
 Vega, Lope de, 81 
 
 "Vicar of Wakefield," Gold- 
 smith's, 338 
 
 Virgil, Dryden's translation of, 
 91, 106, 128, 150, 181, 234, 299 
 
 Voluire, 27, 253, 324, 406, 428 
 
 Waller, Edmund, log, n6, ^38, 
 
 250, 20c, 365 
 Walmesfey, Gilbert, xvi, xvii, xl 
 Walpole, Horace, 321 
 Walpole, Sir Robert, 196, 256, 
 
 266, 354 
 Walsh, William, 225, 228 
 Warburton, Bishop, xxiii, 229, 
 
 261, 264, 275, 277, 296, 304, 323 
 Warton, Dr. Thomas, 203 
 Warwick, Earl of, at Addison's 
 
 death-bed, 198 
 Weather, influence of upon the 
 
 mind, 29 
 West, Gilbert, 322 
 Wharton, Marquis of, 183 
 Whitehead, Paul, 270, 323 
 "Wild Gallant, The," Dryden's, 
 
 63 
 William III., 152, 181 
 Williams, Mrs., xxxvi 
 Withers, Gen. Henry, Pope's epi» 
 
 taph on, 315 
 Wordsworth, viii 
 Worsdale, James, 260 
 Wortley, Lady Mary, z8l, 28J 
 Wotton, Sir Henry, 7 
 Wotton, William, 155 
 Wycherley, William, 225, 249 
 
 Xavier, Francis, life of, 87 
 
 York, Duke of, 77 
 Young, Edward, 357