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haste to gratify the public curiosity, there is danger lest his interest, his fear, his gratitude, or his tenderness overpower his fidelity, and tempt him to conceal, if not to invent. There are many who think it an act of piety to hide the faults or failings of their friends, even when they can no longer suffer by their detection; we therefore see whole ranks of characters adorned with uniform panegyric, and not to be known from one another but by extrinsic and casual circumstances. “Let me remember,' says Hale, when I find myself inclined to pity a criminal, that there is likewise a pity due to the country.' If we regard the memory of the dead, there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue, and to truth."

Where Johnson does not cite his authorities in footnotes, he leaves the reader to infer that he has obtained his information from accessible materials. Yet-and mark his incessant love of truth-where he introduces new matter, he is particularly careful to name the persons from whom he derived it. Thus we find him citing his father, an old bookseller, in illustration of the sale of 'Absalom and Achitophel,' and the characteristic story he has given of the preaching of Burnet and Sprat. His friends in early life are frequently appealed to. From Walmsley (most enduringly remembered in these Lives) he derives a story about Rag Smith and Addison. Andrew Corbet of Shropshire is his authority for the anecdote of Addison and the barring out. Mr. Ing and “the well known Ford” (Hogarth's Ford) are cited in support of passages in his Life of Broome. Mr. Locker of the Leather-sellers' Company and Mr. Clark of Lincoln's Inn, are two more authorities to whom he refers, and of whom I have learnt nothing. I would that Boswell had known them! Dr. Madden—"a name which Ireland ought to honour”—is produced thrice as his authority in his Lives of Addison and Swift. Dr. Hawkesworth he acknowledges as his authority for an anecdote of modest Foster (no common man). He draws at times on booksellers of name in support of what he states. Thus we find him referring to Mr. Draper, —to Osborne, whom he knocked down, and in two or three places to Mr. Dodsley. Persons of still greater reputation occasionally occur. What Lord Orrery told him of Swift he has introduced into Swift's Life; and what Lord Marchmont, Bishop Warburton, Richardson the painter, and Dobson the scholar, told him about Pope, he has given on their authority. “Miller, the great gardener,” “ the late learned Mr. Dyer," Dr. Gregory, Mr. Thyer, Mr. Hampton (the translator of Polybius), and Mrs. Porter the actress, are cited by name; and his own wife,

“Rambler,' No. 60.

he says,

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

In thus appealing to his authorities, he no doubt kept in view the caution he had addressed to Warton and others many years before, on the danger and weakness of trusting too readily to information. “Nothing,”

“but experience could evince the frequency of false information, or enable any man to conceive that so many groundless reports should be propagated as every man of eminence may hear of himself. Some men relate what they think as what they know; some men of confused memories and habitual inaccuracy ascribe to one man what belongs to another; and some talk on without thought or care. A few men are sufficient to broach falsehoods, which are afterwards innocently diffused by successive relaters." 6

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

"Ev'n such small critics some regard may claim,
Preserved in Milton's or in Shakespeare's name.”

POPE: Epistle to Arbuthnot.

Brown and Dennis, both able men, will now live chiefly through the great poets they attacked and the proper importance which Johnson gave to their writings from his knowledge of the influence such satire and criticism exercised on the age in which he himself chose to be (and was) a poet. When writing the Lives of Wordsworth and Keats, we must not forget the injurious criticisms of the “Edinburgh,' or the bitter notice of the 'Quarterly.' The next generation will no doubt wonder in what way poetic reputations could have been injured by such criticism, as we ourselves wonder in what way Dryden could have been hurt by Brown's light shafts or Milbourne's heavy artillery, or Pope's reputation (high as it was) injured, even for a season, by the sullen asperities of Dennis.

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

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

As a piece of English composition there is no better life of Milton than Johnson's brief and admirable narrative; Todd is more full and accurate, and Brydges more enthusiastic and impartial, but the former is cumbrous and unmethodical, the latter pleasant but superficial. Johnson (he had no predecessor of name) has not been outstripped.

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

a

the hold that this memoir has had upon mankind may be best illustrated by a passage in Lord Byron :

“Milton's the prince of poets,—so we say,

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

Learn'd, pious, temperate in love and wine :
But his life falling into Johnson's way,

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

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

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

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

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

With less probability, other reasons are assigned: “he seems to me,"

writes Boswell, “ to have an unaccountable prejudice against Swift; for I once took the liberty to ask him if Swift had personally offended him, and he told me he had not.” He was certainly, as Scott says, no friend to the fame of Swift.?

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

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

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

When Boswell, in conversation with Burke, characterised the Life of Young' as a work possessing a considerable share of merit, and display

? Misc. Works, ed. 1834, vol. ii., p. 441.

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