end he was distinguished by the same ardour for literature, the same constant piety, the same kindness for his friends, and the same vivacity both in conversation and writing.' He died on the 13th December 1784, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

'An elegant collection of the best biography and criticism of which our language can boast.' Such is Boswell's commentary upon the Lives. Later writers have, no doubt, hesitated to concur in this simple and sweeping expression of opinion, and the public has long desisted from 'conspiring to squander praise' on Johnson. Yet it is very generally admitted that this work is the finest of his performances; and though it has been frequently misjudged and frequently misunderstood, it cannot be said that the decision of posterity has been other than generous; kindly in intention, if sometimes less than intelligent in application. This is the more creditable to the candour of recent critics that the Lives are conspicuously and lamentably deficient in a particular wherein the present age has covered itself with glory. The modern literary historian will spend years in discovering the date of anybody's birth, and will exalt with the name of biography two swelling volumes composed in equal parts of parish register, Stationers' Hall, charter chest, and Somerset House. Johnson, on the contrary, owns that he engaged in his undertaking with less provision of material than longer premeditation might have accumulated, and frankly confesses that 'to adjust the minute events of literary history is tedious and troublesome.' Nay, he makes bold to add that to do so 'requires no great force of understanding.' He, for one, was not to run, like Boswell, half over London to verify a date. Hence a considerable number of trivial errors, which the diligence of annotators has corrected. Yet most people, perhaps, will prefer Johnson

wrong before Peter Cunningham right, and had rather know what Johnson learned from some old catalogue, or heard from 'my father, an old bookseller,' or from Mr. Savage, or from old Mr. Cibber, than peruse a file of the Gazette, or dig in a shapeless mass of raw material from the Public Record Office.

The chief quarrel, to be sure, of later writers with Dr. Johnson has been on the score of certain defects of taste, certain eccentricities of judgment, which it were vain to extenuate or deny. To us, assuredly, the Epistle to Abelard scarce seems 'one of the most happy productions of human wit'; we are reluctant to admit Akenside to be 'superior in the fabrication of his lines to any other writer of blank verse'; and most of us think that, given the mass of English poetry to choose from, we can hit upon more 'poetical paragraphs' than the well-known passage from The Mourning Bride. What, too, we immediately ask, is to be said of the critical faculty of one who made interest for the inclusion in the English poets of Blackmore, Watts, Pomfret and Yalden, and who excluded, or, at least, acquiesced in the exclusion of, every writer of prior date to Waller? Or what of the insensibility which spurned at Chevy Chase? (Though, in truth, to praise that ballad as Addison praised it is to the full as wrong-headed as to find in it nought but 'chill and lifeless imbecility.') To expatiate on what seem to us mistaken views were superfluous. Nor need we long dwell with the indulgence of superior discernment on the unhappy prediction that, after Pope, '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.' We all know how the prophecy has been falsified. We all see that the resources of art were not then, nor are they now, exhausted. But to twit the sage with his palpable discomfiture

were as sheer waste of time as to speculate if he might not have enriched the world with 'something sublime' upon the Gunpowder Plot, or why he ceased early in life to warble the amatory lay.' Nevertheless, of Johnson's critical opinions from which men have agreed to differ, there are others that, being due neither to caprice nor to visitations of 'stark insensibility,' may not be so summarily dismissed. His inflexible preference of rhyme to blank verse, his disgust at Lycidas, his contempt for Gray's Odes, if we cannot share, we can, to some extent at least, explain by a consideration of the general canons of criticism disclosed in the Lives.

Criticism, then, according to Johnson, is not a matter of hard and fast rule. It is essentially a matter of perception, not of principle, whatever they may say who sneer at Addison's judgments as 'tentative and experimental rather than scientific.' One of the great defects of Cowley and his school is that their verse stands the test of the finger better than that of the ear; and the prime merit of Dryden's critical work consists in its being the criticism of a poet and not a 'dull collection of theorems.' Hence we reach the cardinal proposition, that the object of poetry is to gratify a particular taste: in a word, to please. 'Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the help of reason.' '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.' Once more: "Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults: negligences and errors are single and local, but tediousness pervades the whole. Other faults are censured and forgotten, but the power of tedionsness propagates itself.' And here it may be proper to glance at Johnson's view of the relation subsisting between Morals and Art. That he who was emphatically a good man and not, like Savage, merely the friend of goodness, who was

scarce less eminent as a moralist than as a lexicographer, who saw that men are of necessity 'perpetually moral, but are geometricians'-he might have added, or poets or paintersonly by chance,'—that such an one should be apt to confound the ethical with the æsthetic, the good with the beautiful, was to be expected. The tendency betrays itself perhaps, more strongly than anywhere else in the admirable Preface to Shakespeare, where he imputes it as a fault to the dramatist that he seems to write without any moral purpose,' and where he complains that he is not always 'careful to show in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked.' What is really surprising is, that as he grew older Johnson's innate candour and vigour of intellect triumphed over the tendency and so far detached him from a highly congenial doctrine that, if he did not explicitly disavow it, he perceptibly inclined towards a view indicated in the Life of Savage, where, so far from making morals the chief consideration, he had recommended The Wanderer only in the last resort as a poem that could at least 'promote no other purposes than those of virtue,' being 'written with a very strong sense of the efficacy of religion': which he parenthetically and almost half-heartedly remarks, ́ought to be [and by implication is not] thought equivalent to many other excellencies.' True, he hoped that the Lives were so written as to tend to the promotion of piety.' True, he goes out of his way to compliment his favourite Richardson upon having excelled Rowe in moral effect. True, he could not resist the taking a parting shot at Gray, and therefore opined that The Bard-(which promoted no truth moral or political' that he could see)'might have been concluded with an action of better example' than suicide. But, upon the whole, in the Lives he is not only lenient to offences against decorum, which without overniceness he might have visited with severity, but his point of

view is quite different from what it had been fifteen years before. Pope's Essay on Man, for example, where vulgarity of sentiment' contends for supremacy with 'penury of knowledge,' is a singular combination of fallacies and truisms. No one knew that better than Johnson, who, with incomparable skill, has exposed the triteness of its maxims, and the tenuity of its reasoning. Yet with what generous enthusiasm he hails that ' egregious instance of the predominance of genius'! How he salutes its 'blaze of embellishment,' its 'sweetness of melody' ! Listen to this 'model of encomiastic criticism': 'The vigorous contraction of some thoughts, the luxuriant amplification of others, the incidental illustrations, and sometimes the dignity, sometimes the softness, of the verses, enchain philosophy, suspend criticism, and oppress judgment by overpowering pleasure.' And while on the one hand Johnson seems to insist that not the subject but its treatment discovers the poet, on the other he is ever scrupulous to distinguish between the writer and the man. Unlike the worthy Matthew Bramble, he was not shocked to find a man have sublime ideas in his head and nothing but illiberal sentiments in his heart; for he knew that the loftiest poetry might be the work of an 'acrimonious and surly republican.' 'With the philosophical or religious tenets of the author,' he says, in the life of Akenside, 'I have nothing to do my business is with his poetry.' 'That poetry and virtue,' he remarks in the life of Gray, 'go always together, is an opinion so pleasing that I can forgive him who resolves to think it true.' That is not the language of a man who is resolved to think it true himself.

The production of a certain species of pleasure being the object of poetry, it next falls to be considered what qualities contribute to the desired result. Mere prettiness will not suffice. Pretty things, which are pretty and no more, are 'flowers fragrant and fair, but of short duration; or they are