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summer," he writes to Boswell, August 21, 1780, "thinking to write the 'Lives,' and a great part of the time only thinking. Several of them, however, are done, and I still think to do the rest." This still thinking and not performing brought other difficulties, and as time began to press, he gladly adopted a life of Dr. Young, written by Herbert Croft, then an unknown man ambitious of literary distinction. He was willing to have obtained other favours of a like character, for the progress of his undertaking had brought him to the task of writing the lives of his contemporaries, and of some still younger than himself. He did not care for the new school of poetry, nor for the poets themselves. He knew his own prejudices, hurried through his work, and brought it to a close.

"Some time in March" (he observes in his annual review made Easter, 1781) "I finished the Lives of the Poets,' which I wrote in my usual way, dilatorily and hastily, unwilling to work, and working with vigour and haste." What he has said of Addison and "Cato" is still more applicable to his own achievement. "Cato," he says, "was at length completed, but with brevity irregularly disproportionate to the foregoing parts, like a task performed with reluctance and hurried to its conclusion."

The Lives of the Poets' made a stir at the time in the world of letters. A cry was raised on more grounds than one against his Life of Milton. "I could thrash his old jacket," writes Cowper, "till I made his pension jingle in his pocket." All Cambridge was in arms against what Mackintosh has called "that monstrous example of critical injustice which he entitles the Life of Gray." The same feeling was expressed against his criticism on Collins, and only less generally because the reputation of that poet was but then upon the rise. The friends of Lord Lyttelton were annoyed at the contempt, artful and studied as they called it, thrown upon the character of a nobleman who, with all the little foibles he might have, was, in their eyes, one of the most exalted patterns of virtue, liberality, and benevolence. Great displeasure was expressed with equal justice at his account of Thomson, while his censure of Aken

side was thought by many what it really is, illiberal, and his criticism on Prior was condemned as "severe and unjust."

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Notwithstanding these and other complaints of the spirit in which the Lives' were written, Johnson's great work obtained an immediate popularity which has continued to our own time, and will certainly continue unimpaired. Biography," says this greatest of biographers, "is of the various kinds of narrative writing that which is most eagerly read, and most easily applied to the purposes of life." This was said long before the Lives of the Poets' were even thought of, and it is in this application of others' lives to the purposes and nicer uses of our own, that the essential value of Johnson's work may be said to consist. The secret of Johnson's excellence will be found in the knowledge of human life which his 'Lives' exhibit; in the many admirable reflections they contain, varying and illustrating the narrative without overlaying it; in the virtue they hold up to admiration, and in the religion they inculcate. He possessed the rare art of teaching what is not familiar, of lending an interest to a twice-told tale, and of recommending known truths by his manner of adorning them. He seized at once the leading features, and though he may have omitted a pimple or a freckle, his likeness is unmistakeable-defined yet general, summary yet exact.

The industry of Johnson was exerted and exhausted in his Dictionary. After that great task indolence overtook him, from which he never altogether recovered. Those common necessities which before compelled him to write, no longer existed, and his pension only added to his disinclination for work. When he engaged to write the 'Lives of the Poets,' he was in his seventieth year, and in the full vigour of his faculties, yet he wrote, as we have seen, dilatorily and hastily, and almost without books. Deservedly held as the greatest writer of his time, he was aware of the importance of the task he had undertaken, and of what would be expected from him. He knew his strength, and that the value of his work would not depend on the minute succession of facts, but on the characters, drawn as they would be

'Idler,' No. 84, November 24, 1759.

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from books and men, and marked with a happiness of illustration almost peculiar to himself. He had read with critical eyes the important volume of human life, and knew the heart of man from the depths of stratagem to the surface of affectation. He knew also his own prejudices, for he had already described in print the temptations which beset and mislead a biographer -"He that writes the life of another is either his friend or his enemy, and wishes either to exalt his praise or aggravate his infamy: many temptations to falsehood will occur in the disguise of passions, too specious to fear much resistance. Love of virtue will animate panegyric, and hatred of wickedness embitter censure. The zeal of gratitude, the ardour of patriotism, fondness for an opinion, or fidelity to a party, may easily overpower the vigilance of a mind habitually well disposed, and prevail over unassisted and unfriended veracity." 2

Dictatorial in conversation and confident in his own resources, he delighted in argument; nor was he at times over scrupulous in his manner of obtaining victory. He remembered an early observation of his own: "Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority.' The same seeking for superiority is to be found in the Lives of the Poets,'—and the reader is now and then required to see the Doctor and Dictator triumphant over the subject of his narrative.

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When Boswell remarked that in writing a life a man's peculiarities should be mentioned, because they mark his character, Johnson observed in reply, "Sir, there is no doubt as to peculiarities the question is whether a man's vices should be mentioned; for instance, whether it should be mentioned that Addison and Parnell drank too freely; for people will probably more easily indulge in drinking from knowing this; so that more ill may be done by the example than good by telling the whole truth." Yet he observed on another occasion, and to Boswell, that "it would produce an instructive caution to avoid drinking, when it was seen that even the learning and genius of Parnell could be debased by it." Indeed he was not always true to himself. When asked if it was not wrong in Orrery to 2 Idler,' No. 84.

3 Rambler,' No. 2.

expose the defects of a man with whom he had lived in intimacy, he replied, "Why, no, Sir, after the man is dead; for then it is done historically." And that man was Swift.

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Of the errors into which Johnson has fallen in his 'Lives,' some account may be expected by the readers of this edition. They are of two kinds-those attributable to the imperfect information of his period, and those due to his own neglect. Thus, in the first written of the 'Lives,' that of Cowley, he tells us in one place that Cowley's unfinished epic is in three books, and in another place (a few pages on) that it is in four. We may safely suspect that he had never read Cowley's Comedy-for he mistakes its title. In his Waller' he finds fault with Fenton for an error made by himself, from confounding two poems. In the same life he calls Hampden the uncle of Waller instead of the cousin. In his Life of Milton' he cites Philips (Milton's nephew) for a remarkable statement not to be found in Philips, and attributes to Ellwood (Milton's Quaker friend) the preservation of a doubtful story said to have come from Milton's own lips, which is certainly not in Ellwood;-while he states oddly enough "that 'Paradise Lost,' originally published in ten books, was made into twelve by dividing the seventh and twelfth," meaning of course the seventh and tenth. Where his preparations had been greater, he is still more inaccurate. Thus he says of Dryden's 'King Arthur' what is true of Albion and Albanius; mistakes the origin of Mac Flecknoe,' and the date of its appearance; informs his readers that King James and not King Charles made Dryden historiographer; assigns Dryden's translation of Maimbourg to a period subsequent to his conversion, when it was well known that it appeared while Charles the Second was yet alive; states positively-and in two placesthat Dryden translated only one of Ovid's Epistles, whereas he translated at least two; attributes to Settle what is by Pordage; and, from not looking into Burnet for himself, makes Dryden the author of an answer actually written by Varillas.

Let me continue, though briefly, the enumeration. He is altogether wrong about Cowley's parentage. He makes Lord Roscommon live into King James's reign; calls Lord Ro

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chester's daughter his sister; refers to Palaprat's 'Alcibiade,' when there is no such production; makes Venice Preserved' the last of Otway's plays, which it was far from being; writes the Life of the Earl of Dorset,' and in three other places advances him to a dukedom, which he never obtained; ascribes to Walsh what was written by Chetwood; asserts that Addison never printed his poem to Sacheverell, whereas it is to be seen with his other earliest printed productions in so common a book as Tonson's Miscellany; confounds Sir Richard Steele with Dicky Norris the actor; attributes a discovery to Congreve—that Pindaric odes were regular-when the discovery is to be found in Ben Jonson and Philips's Theatrum Poetarum;' taxes Warburton with making an arrangement of Pope's Epistles, which Pope himself had made; informs us in the Life of Pope' that the Pastorals of Philips and Pope appeared for the first time in the same Miscellany, but forgets his information when he comes to the life of Philips. While he is wrong in the years of birth of Savage, Somervile, Yalden, and Collins, he is equally incorrect respecting the dates of death of Dryden, Garth, Parnell, and Collins.

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Boswell complains that Johnson was by no means attentive -to minute accuracy, and omitted when reprinting his Lives to correct the errors that were pointed out to him. Indeed, in his brief Advertisement to the whole work he acknowledges that in the minute kind of history, so constantly requisite in biographical writing, the succession of facts is not easily discovered, and that "longer premeditation" might have added to his materials, while in the lives of later writers he might by attention and inquiry have gleaned many particulars which would have diversified and enlivened his work. "To adjust the minute events of literary history is," he tells us in his Life of Dryden,'" tedious and troublesome; it requires indeed no great force of understanding, but often depends upon inquiries which there is no opportunity of making, or is to be fetched from books and pamphlets not always at hand." He reverts to the same subject and to other attendant difficulties in the first written of the second series of his Lives-that of Addison : "The necessity of complying with times, and of sparing persons,

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