INTRODUCTION.

JOHNSON'S Lives of the Poets were issued between 1779 and 1781. His original undertaking was merely to furnish short biographical prefaces to an edition of the poets from Cowley downwards, which in 1777 certain booksellers contemplated publishing. The task was one, says Macaulay (Biography of Johnson), "for which he was pre-eminently qualified. His knowledge of the literary history of England 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; Cibber, 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 honourable kind to Pope. The biographer therefore sate 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 Lives of the Poets are, on the whole, the best of Johnson's works. The narratives are as 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 prejudice and deficient in sensibility, but vigorous and acute. They, therefore, generally contain a portion of valuable truth which deserves 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." As to the style of the work, Macaulay continues, "Since Johnson had been at ease in his circumstances he had written little and talked much. When, therefore, he, after a lapse of years, resumed his pen, the mannerism which he had contracted while he was in the constant habit of elaborate composition was less perceptible than formerly; and his diction frequently 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 most careless reader."

Foremost in the rank of English poets of course stood Milton; and if his life as written by Johnson is not among the best of the series, its inferiority lies not in want of completeness or thoroughness of research. To its author the task was no doubt less congenial than in

the case of any of the other great poets with whom he had to deal. A bigoted and extreme Tory, Johnson had to criticize the principles and political actions of one who held doctrines as extreme, if not as bigoted, in the opposite direction. A High Churchman of the most unbending type, he was called upon to pass in review writings violently latitudinarian, schismatic, and, as the Treatise of Christian Doctrine shows, scarcely to be reconciled with any form of received religion. Think of the horror and loathing with which Johnson must have regarded The Demise of Kings and Magistrates, Eikonoklastes, Defence of the People of England, tractates in which kingly power is banned with curses of malignant fierceness, in which Charles, the beloved idol of Johnson's veneration, is insulted, harried, scourged, his divinity ridiculed, his execution sanctified, his downfall made the subject of a song of triumph! How should Johnson not shudder at the History of Reformation, the Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty, denunciations of everything sacerdotal. that from his early boyhood had been cherished as reverend, holy, sealed with the seal of God's institution and upholding! To him the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, which even to many of Milton's fellow-thinkers was a stumbling-block, must have read as blasphemous arrogance; the Areopagitica, in whose trumpet tones liberty of thought and speech is proclaimed as an indefeasible right, probably sounded as a blast of revolutionary special-pleading and unbridled license of argument; while could he have read the longlost Treatise of Christian Doctrine, with its Pantheistic Materialism, its heresy as to the Decalogue, its justification of Polygamy, it would no doubt have been branded

น

as the ravings of lunacy, or the inspiration of Belial. "Fair is foul and foul is fair" might express Johnson's estimate of Milton's tenets, political and theological. The gods of the poet are the fiends of the critic. If, therefore, in the Life he could not even hope to be impartial, if here and again he lets fall an unworthy gibe, belittles Milton's aims and occupations, makes light of his sufferings and dangers, exaggerates his failings, questions the sincerity of his political faith, insinuates. acts of baseness, colours as magnanimous clemency the mixture of policy and disdain which left the poet untouched amid the persecution and proscription which followed upon the Restoration; if the critic's appraisement of the poet is sometimes marred by a distorted estimate of the man, and a standard applied by which he would not have measured anyone else: we may yet admit that honesty of intention and a conscientious belief that he was serving the cause of truth were at the bottom of his severest strictures. Political and religious prejudice, however, was not the only difficulty in Johnson's path. Of Milton's cast of poetry, whether in its lighter or its more serious forms, the critic was by nature but poorly fitted to judge. With didactic, narrative, or satirical verse, he was at home. Where loftier flights were in question, his imagination failed to follow. His criticisms of the dramatic powers of Shakespeare, of the epic powers of Milton, are wholly inadequate; and from one who laid it down as an undeniable proposition that during the latter part of the seventeenth century and the earlier part of the eighteenth century, English poetry had been in a constant progress of improvement, we should be foolish