chance of excellence there is for an author who is forced to write whenever some event gives him a subject on which he may earn. Dryden's poems were almost all occasional, and '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 this respect Pope had a great advantage over Dryden, for Pope '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."

The enumeration could be continued at great length. To select a few more :

At one moment Johnson is laying down a rule as to how illustrations should be worked out, the chief fault to be avoided being a too great likeness between the two things compared3; and at another we find him, in his strong love for the new-born regularity of English numbers, lamenting that there is no fixed rule for the introduction of Alexandrine lines. With shrewd penetration we are warned against judging too harshly of the apparent hypocrisy of private letters: and again, with even greater acuteness, against crediting a man's over-earnest or over-frequent protestations of his contempt for anything, for 'no man thinks much of that which he despises." He gives an admirable exposition of what ought truly to be meant when we speak of an author's originality'; and concludes his Life of Pope with an eloquent application to the poet's particular case of the rule before laid down that success is its own only test. 'Let us enquire 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 disputed.'8

It has been already pointed out that the same test may be applied to Johnson himself, and that, when judged by this

principle, there can be no doubt of his position as a classical prose writer. It is unnecessary to enter upon any of those questions which have sometimes to be considered in awarding the title of classic to other writers; Johnson stands preeminent as the representative of the prose of his time, and his pre-eminence has dwarfed his contemporaries, with the single exception of Burke. In one sense it was not so very difficult for him to stand alone. The bad condition into which English learning had fallen has been already noticed; and Johnson, whose scholarship was rather wide than accurate, found nevertheless few equals in knowledge of the classic languages. To him Latin appeared a necessity, and the genius of the Latin language permeated Johnson's style, contributing to it some of its beauties, many of its faults, and all its peculiarity. During Johnson's long life learning in England began to revive somewhat, a result to which his own influence contributed a large share for any one man. And this dawning of new light for classical scholarship naturally produced a tendency to look down unduly upon the Saxon elements in the language. This was a mistake which was very common in Johnson's day, and from which not even Burke was wholly free. The classical languages have endowed us with precision, but they have not lent us force; they have given a complexion to the body of our speech, but the bones and sinews are Saxon. And in estimating Johnson's style we shall find its chief fault to be an over-pretentious Latinity. This shows most plainly whenever he has to weave into his web threads drawn from the bundle of old English proverbs. To these he is as ruthless a Vandal as ever destroyed the monuments of a fine antiquity. Thus he makes a maidservant translate the old English 'What is done cannot be helped,' or 'It is vain crying over spilt milk,' into the Johnsonian 'What cannot be repaired is not to be regretted."1 To understand the causes of this peculiarity it must never be forgotten that Johnson's prose was the prose of a transition age. At a time when learning was just emerging from almost total neglect, it was natural that men of culture should make that culture the all-important thing, and allow to drop into the background that to which the culture is applied, the human heart, the human intellect-the man himself, in

1 Rasselas, chap. iv.

short. This is a frame of mind which produces a dissatisfaction with what is familiar, often unjustified by the real qualities of the familiar thing. It is ever the danger of a scholar that he should try to find some better vehicle than his mother tongue for communicating his thoughts to his fellow men. And though he should thus excite the admiration of his less learned contemporaries, his tours de force remain as blemishes rather than as beauties in his style, pedantic in his own age and ridiculous in the next. To confuse unfamiliarity with excellence of style was a common enough fault in Johnson's day. To what extent the common language of everyday life was then considered unworthy the use of a man of literature is strikingly shown in the following anecdote from Boswell :

'Talking of the comedy of The Rehearsal he said "It has not wit enough to keep it sweet." This was easy: he therefore caught himself, and pronounced a more round sentence: "It has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction."

The terse vivacity of the easier form, as Boswell calls it, seems to us now preferable to an almost comical degree to the rounder sentence, which Johnson's scholarly instincts substituted for it, and in admiring which Boswell would doubtless have had the concurrence of most of the cultured men of his day.

But though Johnson's style is open to this censure, it must not be concluded that it is really vicious. He that writes much will not easily escape a manner,'2 and Johnson himself came under the operation of this rule. But he knew well the essential constituents of style, as also its ultimate end. That is the best style which best conveys the writer's meaning to the reader's mind; and by this rule Johnson will not be found to fail. Though many sentences are fatiguingly long, very few throughout this volume will be found to be confused. His prose has a certain stately march, and bears his reader along with it :

Strong without rage, without o'erflowing, full.'

The very weightiness of his style was in Johnson's hands a power and not an encumbrance. Few poor men could, without loss of dignity, have so completely repaid with scorn Pope's scorn of poverty. And as an antidote to the jerky style of the modern ephemeral press, the student can have no better regimen

than the writings of Samuel Johnson. And in another essential of style he will bear examination, an essential which he himself pointed out in his critique upon Dryden. Johnson cannot be successfully imitated. It has been thought and said that it would be easy to learn to 'write Johnsonian.' The answer to which is that many in his own time tried to write Johnsonian, but had it not been for the industry of Boswell we should never have heard of one of them. Johnson's intellect was strong enough to go forth to war in heavy harness; he is

'Astur of the four-fold shield,

Girt with the brand none else may wield,'

the prose of his imitators produces an intellectual impression akin to the discomfort of the eye in looking at a very small man walking under a very large hat.

Nor does Johnson fail in the great gift of humour, the peculiar and precious gift of English literature. This is displayed particularly in Rasselas, and is the one point of superiority in that work over Voltaire's Candide. And constantly in Johnson's writing the vein of humour crops up in a sentence of apparently the gravest construction, and the reader's pleasure is heightened by his surprise. To his eternal honour be it added that Johnson's humour is never coarse. Ferocious and unscrupulous as Johnson might be in conversationintellectually the moral nature is ever pure within, and his mirth is as innocent as a child's. No other hand had strength and delicacy to put in such fine touches with so broad a pen.

It may be well to caution the student once for all against attaching too great a value to these Lives as biographies. As narratives of fact they are of very little worth. Johnson was not the man to take minute trouble in investigating into obscure details; and in fact he accepts with very little examination, or with none, any story that may be current about the original of his portraits. So far as a man can be really judged from his own writings Johnson's Lives will be a safe guide to truth. But when his narrative is to be fetched from 'casual mention and uncertain tradition,' Johnson soon gets out of his depth, or rather goes further than his industry will follow him. He had not much talent for estimating probabilities, and readily admits a tale to the disadvantage of any one whom he personally dis

likes. To say that such mistakes were made in the most perfect good faith, while it excuses the workman from much of the blame, does not render the work any more valuable. The two Lives contained in this volume will be found to contain some very serious errors. Few of the dates are accurately given, and many of the incidents are founded upon mere hearsay evidence, and do not bear a moment's examination. Erroneous as they are, they have been here given as Johnson wrote them, no attempt having been made to tamper with the text of a classic under pretext of emendation. It is believed that all the errors are pointed out in the Notes; it is enough, as an example, to call attention here to the strange story of Dryden's funeral, and the obvious falsehood of the incident about Voltaire, narrated by Pope and handed on by Johnson. As it has been said above, it is not as expositions of fact that these Lives are valuable. Their value lies in the wisdom, the knowledge of men and things, which lies scattered over almost every page, sparkling in shrewd remark and epigram. Caring little for the minutiae of this or that particular existence, Johnson knew the facts of human life in general, and in his Lives of the Poets has written a biography of mankind.

The edition followed in the Lives has been that of 1783, the latest edition in Johnson's lifetime, and one in which he had made a few, a very few, corrections of the inaccuracies of the first edition.

Free use has been made of previous editions of the works of Johnson, Dryden, and Pope. To these, as to other works consulted, I must express my acknowledgments in general terms; their number precluding special mention. I have also most gratefully to acknowledge the invaluable aid and counsel received from the Rev. Mark Pattison, B.D., late Rector of Lincoln College, and other kind assistance received from various quarters, in particular from Professor Henry Morley, who has supplied me with some valuable references.