65 a tail to a kite, and this belief infects all his criticism of poetry. He failed to see that imaginative art teaches indirectly, and that in his far-seeing representation of life, Shakespeare is a profound teacher as well as an imperial poet. Of Johnson as a political pamphleteer it will suffice to say that he failed, as the ablest writer must who deals with a subject about which he has little to guide him beyond the prejudice due to ignorance. To defend the folly which led to American independence was no easy task, and Johnson's strength failed him in the effort. "Taxation no Tyranny" is as dead as the cause it advocated; and even Boswell, who too often magnifies his master indiscriminately, declares, that " positive assertion, sarcastical severity, and extravagant ridicule are united in this rhapsody." A few words must be said with reference to the publication of the "Prayers and Meditations," which Johnson, with his characteristic lack of sensitiveness, allowed to be published after his death. The "Meditations" cover a period of more than forty-five years, and express, without restraint, his spiritual anxieties. The sincerity of the writer cannot be questioned; he does not spare himself nor attempt to conceal his wayward thoughts and superstitions. His faults, his resolutions, his regrets at failure are all noted down with a minuteness of detail that would be wearisome, were it not that they reveal, as nothing else which he has published can, the fears and struggles of the writer. Johnson had a full E perception of his intellectual greatness, but when placing himself in the Great Taskmaster's eye, he acknowledged his frailty, as every sincere and thoughtful man must. "THE LIVES OF THE POETS" IN our days the tendency of literary criticism is to ignore morality altogether: Art, it is asserted, has a world of its own, in which there is no room for the pedestrian footsteps of the moralist. Is an imaginative work beautiful in conception and execution? then, whatever be its tendency, the critic must pronounce it good. That Winckelmann, for example, joined the Roman Catholic Church, not from conviction, but from convenience as an artist, has been said by a distinguished critic to more than absolve him at the bar of the highest criticism. To exalt art at the expense of morality is too often the error in our time; Johnson, on the contrary, and the critics of the eighteenth century, if they did not exactly ask what a poem proved, never failed to expect and to seek for a moral purpose in the poet. "The Lives of the Poets" (which should be read with notes, for the biographer is often inaccurate in dates and facts), begins with the birth of Cowley in 1618, and ends with the death of Lord Lyttelton in 1773, a period of little more than a century and a half. With the whole time Johnson had a wide acquaintance, and apart from the value of his criticism, he relates much not readily to be found elsewhere. And it is no small boon to gain our knowledge from a man of letters so richly endowed, and living as it were in the centre of the age of which he is the historian. The "Lives" may, therefore, be said to represent the high-water mark of criticism at that period. There were men, indeed, who rebelled against the lexicographer's authority as a poetical dictator, as there always will be dissenters from the established faith. "Oh! I could thrash his old jacket till I made his pension jingle in his pocket," was the cry of Cowper, upon reading his judgement of "Paradise Lost"; but Johnson expressed the mind of the time, and did it with a force that makes his comments interesting still. Within his own range his criticism is excellent. If he sneered at Milton's "Sonnets," treated "Lycidas" with contempt, and found "Comus " tediously instructive; if he failed to appreciate the lyric genius of Collins, and could find nothing in Gray to praise save the "Elegy"; he is a masterly critic of Cowley, Dryden, and Pope; and there is not a poet or verse-man named in the "Lives" who does not suggest to his biographer some weighty thought or felicitous illustration. The insignificance of the subject was indeed no barrier to Johnson, and many of his happiest passages will be found in the account of men whose names live only in his pages. And it may be observed, that at no period of our literary history were there so many poetasters as in the years which separate Dryden from Johnson, for verse-making was as much the disease |