particularly to his exquifite paper in the Rambler (N° 54) on the deaths and afperity of literary men. It is hardly poffible, I think, to read the paper I have mentioned without lofing, for fome time at least, all fenfations of difpleasure towards the eloquent, the tender moralift, and reflecting, with a fort of friendly fatisfaction, that, as long as the language of England exifts, the name of JOHNSON will remain, and deferve to remain,

Magnum & memorabile nomen,

As long as eloquence and morality are objects of public regard, we muft revere that great mental phyfician, who has given to us all, infirm mortals as the best of us are, fuch admirable prescriptions for the regimen of mind, and we should rather speak in forrow than in anger, when we are forced to recollect, that, like other phyficians, however able and perfect in theory, he failed to correct the infirmity of his own morbid spirit. You, my dear Warton, whom an oppofite temperament has made a critic of a more airy and cheerful complexion, you are one of the beft

witnesses that I could poffibly produce, if I had

any
occafion to prove that my ideas of Johnson's
malevolent prejudices againft Milton are not the
offsprings of a fancy equally prejudiced itfelf
against the great author, whofe prejudices I have
prefumed to oppofe; you, my dear friend, have
heard the harfh critic advance in conversation an
opinion against Milton, even more fevere than
the many detractive farcafms with which his life
of the great poet abounds; you have heard him
declaim against the admiration excited by the poe-
try of Milton, and affirm it to be nothing more
than the cant (to ufe his own favorite phrafe)
of affected fenfibility.

I have prefumed to fay, that Johnson fometimes appears as an infidious enemy to the poet. Is there not fome degree. of infidious hoftility in his introducing into his dictionary, under the article Sonnet, the very fonnet of Milton, which an enemy would certainly chufe, who wifhed' to reprefent Milton as a writer of verfes entitled to fcorn and derifion? You will immediately recollect that I allude to the fonnet which begins thus:

..

A book was writ of late called Tetrachordon."

The fonnet is, in truth, contemptible enough, if we suppose that Milton intended it as a serious compofition; but I apprehend it was an idle lufus poeticus, and either meant as a ludicrous parody on fome other fonnet which has funk into oblivion, or merely written as a trifling paftimes to show that it is poffible to compose a fonnet with words moft unfriendly to rhyme. However this may be, it was barbarous furely towards Milton (and, I might add, towards the poetry of England) to exhibit this unhappy little production, in fo confpicuous a manner, as a fpecimen of English fonnets. Yet I perceive it is poffible to give a milder interpretation of Johnson's defign in his difplay of this unfortunaté fonnet; and as I moft fincerely wish not to charge him with more malevolence towards Milton than he really exerted, I will obferve on this occafion, that as he had little, or rather no relish for fonnets, which the ftern logician seems to have defpifed as perplexing trifles (difficiles nuge) he might only mean to deter young poetical ftudents from a kind of verfe that he difliked, by leading them to remark, how the greatest of our poets had failed in this petty

compofition. You, who perfectly know how much more inclined I am to praife than to cenfure, will give me full credit for my fincerity in faying, that I wish to acquit Johnson of malevolence in every article where my reason will allow me to do fo. I have been under the painful neceffity of displaying continually, in the following work, the various examples of his feverity to Milton. Nothing is more apt to excite our fpleen than a stroke of injustice against an author whom we love and revere; but I fhould be forry to find myself infected by the acrimony which I was obliged to difplay, and I should be equally forry to run into an oppofite failing, and to indulge afpirit of obloquy, like Mrs. Candor, in the School for Scandal, with all the grimaces of affected good nature. I have spoken, therefore my own feelings, without bitterness and without timidity. I cannot fay that I speak of Johnson "fine ira & ftudio," as Tacitus faid of other great men (very differently great!) for, in truth, I feel towards the fame object those two oppofite fources of prejudice and partiality as a critical biographer of the poets he often excites my tranfient

indignation; but as an eloquent teacher of morality he fills me with more lasting reverence and affection.

His lives of the poets will probably give birth, in this or the next century, to a work of literary retaliation. Whenever a poet arises with as large a portion of spleen towards the critical writers of past ages, as Johnson indulged towards the poets in his poetical biography, the literature of England will be enriched with " the Lives of the Critics," a work from which you, my dear Warton, will have little to apprehend; you, whofe effay teaches, as the critical biographer very truly and liberally obferved," how the brow of criticism may be "fmoothed, and how she may be enabled, with "all her severity, to attract and delight."

Yet to show how apt a writer of verses is to accuse a profest critic of feverity, we may both recollect, that when I had occafion to speak of your entertaining and inftructive Effay on Pope, I fcrupled not to confider the main scope of it a little too fevere; and in truth, my dear friend, I think fo ftill; because it is the aim of that charming Effay to prove, that Pope poffeffed not