Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?' and in dealing with poets, notably Milton, Parnell, Collins, Dyer, and Gray, into whose work the qualities so highly prized by the Romanticists enter, he either passes over the poems marked by them, or, if he reviews them, ignores the qualities themselves, or, still more frequently, dismisses them with a sneer. But nothing shows so forcibly that it was Johnson's intention to vindicate and glorify the school in which he believed, and to which he himself belonged, as the elaborate panegyrics of its chief leaders, and the fact that his appreciation of the minor poets is regulated by their fidelity to, or their deviation from, its canons and traditions. Should any one doubt this, he would do well to compare the critique of Roscommon with the critique of Collins, or the critiques of Denham and Waller with those of Gray and Dyer.

But, if the chief defects and limitations of the Lives' have an historical interest, an interest of a very different kind attaches itself to the work as a whole. Within his sphere and at his best Johnson has no superior, or perhaps it would be more correct to say no equal, in our literature at least, as a critic. That sphere was, it must be admitted, a comparatively narrow one; and, even when within it, he was not always at his best. He describes himself as having written the 'Lives' in his usual way, dilatorily and hastily, unwilling to work and working with vigour and haste.' Of this haste the indications are at first evident only when he is dealing with poets of little importance, but they become increasingly apparent as the work proceeds and he approaches the poets of his own time, many of whom are despatched with ill-disguised impatience and with very little ceremony. In the greater part and in all the important parts of his work, vigour is certainly more in evidence than haste. Sainte-Beuve tells us that, in a conversation he once had with Villemaine, who was decrying Johnson, he defended him by saying that, whatever might be Johnson's limitations, he had at least two of the qualities essential to a great criticsound judgment and the authority requisite to give weight to it. This puts Johnson exactly in his place. On everything submitted to him he brought to bear, when unprejudiced, sound judgment and robust good sense, combined with extraordinary natural acuteness.

A logical and positive intellect incessantly occupied in analysis and generalisation and enlarged and fertilised by multifarious reading and attentive observation of life, however little it may have contributed to develope the finer sensibilities and sympathies of the critic, not only furnished him with immense general stores of digested information, but with invaluable criteria. If his studies were bounded by his tastes and his inclinations, and these, early fixed, had become prematurely stereotyped, their efficacy and influence had been doubled by their very contraction; for what he had read he retained and assimilated, and on what he had made his own he exercised his judgment. Thus he applied himself to criticism with fixed principles, settled rules, and definite canons, not arbitrarily determined, but deduced from the studies to which taste and temperament inclined him— the Latin classics and their modern disciples chieflywell weighed in the balance of his own judgment and having the sanction of common sense. Within these limits, and universally (it may be added) in what pertains, within the bounds of rhetoric, to the art of expression, his judgments are not merely sound but almost infallible. One gift Johnson possessed which the most perfect critic who ever lived might envy-his power of investing with distinction and impressiveness whatever he wished to convey or enforce.

But to turn to the Lives themselves. The first in order of composition was the Life of Savage, published as a separate work in 1744 and incorporated with the other Lives many years afterwards. It was written under pressure and with extraordinary rapidity, and is a bad specimen of Johnson's first and worst style. The miserable story which is told could scarcely be told more impressively and pathetically; but half the story, as told by Johnson, is fiction. We are surprised that his editors should have allowed this biography to stand without directing attention to the monstrous myth to which Johnson in all innocence gave currency. So far back as 1858, Mr Moy Thomas conclusively proved that Savage's claim to be the son of the Countess of Macclesfield and Earl Rivers had not, as he himself well knew, a shred of evidence to support it, but that in urging it he had simply availed himself of an opportunity afforded by a half

forgotten scandal in the Countess's early life to levy blackmail on her and on her family. A baser, crueller, and blacker-hearted scoundrel than the subject of Johnson's pathetic narrative never existed. His untruthfulness and want of principle Johnson himself acknowledges; and how, with such facts before him as he must have had, he could have been deceived by him is a mystery. Yet so it was; and one of the most callous impostors who ever lived will continue to excite pity, and one of the kindest and most tender-hearted of women execration as a prodigy of cruelty and unnaturalness.

The Lives proper begin with the Life of Cowley. This Johnson always considered the best on account of the dissertation on the metaphysical poets. Of that dissertation he had reason to be proud. It is a masterpiece of analytical criticism. But the whole Life is written with great care and is in Johnson's best style. Cowley has many sides; and Johnson does justice to all. It is, however, curious that he should apparently have found little attraction in poems which, to readers in our day, have much more interest than those singled out by him for special notice. Such would be the Ode on the use of Reason in divine matters. Surely the passage in which the relation of reason to faith is described is far more striking than any quoted by Johnson:

... Reason must assist too; for, in seas

So vast and dangerous as these,

Our course by stars above we cannot know

Without the compass too below.

Though Reason cannot through Faith's mysteries see,

It sees that there and such they be:

Leads to Heaven's door and there does humbly keep,
And there through chinks and key-holes peep.

Though it, like Moses, by a sad command

Must not come into th' Holy Land,

Yet thither it infallibly does guide,

And from afar 'tis all descry'd.'

Johnson's remarks on the importance of language and style as the dress of thought, and his criticism of Cowley's negligence in this respect, are truly admirable. One paragraph may be quoted:

'Truth indeed is always truth, and reason is always reason; they have an intrinsic and unalterable value, and constitute

that intellectual gold which defies destruction. But gold may be so concealed in baser matter that only a chymist can recover it; sense may be so hidden in unrefined and plebeian words that none but philosophers can distinguish it; and both may be so buried in impurities as not to pay the cost of their extraction.'

The Life of Waller, which, in order of composition, followed that of Cowley, is written with equal care and elaboration, and is one of the most finished of the series. Waller scarcely rises above mediocrity as a poet, but he is of importance in the history of the Critical School, and was, moreover, a most interesting man; and this is some justification for the prominence which Johnson has given him. To Waller's adventures and witticisms. ample justice, to his merits and services as a poet more than justice, is done. In none of the Lives' are there more brilliant passages. Thus he speaks of Waller's unsuccessful poetical courtship of Sacharissa and subsequent marriage with a less brilliant mistress:

'He doubtless praised some whom he would have been afraid to marry, and perhaps married one whom he would have been ashamed to praise. Many qualities contribute to domestic happiness upon which poetry has no colours to bestow; and many airs and sallies may delight imagination which he who flatters them can never approve. There are charms made only for distant admiration. No spectacle is nobler than a blaze.' Such, too, are the remarks about Waller's fickleness, and the summary of the general character of his poetry. But the most memorable passage is the justly famous digression on the relation of poetry to religion. It is, however, little more than a piece of splendid sophistry, with a certain amount of truth infused into it, and expressed with an eloquence so fervid that it resembles inspiration. Its best refutation was, as Mrs Thrale told him, the very practical one of his own inability to restrain his tears whenever he heard the Dies Iræ.' As to Denham, we smile to hear him described as 'one of the fathers of English poetry.' Yet there is no mismeasurement in the rest of the critique on this poet; and the term applied to him, being evidently limited to his influence on the style and tone of the Critical School, is, in its strict application less absurd than it appears.

Next to the Life of Denham comes the Life of Milton. It was composed with great care, for Johnson knew that he was on his mettle, and in point of style as well in the power and acumen displayed occasionally and in particular passages is among the best of the 'Lives.' The first thing which strikes us in it is the aggressive and defiant spirit in which it was evidently written. It was plainly designed to shock and offend the admirers of Milton; indeed he frankly said to Malone 'we have too many honeysuckle lives of Milton; mine shall be in another strain.' He detested Milton's politics, he disliked his character, and he had no relish for his poetry. But Johnson's nature was too noble for malignity and too honest to palter with truth. He told the truth, but he told it with reserve and coldness when it was to Milton's credit, and with all the emphasis he could command when it was not to his credit. On what was unpleasing and unamiable in that great man he lays undue stress; and, where he should have been indulgent he is querulous and exacting. He sneers, he objurgates, he censures where, if he pleased, he had a perfect right to do so, but where good-nature would have been silent. His worst offence in the biography is the countenance he gives to the story that Milton interpolated the prayer from Sidney's Arcadia' in 'Icon Basilike,' an abominable charge, of the truth of which he should have satisfied himself before recording and giving it currency. The sincerity of his portentous criticism of Comus,' of 'Lycidas,' of the Sonnets, and of Samson Agonistes' need not be suspected, though prejudice against their author and a paradoxical desire to astonish and disgust his admirers were no doubt largely responsible for its extravagance.

It may fairly be deduced from Johnson's temper and critical utterances that 'Paradise Lost' really appealed to him almost as little as Comus' and 'Samson Agonistes'; but intellectually he recognised its greatness, and was well aware that to dispute its supremacy in modern epic poetry would have been as futile as to dispute the supremacy of the Iliad and Odyssey in ancient. He therefore pre-. pared himself for a great effort when he came to deal with it. The moment we compare his critique with such critiques, say, as those of Hazlitt and Coleridge, we perceive