No. XXVII.-JOHNSON'S LIVES OF THE POETS.*

MANY years ago, when as yet Blackwood's Magazine was not, and when Blackwood himself kept a sale-room for second-hand books, one of his nightly lots was knocked down cheap to a working man. The day's labours over, the man had come in his working-dress, and was the highest bidder for the lot aforesaid. Three and elevenpence he paid down, and with four volumes under his arm turned his springy step homewards. A gentleman present in the sale-room, but too late for this particular lot, stopped the happy purchaser in his retreat, and offered him an advance on the purchase-money, to an amount sufficiently tempting to working men in general, would he resign the bargain. But no; politely, but firmly the original purchaser declined negotiating; and all that was left for the foiled book-buyer was to stare at a rough workman's insusceptibility to a good offer, and perhaps wonder with a foolish face of praise at his uncompromising preference of literature to lucre. The workman went on his way rejoicing, and the gentleman saw him no more.

Now to that purchase, value (by sale-room scale) three shillings and elevenpence, we indirectly owe two notable contributions to our modern literature; to wit, the Lives of the British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, in Murray's Family Library, by Cunningham père, and the edition now before us, fully and carefully annotated and corrected, of Johnson's Lives of the Poets, in Murray's British Classics, by Cunningham fils.

For the book purchased in the gloaming, auld lang syne, at the Auld Reekie roup, Auld Ebony in the chair, was Johnson's Lives of the Poets; and the purchaser was Allan Cunningham. "Honest Allan," as he was familiarly called-to distinguish him, perhaps, so Thomas Hood suggested, from one Allan-a-Dale, who was apt to mistake his neighbours' goods for his own-was indeed what Sir Walter Scott declared him, “a credit to Caledonia;" "a long credit," Sir Walter might have said, quoth the same kindly humourist, who loved to play on Allan's towering stature. At present he was working as a mason in Edinburgh, not unmindful, amid the daily din and dust of labour, of early joys and hopes in bonny Blackwood and Dalswinton, nor of cherishing the gift of poetry that was in him, and the love of romance that refined him, and which ere long should find expression in such sweet lyrics as My Nanie O," such true ballads as "The young Maxwell," such tender

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* Lives of the most eminent English Poets, with critical Observations on their Works. By Samuel Johnson. With Notes corrective and explanatory, by Peter Cunningham, F.S.A. In Three Vols. Murray. 1854.

"The grenadier of our corps," he styles him, when reviewing the forces of the London Magazine ;-" a physical Colossus of Literature." And again: "Thou was formed for a poet, Allan, by nature, and by stature too, according to Pope

'To snatch a grace beyond the reach of Art.'"

laments, most musical, most melancholy, as "Gane were but the wintercauld," such stirring chansons as "A Wet Sheet and a Flowing Sea,”or again, "rustic epics" like "The Maid of Elvar," and prose fictions like "Paul Jones" and "Sir Michael Scott." No wonder, then, at the stonemason's bidding for Johnson's Lives of the Poets-his gladsome expenditure of three and elevenpence on the four volumes, and his fine "refusal to deal" with the disappointed bibliophile. And now his son tells us, "From this acquisition (gained by the sweat of the brow, in later years honoured with a better binding) my father learnt much, and I have learnt something.. . To my father's cheap but highly-prized acquisition the public is mainly indebted for a good work (the Lives of the British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects), and in that edition I first read Johnson, and determined twenty years ago to become his editor." And here we behold the fulfilment of that resolve, in such an edition as the elder Cunningham would have eagerly bid something more than three and elevenpence for, could old Ebony but have put it up for public competition.

During the interval of years between now and then, there has been no growing acceptance, but the reverse, of Johnson's Lives of the Poets. His criticisms are of the eighteenth century, and it is now the nineteenth, and the better half of that too gone. To the nineteenth century belong poetical tastes of profounder sensibility, and critical judgments of more subtle scrutiny, nobler aspirations, finer sympathies, deeper searchings of heart, than to its predecessor. Wordsworth has sung to us since Johnson's day, and Goethe has mooted new questions of thought and new modes of culture, and our minstrels are such as Tennyson and the Brownings; and our critics are such as the Coleridges, and Hare, and Henry Taylor, and De Quincey, and Carlyle; and our philosophers are such as broach and canvass vexed questions undreamt of in his (rather "mild") philosophy. Accordingly, it is objected by some, that to reprint Johnson's Lives at all is a very work of supererogation, and that to reprint it in such a form, and with such aids and appliances to boot (in the way of costly paper, handsome print," painful" editor, &c.), as distinguish Murray's British Classics, is simply to be deprecated as either a mistake or a piece of mischief-a mistake, if on the presumption that there is a demand for the present supply; a mischief, if with assurance that the supply will beget the demand. Apart, moreover, from their general protest against Johnson as an unqualified teacher in the province of verse, and a blind leader of blind students, the objectors will urge a special demur to the nature of this work, in the compilation of which the Doctor was made to fetch and carry pretty much at the will of his employers, the booksellers. Not only is there an objection to Johnson's born-and-bred inaptitude to criticise the divine art, but to the manner in which he suffered even what aptitude he had, to be hampered by the trade policy of his illiterate paymasters, to be cabin'd, crib'd, confined, by the state of this dull bibliopole's remainders and that enterprising publisher's dead stock. Such was the condition of trade and taste at the time, that in the "Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets," by the Leviathan of then extant critics, we find no such person as Geoffrey Chaucer, but in his room a select coterie of the caste of William King and Thomas Yalden; no one answering to

the style of Edmund Spenser, but, all in high preservation, the names of John Pomfret, and George Stepney, and Richard Duke; no Oliver Goldsmith* even, but a supply quite tolerable and not to be endured, of Spruts and other such small fish that came to the Doctor's net. Sprat among the Most Eminent English Poets! Reverse we Mercutio's apostrophe, and say, O fish, fish, how art thou fleshified! Invert we the adage, and talk not of a Triton among the minnows, but of a minnow among the Tritons. Still this too is incorrect, for in Johnson's Lives the minnows are in the majority, and the Tritons are but one or two, rari nantes in gurgite vasto.

Glad are we, notwithstanding, to welcome this edition of a work that, say its detractors what they list, will take a long time yet to die,-to die, and go we know not where, to lie in cold obstruction and to rot. Like its author, it is rough, tough, burly, and can stand a good deal of critical horse-play without "knocking under." Mr. Cunningham is right in his remark that wherever the world has dissented from Johnson's judgments, the world is still curious to preserve his opinions-because, even when wrong, he is still sagacious and penetrating, and the reader never loses the presence of a clear intellect. A reflective reader will find incomparably more enjoyment and instruction, in following, under protest, the lead of a masculine mind, devious and astray though the route may be, than in keeping up with, and potentially outrunning and "preventing," a common-place writer of sympathies and convictions accurately en rapport with his own. Thus an intelligent man will, though three-pile Tory, infinitely prefer intercourse with Macaulay's history to dozing over stolid prosings to which he heartily assents; and though sturdy Protestant, will more profitably and pleasurably go through the opera omnia of John Newman than the operose orthodoxies of that Father's fourth-rate foes; and though an old-fashioned art-student, will be more refreshed and healthily exercised by collision with the crotchets of Ruskin, than by torpid assent to conventionalities to which he has subscribed all his days and with all his soul. Johnson is felt to be prejudiced, to be frequently superficial in taking exception, to be curiously near-sighted in his perception of petty particulars, curiously short-sighted in his perception of comprehensive generals. Nevertheless he is heard with respect-albeit with stifled interruptions from his auditory, and suppressed murmurs,-with the respect and the interest due to a speaker who has thought out his thoughts, such as they are, and gives them to us in the clearness and with the emphasis of original production, uttered in big manly voice, and with a bluff genuine air of sincerity and truth. At least we have a man to do with, and not an echo; a living presence, and not the shadow of a shade; if a bear, then a great bear, with power as well as clumsiness in that shaggy paw of his,-and no mere frog in the marsh, on the fume and fret for identification with the bull in the meadow. Where understanding alone, Mr. Cunningham contends, is sufficient for poetical criticism, the decisions of Johnson are generally right. Coleridge would have objected that this is just what the under

"It is much to be regretted," says Mr. Cunningham, in his editorial preface, "that the petty interest of a bookseller named Carnan should have excluded Goldsmith from the number of his Lives."

standing never is sufficient for; that poetical criticism, in any sense worthy the name, is the province of something above and beyond the understanding. But allowing, if only by courtesy, that certain versemakers of established repute are "poets," whose "poetry" is characterised in fact by a prominent and pervading exercise of the "understanding," and wholly devoid of "the light that never was on sea or shore, the consecration and the poet's dream," then surely Johnson was qualified to do them justice; to gauge their merits, to appreciate their several characteristics, to show wherein lay their weakness and wherein their strength. Now, with scant exception, this is the very class of "poets" with which his volumes are concerned. Just the singing-men whose strains the "understanding" is adapted to "understand," are they whom Johnson undertakes to review. Hence, few admirers of those earlier minstrels whom he passes over, the poets of Tudor and paulopost-Tudor times, will regret the Doctor's exclusion of them from his critical biographies, however they may resent the slight implied in such exclusion. Southey once said, that the poets before the Restoration were to Johnson what the world before the flood is to historians. If the good Doctor can ensure supplies of our contemporary poets, in the elysian fields, and he once smiled a benign smile on the notion that a lady, who loved Shakspeare too fondly to conceive of paradise without him, would, as she crossed the very limen Olympi, be presented with a glorious copy of his works,-one may marvel what he thinks, supposing him still the manner of man he was, of our "Most Eminent English Poets" since the French Revolution. But the world can probably do as well without his criticism on the latter Georgian and Victorian era of song, as it does without that on the Elizabethan and its after-math.

It is as good as a sermon to note some of the names included in Johnson's constellation of bards. They twinkled, twinkled in their day, each little star, though now we only wonder what they are. Poets, mayhap, there are of our own day, who will at best be reckoned poetasters to-morrow, and the day after will be known only as some of Johnson's poets are known, to be wondered at as interlopers and impostors, who have at length been found out. Thus may we see, quoth the fool in the forest, how the world wags. The world changes its mind as well as its population, and allows no century to set up a court from which there is no appeal. Only run over the names at the beginning of the second volume before us, and meditate on the worth of present "eminence" among English poets. John Pomfret: who was John Pomfret ? Why, for the matter of that, even his biographer as much as says that "nothing is known," so far as the man John is concerned; but as to the poet John, he, we find, "has been always the favourite of that class of readers who, without variety or criticism, seek only their own amusement." The Doctor adds, "He pleases many, and he who pleases many must have some species of merit." John "pleases the many" no more; his title to be "always the favourite" has run out, longer since than the memory of the oldest inhabitant can extend. William Walsh: who was he? The best critic in the nation, said Dryden, and that, he assures us, "without flattery." As for his poetry, he is known more, says his biographer, by his familiarity with greater men, than by anything done or written by himself. Edmund Smith: what about him? He, Johnson

testifies, is one of those lucky writers who have, without much labour, attained high reputation, and who are mentioned with reverence rather for the possession than the exertion of uncommon abilities. What did he write?" Mr. Smith's Pocockius' is of the sublimer kind," says Oldisworth. Enough: pass on to the next case. Richard Duke: what

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report hear we of Richard? Only that in character as a man he was dissolute, and that his poems are neither below mediocrity of merit nor above mediocrity of praise. William King: this eminent English poet was born in London, educated at Oxford, made Gazetteer, and buried in Westminster Abbey; and his poems are pronounced by his biographer to be rather the amusements of idleness than efforts of study, calculated rather to divert than astonish. He neither diverts nor astonishes now; and as for a tomb in Westminster Abbey, except a few habitués of the cathedral, and here and there a savant in Mr. Cunningham's line of things, no man knoweth his sepulchre unto this day. John Hughes: him let Pope describe the description will not offend many now, however depreciatory may be its tone- Hughes was a good humble-spirited man, a great admirer of Mr. Addison, and but a poor writer, except his play, that is very well"-the play being "The Siege of Damascus," "of which it is unnecessary," said Johnson, in whose time it was still a stock-piece on the London boards, "to add a private voice to such continuance of approbation." "I never heard of the man in my life," wrote Swift to Pope, on receiving "the works of John Hughes, Esquire." A good many are in the same category with the Dean; they have never read the "Court of Neptune," seen the " Siege of Damascus," or heard of the man in their life. Thomas Yalden: this reverend doctor (Youlding he should be spelt) wrote poems "of that irregular kind which was supposed to be Pindaric," and now boasts of a still smaller circle of readers than Pindar himself, without the solatium of being, like Pindar, praised to the skies by a catholic tradition of quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus.

With regard to the poets still known and accepted as such, who come under Johnson's notice, it was Cowley whose life and writings he believed himself to have most happily and completely analysed. Boswell ascribes this preference to the Doctor's sense of the value of certain contents of this particular essay-namely, of the dissertation on the Metaphysical Poets, which cost him rather heavily in time and trouble, as he had to "get up" the subject for the occasion,-and again, of the investigation of the nature of Wit. The Life of Milton, that much-canvassed and heartily-abused affair, which illustrates better perhaps than any other of his writings the Doctor's prejudices and powers as a good hater, is considered by Mr. Cunningham unsurpassed as a piece of English composition, and also as an expression of criticisms fine and true upon "Paradise Lost" itself. "His alleged virulence," Mr. Cunningham contends, "is indeed always more in the manner of his matter than the matter itself". a remark which, if we understand its bearing at all, tells all the more against the biographer, who, failing evidence against his victim, quits particular charges for general abuse. "He had no inclination to narrate the events of Milton's career; and he tells us in the very outset of the memoir that he would have contented himself with the addition of a few notes to Fenton's elegant Abridgment, but that a new narrative, for