Essays

turb his judgment, a tolerably correct arbiter of literary reputation, the Doctor would find hard work to persuade any well-read person of the present day, that more than half the verse-writers whose lives he has composed have any claim to be called poets, or even men of distinguished talents. Perhaps the account might be balanced by the addition to his list of as many names as a modern judgment of the literary celebrities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would erase from it. We have learned to look for other qualities in those we honour withthe name of poets than-such as pleased the critics of Johnson's age; or, at least, we have learned a different relative estimate of poetical gifts, and are used to flatter ourselves that ours is a truer and deeper view than the one held by our grandmothers. The result is that reputations have since that time both sunk and risen, forgotten writers have been dug up from the dust of oblivion, and others who lived then per ora virAm, in the gossip of Mrs. Thrale's tea-table, and in the pages of the oracular Doctor, are buried out of sight and hearing, and silence covers them. But taking all such changes of opinion into account, the century and a-half over which Johnson's immortal work extends?for immortal it must be called, though, in reverence be it spoken, it is a collection of lives which is lamentably wanting in many qualities of first-rate biography ?can on no mode of forming the list be made to include a hundred writ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.