No More Learning

Yet
1 He travelled, of course, much on foot, but it is not probable that he always did so.
It was not his way to record on all occasions how he travelled. The distances which he
walked have been absurdly exaggerated.
? See the story told more at length in the second volume of Gray's Letters (1904).
6


## p. 135 (#161) ############################################

>
Gray's letters
135
no small part of his reputation rests, for us, upon copious MSS,
carefully preserved by him, but never intended to be seen, except
by an esoteric circle. To begin with, his invaluable letters are an
index to his whole character, and to the humorous spirit that
is often, as in the case of Hood, twin sister to melancholy. In
his letters, his life lies spread out before us; they are the only
absolutely trustworthy records for his biographers. Their interest
lies in their infinite variety. Walpole was a better historian of
social life; but his claims to erudition were slight, his obligations
to Gray, acknowledged and unacknowledged, were great, and his
scientific knowledge was nil; while, whatever the interest of his
letters for political and social history, they contain nothing com-
parable to the depth and pathos of Gray's more limited memories
and friendships. On the other hand, Gray's letters are an excellent
guide as a survey of continental literature; the best French writers
he literally devoured; his liking for inferior fiction he shared with
the fashionable world, partly because it was fashionable, but such
writers as Montesquieu, Buffon and the encyclopaedists he read
with enthusiasm. With Rousseau, except his Emile, and with
Voltaire, he is utterly out of sympathy. He plunges deep into the
pages of Froissart, the Herodotus of a barbarous age,' of Sully's
Mémoires, of Madame de Maintenon's letters, and the memoirs
of that French Fanny Burney, Madame de Staal Delaunay. He
knows, beside Froissart, all the old French chroniclers, and gives
advice as to the order and method of their study. While, at times,
like a market-gardener, he exchanges with Wharton notes as to
the dates of the returns of the seasons and the state of the crops,
he is also a man of science. He is in touch with Linnaeus, through
his disciple at Upsala, and with the English naturalist Stillingfieet.
Classical literature has, for him, no dry bones. He rises to
enthusiasm on such subjects and expects Wharton to share his
delight in the description of the retreat from Syracuse, which his
friend has just reached in the seventh book of Thucydides.
In December 1757, he was offered the laureateship, but con-
temptuously declined it; the offer, nevertheless, was a tribute to
him, as the first poet of his generation. And, indeed, in 1748,
before he had written very much, he sat in scornful judgment
upon his contemporaries. In Dodsley's collection of that year, the
only living poets whom he can praise unreservedly are Shenstone
1 See his Anecdotes of Painting and Gray's comments; also, Gray's criticisms on
Historic Doubts (read between the lines).
* As to Walpole’s letters, see chap. XI, post.


## p. 136 (#162) ############################################

136
Gray
for The Schoolmistress, Johnson for London and Verses on the
opening of Garrick's theatre, Dyer for Grongar Hill, and, of
course, Walpole. But, he adds
What shall I say to Mr Lowth, Mr Ridley, Mr Rolle, the Rev. Mr Brown
('Estimate Brown'), Seward, etc. etc. If I say Messieurs! this is not the
thing; write prose, write sermons, write nothing at all: they will disdain me
and my advice.
Of Gray's most persistent friend and correspondent, Mason, it is
difficult to speak with justice or moderation. Gray has described
him with kindliness and sincerity, and it is, perhaps, the one
redeeming trait in Mason's edition of the correspondence that
he has preserved this description with almost Boswellian self-
sacrifice. According to Gray, he is a creature of childlike sim-
plicity, but writes too much, and hopes to make money by it, reads
very little, and is insatiable in the matter of preferment; the
simplicity we may question, and it seems incompatible with the
rest of the description. He garbled Gray's letters ruthlessly; in
their unmutilated form, they would have disposed for ever of his
claims to be his friend's compère. He may be excused for not
wishing to figure before the public as 'dear Skroddler'; but, when
he pleads the boyish levity of some of the letters as an excuse
for his expurgations, he knows better, and is simply posing, often
substituting his own bombast for Gray's plain speaking. Gray
recognised merit in Mason's Musaeus, a Monody on the death of
Pope, spite of shells and coral floors; he liked, moderately, Elfrida
and, immoderately, Caractacus, from which, in The Bard, he quotes
an example of the sublime. His elegies and other verses it would
be profitless to enumerate. They have no place in the history of
our literature. He wrote political pasquinades of no great merit;
but it may be reckoned to his credit that he was a consistent Whig,
so that, on the accession of George III, he lost all chance of further
preferment. He showed very little magnanimity in attacking, in
his Isis, the university of Oxford, then (1746 sq. ) out of favour with
the court, the bulk of whose patronage went to Cambridge. He
was answered in The Triumph of Isis by Thomas Warton, then a
youth of twenty-one, with spirit and good temper; yet, such was
his vanity that he believed he had inflicted a mortal wound, and,
years after, congratulated himself on entering Oxford at night,
without fear of a crowd of 'booing undergraduates. ' His super-
ficial resemblance to the manner of Gray did the greater poet
some harm. Their contemporaries, and certain critics of a later


## p. 137 (#163) ############################################

Mason Projected history of English poetry 137
.
generation, did not see any difference between Mason's frosty glare
and constant falsetto and the balanced eloquence of Gray.
6
If the project of a joint work with Mason on the history of
English poetry had not fallen through, Gray must have found
his associate a terrible incubus. No greater contrast existed at
that date than Mason's slipshod, as compared with Gray's scholarly
accuracy. Even the work of Warton was an inadequate substitute
for that which Gray might have given us; the probability is that
its only fault would have been too much, even as Warton has too
little, method.
There was one of Gray's preferences that contributed greatly
to the appreciation which, as the historian of our poetry, he
would have shown of its earlier stages. In strong contrast to the
elaborate and stately diction of his own verse, he loved best the
poets who were almost models of simplicity : Matthew Green, and
the French Gresset, and Dyer of Grongar Hill, and whatever
Shenstone and even Tickell had written in the same vein. His
mind was early ripe for the ballads of Percy's Reliques. He
finds, accordingly, in Gil Morrice, all the rules of Aristotle
observed by some unknown ballad-writer who had never read
Aristotle. He derives from Macpherson's fragments and his
Fingall evidence that without any respect of climates poetry
reigns in all nascent societies of men. ' The theory itself is
intrinsically better than the support on which he chose to rest it.
He was struggling in that portentous Ossianic mist which spread
from Britain to the continent, a mist through which people of
genius, the greatest as well as the least, wandered for a time,
bewildered by their own shadows. The last efforts of his muse,
dating from The Bard, are, in the history of our literature, in-
comparably the most important. From his Latin verse, which, if
we except his jocular or satiric efforts, was alone fluent and
spontaneous, and is still significant as marking the first stage in
his poetic development, we pass to a meditative mood sufficiently
conventional in form except in its extreme classicism, and trans-
cendent only because impressed by genuine feeling, and thence to
the scanty product by virtue of which we regard him as a pioneer,
who seems, like Hesperus, to lead a starry host, but really moves
with the rest in obedience to the same mysterious impulse. His
fame, in this character, has obscured without effort that of many
lesser bards whose course was in the same direction, until the
magic was transmitted to Coleridge, and then to Scott, who used
it with more persistent energy and more conspicuous effect.


## p. 138 (#164) ############################################

CHAPTER VII
YOUNG, COLLINS AND LESSER POETS
OF THE AGE OF JOHNSON
THE posthumous experience, if it may be so described, of most
of the poets to be treated in the present chapter, like that of
their predecessors, noticed in an earlier section of this History,
illustrates certain doctrines, both of the less, and of the more, vulgar
philosophy of life. For more than a century and a half, through the
successive collections of Dodsley, Pearch, Johnson, Anderson and
Chalmers, they have had opportunities of being generally known
which can hardly be said to have been shared by the verse writers
of any other period of English literary history. But, for the last
century at any rate, this familiarity with their productions has, also,
brought about its proverbial consequence. Collins, indeed, if not
nemine contradicente, yet, by a strong body of the best critical
judgment, has (putting range of kind and bulk of production out
of the question) been allowed poetical quality of almost the rarest
and purest sort. Young, despite the great volume of now im-
perfectly interesting matter comprehended in his poetical works,
and the extreme inequality of his treatment of it, despite, too, the
defects of his temper and other drawbacks, enjoyed, for a long
time, great and almost European popularity; he possesses, for the
literary historian, the attraction of having actually anticipated
Pope in one of the most characteristic directions of Pope's satiric
energy; and he can never be explored by any patient and unbiassed
investigator without the recognition of flame under the ashes,
flowers in the wilderness and fragments of no contemptible mould-
ing among the ruins. Shenstone, Dyer, Green ("Spleen '-Green),
Blair, Armstrong, Akenside, Beattie, Smart—there are associations
with each of these names which ought not to be forgotten; and,
even from the numerus which may be grouped with them, there
remains something to be gathered as to the general state and
1 See ante, vol. II, chap. vi, sec. II.


## p. 139 (#165) ############################################

a
Young's Life and Writings 139
fortunes of literature and of poetry which ought not to be missing
in such a work as the present.
An extensive notice of biographical data, not generally included
in the plan of this History, would be altogether out of place
in a collective chapter; but some references of the kind will
be found to be occasionally indispensable. Young's long life,
from the time when he entered Winchester in 1695, was exactly
divided between residence at school and in three colleges at
Oxford (New college, where he missed securing a place on the
foundation, Corpus Christi, and, lastly, All Souls, of which he
became a lay fellow in 1708) and tenure of the college living of
Welwyn, to which, having given up plans of professional and
parliamentary life and taken orders, he was presented in 1730.
Throughout each of these long periods, he appears (except at
the moment of his election at All Souls) as a disappointed man,
baffled as to regular promotion at school; wandering from college
to college; not, indeed, ever in apparent danger of the jail, but
incessantly and fruitlessly courting the patron; an unsuccessful,
or but once successful, dramatist ; a beaten candidate for parlia-
ment; and, in his second stage, perpetually desiderating, but
never, in the very slightest measure, receiving, that ecclesiastical
promotion which, in some not quite comprehensible way, almost
every eighteenth century divine seems to have thought his plain
and incontestable right. In both parts of his career, moreover,
there can be little doubt that Young suffered from that curious
recoil or rebuff for which, perhaps, not enough allowance has
been made in meting out praise or blame among the successive
literary generations of the eighteenth century. Addison's ad-
ministrative, and Prior's diplomatic, honours were not unmixed
blessings to their possessors; but there cannot be any doubt that
they made Grub street, or even places much more agreeable and
legs 'fabulous' than Grub street, all the more intolerable to the
younger generation.
Before applying the light of this (of course not novel) con-
sideration to Young's work, let us see what that work (most of
it now utterly forgotten) actually was. He began with addresses
and odes of various kinds (one on the queen's death) in the last
two years of Anne, and produced the play Busiris, a paraphrase
of Job and his Letters to Tickell, in 1719. In 1721 appeared
his one famous play The Revenge, and, a little later, in parts
(1725—8), the most important work of his younger, but not
very young, years, The Universal Passion. During the years


## p. 140 (#166) ############################################

140 Young, Collins and Lesser Poets
a
1728 to 1730 were published the amazing pieces called Ocean
and Imperium Pelagi, with others. The Complaint, or Night
Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality, began to appear in
1744, when the author was nearly sixty-two. A third play, The
Brothers, followed in 1753 : and his last work of importance,
Resignation, in 1762.
The immense and long enduring popularity of Night Thoughts
hardly requires much comment, even now that it has utterly
vanished and is never likely to return. This popularity was not,
as it has been in some other cases, due to lack of insight on the
part of the public that bestowed it; but, as perhaps nearly always
happens, it was due to the fact that the merits of the work, in part,
at least, were exactly such as that public could best appreciate,
and the faults such as it was most disposed to pass over. Night
Thoughts is hard reading, nowadays, even for the most catholic
lover of poetry; and the rest of Young, even The Universal
Passion, is harder. But he must be a very exceptional critic who
can do Young justice, either without a complete reading of his
poems, or at a first reading only. Two keys, perhaps, are wanted
to unlock the cabinet. The first is an easy and wellknown key-
the effect of personal disappointment. To this feeling, in various
forms, poets are proverbially liable; but it is difficult to remember
any poet who shows it so constantly and in such various forms as
Young. It is not always very noisy in him: but it shows itself every-
where--in his satire as well as in his preachings and moralisings,
in the innumerable passages, whether longer or shorter, of a form
of flattery which sometimes carries with it a despairing sense that
nothing, or nothing adequate, will, after all, come from the flattered;
in the elegies over apparent triumphs such as Addison's, and ap-
parent failures like that of Swift's ‘little Harrison,' who was Young's
intimate friend; last of all, but not least of all, and, perhaps, most
pathetically, in the title and the substance alike of his swan-song
Resignation. That his disappointment, on the whole, was rather
unreasonable is a feeble, as well as a 'philistine,' way of dismissing
the matter: unreasonable disappointments are apt to be the most,
not the least, keenly felt.
But there was something else wrong with Young. Johnson, in
one of that great majority of his judgments on which one cannot
do better than fall back, pronounced that with all his defects he
was a man of genius and a poet. ' He was this; but, of almost all
men of genius and almost all poets, he was the most singularly
lacking in art; and he seems, to some extent, to have been aware
а


## p. 141 (#167) ############################################

Night Thoughts
141
of it, if we may judge from the frequency with which he dismissed
his own work as not worth republication. It is quite astonishing
how bad an artist Young is; for, whatever its deficiencies in other
respects and whatever its limits in the domain of art, the eighteenth
century did not usually, according to its lights, make default in
questions concerning art. In gross and in detail, Young's art,
even his mere craftsmanship, is absolutely untrustworthy. His
rimes are the worst that we have from any English poet, except
Mrs Browning. He constantly ventures, in narrative blank verse,
upon the dramatic redundant syllable, which is always a blemish,
and sometimes fatal, out of drama. The almost incredible ab-
surdities of Ocean, Imperium Pelagi and other odes come partly
from want of taste in selection of stanza, partly from infelicities of
phrase which few schoolboys would commit.
In the greater matter (as some hold it) of construction, he is
equally weak. He really did precede Pope in certain turns, as
well as in a general atmosphere, of satire, which, it may be suspected,
is the reason why some not illiterate persons are in the habit of
attributing lines and passages in Young to his greater successor.
But, in the earlier poet, the inequality, the awkwardness, the
verbiage, are still constantly present.
It ought to be set down to the credit of public taste, which
seldom receives, and does not often deserve, praise, that these defects
(except the verbiage) are somewhat less perceptible in what was long
held to be a masterpiece, and is Young's masterpiece still. Even the
annoying and defacing redundant syllable may be excused, to some
extent, on the plea that The Complaint, to all intents and purposes,
is an enormous soliloquy-a lamentation in argumentative and
reflective monologue, addressed by an actor of superhuman lung-
power to an audience of still more superhuman endurance. It has,
throughout the character of the epideictic—the rhetorical exercise
deliberately calculated and consciously accepted as a matter of
display_which is frequent in more serious eighteenth century
verse. What Shakespeare, in a few lines of Hamlet and of Macbeth,
compressed and sublimed into immortal poetry, Young watered
down or hammered out into rhetoric, with endless comments
and 'uses' and applications. But, in passages which are still
unforgotten, he allows himself a little concentration and something
that is strangely like, if it is not actually, sincerity; and, then, he
does become, in his day and in his place, 'a man of genius and
a poet. ' Indeed, if he were judged by single lines, both of the
satiric and of the reflective kind, these titles could still less be
!
а
6


## p. 142 (#168) ############################################

142
Young, Collins and Lesser Poets
refused him. And it is only fair to say that such lines and
passages occur not merely in Night Thoughts, not merely in The
Universal Passion, but almost everywhere (except in the odes),
from the early Last Day and Job to the final Resignation.
As we turn to William Collins, we come, perhaps, to the only
name the inclusion of which in this chapter may raise a cavil. 'If
Collins is to be classed with lesser poets, it may be said, 'then
who, in Collins's time, or in his century, is a greater ? ' There is
no space here for detailed controversy on such points; yet, without
some answer to the question, the literary history of the age would
be obscured or left imperfect. In the opinion of the present writer,
Collins, in part, and the chief part, of bis work, was, undoubtedly,
a 'greater poet,' and that not merely of his own time. There is
no time_Elizabethan, Georgian or Victorian-at which the best
things in the Odes would not have entitled their author to the
verdict 'poetry sans phrase. ' But there is another part of his
work, small as it may be in bulk-the whole of it is but small, and,
in the unhappy circumstances of his life, could hardly have been
larger—which is not greater poetry, which, indeed, is very distinctly
lesser; and this 'minority' occurs also, we must almost say con-
stantly, in the Odes themselves. Further, this minority or inferiority
is of a peculiar kind, hardly exampled elsewhere. Many poets are
unequal: it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that, in varying
measure, every poet is unequal. The string, be it of bow or of lyre,
cannot always be at full tension. Some-we have but just quoted an
example in Young-are unequal with an inequality which cannot
take any benefit from the old metaphor. But, at certain times,
hardly any poet, and few poets at any time, exhibit the peculiar
inequality which Collins displays; and, for historical and critical
purposes, the analysis of the special character of this difference
is, perhaps, of almost as much importance as that of the discovery
and recognition of his poetic idiosyncrasy and merit when he is at
his best; perhaps, it is of even greater importance than this.
For, here, the cross-valuation of man and time, easily abused
down to mere glib futility, yet very significant when used rightly,
becomes of the very first moment; in fact, it would not be an
exaggeration to say that there is hardly another case where it
counts for so much, and where it explains so much. Almost every-
thing that is good in Collins belongs to the man; almost everything
that is not good belongs to the time. And, consequently, there
is, again, hardly a poet of whom it may be said, with less of this


## p. 143 (#169) ############################################

Collins's Odes and Eclogues
143
+
-
futility, that even supposing his unhappy mental affliction to
have remained the same (which, in the different circumstances,
it very conceivably might not), his production, as a contemporary
of Shakespeare or of Milton, of Coleridge or of Tennyson, would
have been entirely different in all the features that are not its
best. The Collins of the Odes, at his best, is the poet of all
time in general and no time in particular; the Collins of the
Eclogues is everywhere the poetaster of the eighteenth century.
Nor is the distinction to be confined to this easy and sweeping
separation; for, in the Odes themselves, it constantly, and, to the
critical reader, not at all tiresomely, presents and represents itself.
In two succeeding poems of the collection, in two stanzas of the
same poem, in two successive lines, nay, in the very same line of
the same stanza, two writers-the Collins of eternity and the
Collins of his day-are continually manifesting themselves. The
latter talks about a 'British shell' when he means 'English poetry';
intrudes the otiose and, in fact, ludicrous, detail of its southern
site,' a sort of auctioneer's item, in his description of the temple
of Pity; indulges in constant abuse of such words as 'scene. And
he sometimes intrudes upon, though he cannot quite spoil, the
loftiest inspiration of the Collins who writes 'How sleep the brave'
and the Ode to Evening.
When this is thoroughly understood, it not merely brings the
usual reward—the fact of this understanding—but a distinct
increase of enjoyment. On the full perception of the difference
between the two Collinses, there follows, not merely pardon, as in
the proverb, but a possibility of neglecting what would otherwise
annoy. The ‘British shell' no longer suggests artillery or oysters;
the 'turtles' have no savour of the tureen; and nothing interferes
with our appreciation of the dewy eyes of Pity and the golden
hair of Peace, when the sense of incongruity is, as Coleridge says
of the sense of disbelief, 'suspended. '
In regard, indeed, to the Eclogues, the critical is almost the
only satisfaction. They occupy but little room-less than a score
of pages, containing scarcely more than three hundred lines, form
not a very severe tax upon the reader. But, in them, we certainly
find the Collins of the hour almost unrelieved by a single exhibition
of individual poetic quality. Eastern apologues in prose or verse
had been patented for the whole eighteenth century by the
authority of Addison ; and Collins was merely following one of
the various fashions beyond which it was reckoned improper,
if not positively unlawful, to stray. The consecrated couplet


## p. 144 (#170) ############################################

144 Young, Collins and Lesser Poets
>
furnishes the metre; the gradus epithet—ʻradiant morn,’ ‘wanton
gales,' 'tender passion'-lends its accustomed aid to swell and
balance the line; and, though we sometimes come on a verse that
shows forth the poet, such as
Cold is her breast like flowers that drink the dew,
unreasonable expectations of more instances of the same sort are
promptly checked by such flatnesses as the statement that 'the
virtues came along,' or such otiosities as
In distant view along the level green.
Had these attempts to compose something that might represent
the poetry of Saadi and Hafiz and Omar Khayyam stood alone,
Collins might certainly have justified the strictures of The
Gentleman's Magazine on his fellow-contributor to Dodsley.
Fortunately, they do not stand alone, but are accompanied and
effaced by the Odes. Besides the two pieces to which reference
has already been made—the Ode to Evening, with its almost, if
not quite, successful extension of the 'blank' principle to lyric,
and the exquisite softness and restraint of 'How sleep the brave'-
at least three others, in different degrees, have secured general
admiration. These are the slightly 'time-marked,' but, surely,
charming for all time, Dirge in Cymbeline, the splendid outburst
of the Liberty ode and the posthumous Superstitions of the
Highlands, of which the text may, perhaps, admit of dispute, but
certainly not the spirit and the poetic quality. Hardly one of
these, unless it be ‘How sleep the brave,' is, as a whole poem,
faultless; but Longinus would have made no mistake about the
'slips' and 'faults' of Collins, as compared with his sublimity-
and why should we?
The other poets to be mentioned in the present chapter are
inferior to these two; but, with rare exception, each has something
that would make it improper to batch or group him with others,
as was done on a former occasion; while hardly one is so distinctly
eminent that, in his case, chronological order need be disregarded
as it has been in that of Collins. We shall, therefore, observe it,
with the very slight further liberty (possibly no liberty at all)
of mentioning John Dyer, who was certainly not born within the
eighteenth century, but whose exact birth-year is unknown, before
Green and Blair, who can be positively claimed for the seventeenth.
For Dyer, though his real claims rest upon one short piece
only, and that not belonging to the very highest style of poetry,
i Cf. ante, vol. Ix, chap. VI, sec. II, p. 191.


## p. 145 (#171) ############################################

Grongar Hill
145
must be recognised as a poet, and as a very remarkable poet,
from curiously different points of view. The Fleece and The Ruins
of Rome are merely examples of the extraordinary mistakes as to
subjects proper for poetry, and the ordinary infelicity in dealing
with them, which have condemned eighteenth century verse as a
whole to a lower place than it deserves. The Country Walk, not
disagreeable in itself, is either a vastly inferior first draft, or
a still more surprisingly unsuccessful replica, of Grongar Hill.
But Grongar Hill itself is one of those poems which occupy a
place of their own, humble though it may be, as compared with
the great epics and tragedies, simple and of little variety, as com-
pared with the garlands or paradises of the essentially lyrical
poets, but secure, distinguished and, practically, unique. That
even Johnson, though he thought it ‘not very accurately written,'
allowed it to be 'pleasing,' and felt sure that when once read
it would be read again,' is a striking testimony in its favour. For
it deals almost wholly with 'prospects,' to which Johnson was
contemptuously indifferent; and its 'inaccuracy' (which, in truth,
is the highest accuracy) was to prove a very crowbar for loosening
the foundations of the prosody that he thought accurate.
The poem is really a little wonder in subject and form alike.
The devotees of 'the subject' cannot fail, if they know the facts,
to recognise in it the first definite return to that fixing of the eye
on the object in nature which, though not so absent from Dryden
as Wordsworth thought, had been growing rarer and rarer (save in
such obscure work as Lady Winchilsea's) for generation after
generation, and which was to be the most powerful process in
the revived poetry of the future. The student of form cannot
fail to perceive in that inaccuracy which Johnson (for him) gently
blamed something neither more nor less than a return to the
peculiar form of the octosyllabic couplet which, after being de-
veloped by Shakespeare and Fletcher and the pastoral poets of
the early seventeenth century, had been exquisitely employed by
Milton in the twin masterpieces of his youth. The poem appeared,
in 1726, in the Miscellany of that remarkable person Lewis 1.
Even the first of The Seasons had but just been published; and,
if there is a certain identity of spirit between this poem and
Dyer's, the expression is wholly different. Even those who are
free from any half-partisan, half-ignorant contempt for the age of
Pope and the age of Johnson, must own how strange and sweet,
amid the ordinary concert of those ages, is the sound of
1 Cf. ante, vol. ix, p. 188.
T
E. L. X.
CH. VII.
10


## p. 146 (#172) ############################################

146
Young, Collins and Lesser Poets
Who in the purple evening lie
On the mountain's lonely van . . .
or
A little rule, a little sway,
A sunbeam on a winter's day. . .
or
Sometimes swift, sometimes slow,
Wave succeeding wave, they go
A various journey to the deep,
Like human life, to endless sleep.
That Dyer was a painter as well as a poet goes, no doubt, for
something ; that, at least, he liked to think he had married a
collateral descendant of, in his own phrase, “everybody's Shake-
spere,' may go for a great deal.
a
In Dyer-or, at least, in Grongar Hill—we see some of the
first, and almost best, fruits of the romantic spirit and style. In
Matthew Green, both style and spirit are of the other kind, but
hardly less agreeable in their own way. He, also, so far as
good verse goes, is a “single-speech' poet; but he derives some
advantage from the fact that he hardly tried to speak on any
other occasion, though a few minor pieces usually accompany The
Spleen, and a few more might, it seems, be added to them. Green
was a quaker-freethinker (a curious evolution) and a clerk in the
custom-house, where he amiably prevented a reform which would
have disestablished, or, at least, dismilked, the cats. He seems, on
the whole, to have been more like a French man of letters of the
time than like an Englishman possessing a temperament which
may, at once, have qualified and disqualified him for treating the
English disease. ' It must be admitted that his treatment is some
what superficial, and more than a little desultory; but it certainly
exhibits a condition completely opposite to that of the ailment,
and even, for the time of reading, provides an antidote. The
octosyllables, 'accurate,' as Johnson would say, without stiffness
or limpness, and slipping lightly along without any Hudibrastic
acrobatism, frame a succession of thoughts that, if never very
profound, are always expressed with a liveliness of which the well-
known
Fling but a stone, the giant dies
is by no means too favourable a specimen. Sometimes, we have
satiric glances at individuals, as that, near the beginning, at Gildon;
sometimes, lively 'thumbnails' of contemporary manners; once or
twice, more elaborate drawings, as of the often quoted
Farm some twenty miles from town.


## p. 147 (#173) ############################################

The Grave
147
The epicurean attitude of the lighter, but not the coarser, kind
has seldom been better illustrated in verse.
6
Chronology could hardly have been more complacent in contrast-
planning than by putting the author of The Grave next in order.
Here, also, we have a poet of one poem ; but the subject of that
poem has at once greater possibilities and greater dangers. A poet
who writes unpoetically on death at once proves himself to be no
poet; and Blair has not failed to pass the test. But he has passed
it with the qualification of his time; and, perhaps, so universal a
subject ought to receive rather more universality of treatment.
Even the fine coda (which did not form part of the original edition
of the poem) dates itself a little too definitely; and the suicide
passage, to name no other, is somewhat rhetorical, if not even
melodramatic. But there is no doubt that it had a powerful
influence. The very fact that contemporary critics thought the
language lacking in 'dignity'offers the best testimony to its freedom,
at least sometimes, from the always irksome, and sometimes in-
tolerable, buckram which mars Young and Thomson, Armstrong
and Akenside, and which is by no means absent from Collins or
from Gray. The blank verse, like nearly all dating from this period,
though not so badly as some of it, abuses the abrupt full-stopped
middle pause, and is too much given to dramatic redundancy.
But it has a certain almost rugged massiveness, and occasionally
flings itself down with real momentum. The line
The great negotiators of the earth
possesses sarcastic force of meaning as well as prosodic force of
structure. It would be hard to find two poets of more different
schools than Blair and Blake. Yet it was not a mere association
of contradictories when Blake illustrated Blair1.
1
The peculiar 'tumid and gorgeous' style of the eighteenth
century in blank verse, in which Johnson professed to find the only
excuse--and that inadequate-for the metre he detested, not un-
frequently gives the wary critic a certain pause before he absolutely
excludes the notion of conscious or half-conscious burlesque on
the part of its practitioners. There had been no doubt about
this burlesque in the case of The Splendid Shilling? , which,
1 The close coincidence of The Grave, which was certainly written by 1742, though
not published till the following year, and Night Thoughts, the first part of which appeared
in the earlier year, has given occasion to the usual idle disputes about priority. The
conception of each of these poems was, probably, quite independent.
? See ante, vol. IX, chap. x, p. 256.
10-2


## p. 148 (#174) ############################################

148
Young, Collins and Lesser Poets
a
undoubtedly, had led not a few of them to Milton. Even in
Thomson, a later and much stronger influence—in fact, one which
directly mastered most blank-verse writers after 1726—it is not
certain whether the temper which avowedly exists in The Castle of
Indolence may not sometimes lie concealed in The Seasons. And
John Armstrong, Thomson's intimate friend and more than
countryman-for their birthplaces, just inside the Border, were
within a few miles of each other-one of the garrison invalids of
the castle itself, was, by common consent of tradition, a remarkable
specimen of that compound of saturnine, and even churlish, humour
with real kindliness, which Scotsmen have not been indisposed to
acknowledge as a national characteristic. He seems to have pleaded
actual burlesque intent for his péché de jeunesse (as it would be
called in French literary history), The Economy of Love. But it
is difficult to discern much difference of style between this and the
more respectable Art of Preserving Health. The preposterous
latinising, which has made his 'gelid cistern' for 'cold bath' a
stock quotation, and the buckram stiffness of style which usually
goes with it, appear in both. His wellknown contribution to the
Castle of Indolence itself is avowed burlesque, and not unhappy;
while, though his imitations of Shakespeare are about as much
like Shakespeare as they are like Walt Whitman, his Epistle to
Wilkes, from the army in Germany to which he was attached, is
not without good touches. He seems to have possessed literary,
if not exactly poetical, power, but to have been the victim of
personal bad taste, exaggerating a particular bad taste of the time.
a
Richard Glover, like Armstrong, belongs to the 'tumid and
gorgeous' blank-verse division; but, unlike him, he offers not the
slightest provocation to direct or indirect amusement, and, unlike
him also, he has nothing of real vigour. His celebrated ballad,
Admiral Hosier's Ghost, is a curious success; but it is not certain
how much of its reproduction of the half-pathetic, half-bathetic
style of the broadside is art and how much nature. Of his
'great performances, Leonidas and The Athenaid (rash as literary
prophecy is), it may, with little fear, be said that no age will ever
resuscitate their popularity—a popularity which, even at the time,
was not lasting and, perhaps, to some extent, had been politically
engineered; while, almost certainly, the main cause of it was the
already mentioned fancy for the newly resuscitated blank verse.
Glover, perhaps, is not so absurd as is Blackmore: but he is equally
dull in substance; and, in form, he pushes one mannerism to an


## p. 149 (#175) ############################################

Shenstone's Shortcomings and Merits
149
almost maddening length. The effect which Milton produces by
occasional strong full-stops of sense coinciding with the metrical
middle pause is well known and unquestionable. But Milton uses
it carefully, and in combination with the utmost and most artful
variety of other pauses, and of stopped or overrun lines. His
imitators, from the first, were tempted to employ and overdo this
obvious device; and Thomson himself is by no means impeccable
in respect of it. Glover uses it on every possible occasion, not
unfrequently in several successive lines, and not unfrequently, also,
stopping where no stops should be, in order to achieve it. It is
difficult to imagine, and would be hardly possible to find, even
in the long list of mistaken 'long poem' writers of the past two
centuries, more tedious stuff than his.
>
The immediate cause which places William Shenstone here
next to Glover is merely chronological; but the sequence could
hardly be better arranged for a reader of the two. As a relief
from the probably vain attempt to read the London merchant,
nothing could be better than the poems of the Worcestershire
gentleman-farmer. Shenstone is not a great poet; but, perhaps,
there has been a tendency, at all times, to treat him too lightly.
Especially if his prose work on poetry be taken together with his
poems, it may, not as a mere fancy, be found that very few of his
,
contemporaries, perhaps none but Collins and Gray, had in them
more of the root of the matter, though time and circumstance and
a dawdling sentimental temperament intercepted and stunted fruit
and flower. With his prose', we are here not directly concerned;
but it is certainly surprising how, in a few aphoristic touches, he
lays a finger on some of the chief faults of the poetry of his day.
He did not quite practise what he preached : and there is no doubt
that posterity has not been wholly unjust in associating the rococo
decorations and the trivial artifices of the Leasowes with the
poems which partly show direct connection with that estate. But
artificial-pastoral was only a stage on the return to real nature;
and the positive achievements of Shenstone's poetry have much
less of the toyshop and the marionette theatre about them than it
has been customary to think or say. It is almost a pity that he
was of Pembroke, Oxford; for, had he not been there, Johnson's
belittling would hardly have been accompanied by a sort of
patronising endeavour to make the best of it—the most damaging
form of disparagement.
1 See, as to his letters, chap. XI, sec. II, post.


## p. 150 (#176) ############################################

150 Young, Collins and Lesser Poets
-
In fact, it is very easily possible to assign him far less than his
real value in the return to nature itself. When Fanny Burney,
many years after his death, saw Knowle for the first time, she
ranked it next to Hagley as the finest park she had seen, acknow-
ledging, however, with frankness the culpable or regrettable absence
of improvement by temples and grottoes, obelisks and view-seats.
We should, of course, exactly reverse the estimate. Yet Hagley
and the (as some will have it) Naboth's vineyard which patterned
Hagley's beautification were only schoolmasters to bring public
attention, at any rate, from town to country—if to a country
'townishly' bedizened and interfered with. The proper study
of mankind ceased to be man only, when he busied himself with
nature at all; even though for a time he might officiously intrude
his own works upon her. One may smile at
But oh! the transport most ally'd to song
In some fair villa's peaceful bound
To catch soft hints from Nature's tongue
And bid Arcadia bloom around-
but it is only fair to remember that the earlier part of the same
poem had almost expressly condemned meddling with nature as
contained in the lines
'Tis Nature only gives exclusive right
To relish her supreme delight,
and, as if with half-surprise at its own boldness, allowed 'preg-
nancy of (such] delight' to 'thriftless furze' and 'rough barren
rock. '
It may indeed be admitted that, both in his grounds and in his
poems, Shenstone allowed the charms of the villa to overpower
those of furze and rock.
One of the censor’s ironical anecdotes is that ‘nothing roused
Shenstone's indignation more than to ask if there were any fishes
in his water. The obvious innuendo has a certain justice; but it
may, to some extent, be retorted that he did try to 'stock 'some
part of his poetical water-very unprofitably. His Moral Pieces,
had they stood alone, would either have excluded him from notice
here altogether, or have left him with a line of condemnation. The
Judgment of Hercules has the smoothness, but also the insig-
nificance, of the average eighteenth century couplet ; Economy,
The Ruined Abbey and Love and Honour, the frigid bombast and
the occasional sheer 'measured prose' of its worst blank-verse. If
The Progress of Taste deserves a less harsh judgment, it is because
Shenstone, there, is writing autobiographically, and, consequently,
a
6
>


## p. 151 (#177) ############################################

Shenstone's Smaller Pieces
151
with his heart in the matter; while, as to form, he takes refuge
in the easy 'Hudibrastics' which the age generally wrote well, and
sometimes excellently. But, elsewhere, if the sense of impar
congressus is too frequently with us, there are, also, frequent
alleviations; while that other and consoling sense of reading one
who, at least, is a seeker after true poetry is seldom absent. The
Schoolmistress (which, we know, was undertaken irreverently and
converted the author in the writing) has generally been admitted
to be one of the happiest things of its kind, so far as its author
intended (and he has defined his intention very strictly) to reach.
Even the tea-garden 'inscriptions' are saved by the bestknown
of them, 'Here in cool grot,' which, by the exclusion of some of
the unlucky poetic lingo of the time, and the substitution for it of
better phrase, could be made a really charming thing. Whether
there are enough good things in Levities to save the others is a
nicer question : but, some things are certainly good. And the
same is the case with Elegies, which occupies the other wing of his
array. But it has practically long been decided that Shenstone
must be judged by The Schoolmistress and the Miscellaneous
Poems conscientiously subtitled 'Odes, Songs, Ballads etc. ' Of The
Schoolmistress we have spoken; of the others we may now speak.
To anyone who has read much poetry, and has thought a little
about it with due mixture of criticism and affection, some-rela-
tively many—of these pieces have a strange attraction. The true
and even profound notions as to poetical substance and form which
are scattered about Shenstone's prose seem to have exercised some
prompting, but no restraining, influence on his verse. A seldom
quoted, and not in the least hackneyed, piece, The Song of Valen-
tine's Day, illustrates this, perhaps, in a more striking fashion than
any other. He appears, at first, to have caught that inestimable
soar and sweep of the common measure which had seemed to be
lost with the latest Carolines; and the charm of it, as it were, is
in the distance throughout. But he never fully masters it. Some
lines, beginning with the second-
'Tis said that under distant skies,
Nor you the fact deny-
are hopelessly prosaic. The fatal jargon of the time, 'swain' and
'grove' and the rest, pervades and mars the whole. The spell is
never consummated; but the possibility is always there. Of the
Ode to Memory, something the same may be said, and of others.
His best known things, The Dying Kid, the Jemmy Dawson ballad
and the four-parted Pastoral, are unequal, but only because they


## p. 152 (#178) ############################################

152 Young, Collins and Lesser Poets
condescend nearer to the fashion. The three-footed anapaestics
of the last are jingling enough, no doubt; and it is wonderful
that Shenstone should not have anticipated the variations and
ennoblings of the metre which, even then, though chiefly in light
matter, had been sometimes hit upon, and which were perfected
by Byron, Praed and Swinburne. But there is a favour and a
prettiness about them that still appeal to all but very superior
persons; and not merely they, but many of their companions, show
that Shenstone was certainly a 'called,' if he could not quite rise
to be a 'chosen,' poet.
It may be desirable, and should certainly be permissible, to use
once more the often misused comparison, and observe that, while
Shenstone would probably have been a better poet, and would
certainly have written better poetry, in the seventeenth or the nine-
teenth century, there is little probability that Mark Akenside
would at any time have done better than he actually did, and small
likelihood that he would ever have done so well. His only genuine
appeal is to the intellect and to strictly conventionalised emotions;
his method is by way of versified rhetoric; and his inspirations
are political, ethical, social, or almost what you will, provided the
purely poetical be excluded. It is, perhaps, not unconnected with
this restricted appeal to the understanding, that hardly any poet
known to us was so curiously addicted to remaking his poems.
Poets of all degrees and kinds, poets as different from each other
as Thomson and Tennyson, have revised their work largely;
but the revision has always, or almost always, been confined to
omissions, insertions and alterations for better or worse, of isolated
phrase, line or passage. Akenside entirely rewrote his one long and
famous poem, The Pleasures of Imagination, and did something
similar with several of his not very numerous smaller pieces.
Since his actual intellectual endowment was not small, and
his studies (though he was an active practising physician) were
sufficient, he often showed fairly adequate stuff or substance of
writing. But this stuff or substance is hardly ever of itself poetical;
and the poetical or quasi-poetical ornament is invariably added,
decorative and merely the clothes, not the body—to borrow the
Coleridgean image—of such spirit as there is.
He, therefore, shows better in poems, different as they are
from each other, like the Hymn to the Naiads and An Epistle to
Curio, than in his diploma piece. The Pleasures of Imagination
· The title of the second edition (1757) runs : The Pleasures of the Imagination.
:


## p. 153 (#179) ############################################

Smart
153
6
might, by a bold misnomer or liberty, be used as the title of a
completed Kubla Khan, and so might designate a magnificent
poem. But, applied strictly, and in the fashion congenial to
Akenside and his century, it almost inevitably means a frigid
catalogue, with the items decked out in rhetorical figures and
developments. The earlier form is the better; but neither is really
poetry. On the other hand, the Hymn to the Naiads, in blank
verse, does, perhaps, deserve that praise of being the best example
of the eighteenth century kind' which has been sometimes strangely
given to The Pleasures themselves. More than one of the Odes
and Inscriptions, in their formal decorative way, have a good deal
of what has been called 'frozen grace. ' But only once, perhaps,
does Akenside really rise to poetic bloodheat: and that is in An
Epistle to Curio. It may deserve, from the point of view of the
practical man, the ridicule that Macaulay has applied to it. But,
as an example of the nobler satiric couplet, fashioned in a manner
between that of Dryden and that of Pope, animated by un-
doubtedly genuine feeling, and launched at its object with the
pulse and quiver of a well-balanced and well-flung javelin, it really
has notable merit.
Such a thing as this, and such other things as semi-classical
bas-reliefs in description or sentiment, Akenside could accomplish;
but, except in the political kind, he has no passion, and in no
kind whatever has he magnificence, or the charm of life.
a
>
If Shenstone and Akenside present an interesting parallel
contrast in one way, that presented to both of them by Christopher
Smart is even more interesting; while, in another way, he approxi-
mates to Collins. Akenside, with all his learning, acuteness and
vigour, never found the true spirit of poetry, and, perhaps, did not
even look for it, or know where it was to be found. Shenstone,
conscious of its existence, and always in a half-hearted way seeking
it, sometimes came near it or, at least, saw it afar off. Smart
found it once for all, and once only; but that once was when he
was mad. Since A Song to David at last gained its true place (and
sometimes, perhaps, a place rather higher than that), it has been
the fashion rather to undervalue the positive worth of those other
poems from which, by certainly one of the oddest tricks in literary
history, fortune separated the Song in the original edition of
Smart's work, leaving it for Chalmers to find in a review fragment
only, and for the nineteenth century at last to recover completely.
Smart's Latin poems, original and translated, are now quite out of


## p. 154 (#180) ############################################

154 Young, Collins and Lesser Poets
fashion; and they are not, as a rule, strikingly good. He had
not, when sane, the power of serious poetry; but his lighter verse
in a Hudibrastic or Swiftian vein is, sometimes, really capital;
and neither in those great originals, nor in Barham, nor even in
Thackeray, can be found a better piece of burla rhyme than
Tell me, thou son of great Cadwallader,
Hast thou that hare? or hast thou swallowed her:
But, in A Song to David, as it has been said, furor vere poeticus
has seized and inspired his victim. It has been so much praised
in the last half-century as to be, perhaps, to some extent, in
the danger of Aristides; and it is anything rather than faultless.
The ideas, and, indeed, much of the language, are taken at second-
hand from the Bible; there is, as, in the circumstances, there almost
must have been, divagation, repetition, verbiage, inequality, with
other things not good in themselves. But the tide of poetry carries
the poem right through, and the reader with it; the old romance-six
or rime couée-a favourite measure with the eighteenth century,
but often too suggestive of Sir Thopas-once more acquires soar
and rush, and the blood and breath of life, so that the whole crowd
of emotional thought and picturesque image sweeps through the
page with irresistible force.
There is little for us that is irresistible in James Beattie or in
William Falconer. But men not yet decrepit, who in their youth
were fond of haunting bookstalls, may remember that few poems
were commoner in ‘elegant pocket editions, as their own times
would have said, than The Minstrel and The Shipwreck. We
know that Byron was strongly influenced by Beattie in point of
form; and it has been credibly asserted that his influence, at least
in Scotland, on young readers of poetry, is not, or was not very
recently, exhausted. It is difficult to think that this can have
been the case with Falconer. The 'exquisite harmony of numbers'
which Chalmers could discover has now completely vanished from
such things as
With joyful eyes th' attentive master sees
Th’ auspicious omens of an eastern breeze;
and scarcely will any breeze, of east or west, extract that harmony
again from such a lyre. The technicalities are not only unlikely
to interest, but, to a great extent, are, unluckily, obsolete. The
few personal touches are of the faintest; and even Falconer's
Greece is a Greece which, if it was ever living, has ceased to live
now. His smaller poems are few and insignificant.


## p. 155 (#181) ############################################

Beattie
155
He was
Beattie, on the other hand, retains at least a historic interest
as a pioneer of romanticism, and as the most serious and extensive
handler, up to his own time, of the Spenserian stanza.
hampered in general effect inasmuch as, if he was possessed of
any strictly poetic faculty, it was of a singularly small and weak
one; and he hampered himself in a special way by failing to
observe that, to make a Spenserian stanza, you need a Spenserian
line and Spenserian line-groupings. As it was (and he taught the
fault to Byron), the great merit of the form—its complex and yet
absolutely fluent harmony—is broken up by suggestions, now of
the couplet, now of the old dramatic blank-verse line, now, again,
of the Miltonic or pseudo-Miltonic paragraph arrangement. Nor,
though the matter might more than compensate contemporaries
and immediate posterity for a defect in manner which they would
hardly notice, is it such as can give much enjoyment either now, or
ever again. That it is not only plotless and characterless but, also,
unfinished, need not be fatal. It has hills and vales and other
properties of romanticism à la Rousseau; suggestions of knights
and witches and so forth in the manner of romanticism à la Percy.
But the drawing is all in watered-out sepia ; the melody is a
hurdy-gurdy strum.
His minor poems are more numerous than Falconer's and
intend much more greatly: but they have little more significance.
He tries Gray's ode manner, and he tries his elegy manner: and
he fails in both. A tolerable opening, such as that of Retirement:
When in the crimson cloud of even,
The lingering light decays,
And Hesper on the front of Heaven
His glistering gem displays
is followed by some twenty times the number of lines mostly
rubbish. The Pastorals, if less silly, are not much better than
pastorals usually are; and the most that can be said for The
Judgment of Paris, wherein Beattie employs the elegiac quatrain,
is that it is rather less bad than one would expect-a fact which
may account for its unpopularity at the time as well as for its
omission from his collected poems'.
The poets-for, in a few cases, they most certainly deserve that
name—and the verse-writers—an indefeasible title-who have
been mentioned in this and in an earlier chapter do not require
1 As to Beattie's once celebrated Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth,
cf. chap. xiv, post.
3 Ante, vol. ix, chap. vi, sec. II.


## p. 156 (#182) ############################################

156 Young, ,
Collins and Lesser Poets
6
any peroration with much circumstance. But it would not only
be uncivil to give them none; it would amount to a sort of
petty treason in failing to make good their claims to the place
they have here received. This place is, perhaps, justified in one
case only-that of Collins-by the possession of intrinsic genius
of the strictly poetical kind, in quality if not in quantity, sufficient
to have made its way in any age; though, undoubtedly, in
some ages, it would have been more fertile than in this. Yet
Collins acquires not only interest but intelligibility when he is
considered in company with those who have been associated with
him here. "Why was he not as they ? ' 'What was it that weighed
on him as on them ? ' These are questions which those who disdain
the historic estimate—who wish to 'like grossly,' as Dryden put
it-may disdain likewise. They add to the delight as much, at
least, as they satisfy the intelligence of better exercised tastes.
So, again, in various ways, Garth and Watts, Young and Dyer and
Green, Shenstone and Akenside and Smart, have special attractions
—sometimes, if not always, strictly poetical; always, perhaps,
strictly literary-in one way or another, sufficient to satisfy fit
readers, if they cannot abide the same test as Collins. And so, in
their turn, have even the numerus, the crowd of what some harshly
call poetasters, whom we have also included. They, also, in their
day and way, obeyed the irresistible seduction which urges a
man to desert prose and to follow the call of poetry. They did
not go far or do much; but they went as far and did as much as
they could.


## p. 157 (#183) ############################################

CHAPTER VIII
JOHNSON AND BOSWELL
6
It was a supreme fortune that gave Johnson the friendship of
Reynolds and Boswell. His great personality is still an active and
familiar force. We know him as well as if he had lived among us.
But the first of Reynolds's portraits was painted when Johnson had
completed The Rambler and was already 'the great moralist,' and
Boswell did not meet him till after he had obtained his pension.
The Johnson that we know is the Johnson who loves to fold
his legs and have his talk out. ' The years in which he fought
poverty and gained his place in the world of letters are obscure
to us, in comparison with those in which he enjoyed his hard-won
leisure. He never cared, in later life, to speak about his early
struggles; he never spoke much about himself at any time. Even
when he wrote the lives of authors whom he had known and might
have told his own experiences without disturbing the unity of his
picture, he offered little more than the reflection of his feelings.
Sir John Hawkins did not make full use of his great opportunity.
He alone, of all Johnson's biographers, had known him almost from
the start of their work in London, but he drew on his recollections
fitfully and lazily. He has given enough to show how much more
he might have given. Boswell, with all his pertinacious curiosity,
found that he had to rely mainly on his own researches. There
were in these early years subjects too delicate to question Johnson
upon. ' Much remained, and still remains, for others to discover.
New letters, anecdotes or facts will not disturb our idea of
Johnson? They will, at most, fill gaps and settle doubts. The
man himself is known. Yet the very greatness of his personality
has tended to interfere with the recognition of his greatness as a
A large amount of new material on Johnson's family and early life has recently
been made accessible in The Reades of Blackwood Hill and Dr Johnson's Ancestry (1906)
by Reade, A. L. , and in his Johnsonian Gleanings (1909 etc. ). New material on his
later life is given in Broadley and Seccombe's Doctor Johnson and Mrs Thrale (1910).


## p. 158 (#184) ############################################

158
Johnson and Boswell
a
man of letters. No other author whose profession was literature
seems to owe so little of his fame to his books. Many writers,
Dryden and Scott among others, give the impression that they
were greater than anything that they have written. It has been
the unique fate of Johnson to be dissociated from his works. He
would have welcomed the knowledge that he was to be remembered
as a man, for he had no delusions about authorship. But he is to be
found in his works as he wished to be known, and as he was. If the
greatest of biographies catches him at moments which he would not
have recorded, it is also true that his writings give us his more
intimate thoughts, and take us into regions which were denied to
his conversation.
He was born at Lichfield on 18 September 1709, in the year in
which his father, one of the chief booksellers of the midlands, was
sheriff of the city. As a schoolboy, he seems to have been already
distinguished by his ease in learning, his tenacity of memory, his
lack of application, and delays adjusted to his power of rapid work.
But the best part of his instruction he acquired for himself in his
father's shop. There, he prowled about at leisure, and read as his
fancy directed. He was never a laborious reader. The progress
which the understanding makes through a book, he said, has more
pain than pleasure in it. “Sir; do you read books through ? ' he
once asked. There may have been few books that he read through
himself. His defective eyesight had probably some bearing on what
came to be an intellectual habit. But he had in a supreme degree
the gift of discovering the matter and quality of a book, almost on
opening its pages. The extent of his knowledge was the wonder of
all his friends: Adam Smith declared that Johnson knew more
books than any man alive. He had begun this knowledge by
sampling his father's store. And in these days, before he had left
school, he was already a good enough Latinist to be diverted from
a search for apples by the discovery of a folio of Petrarch.
He was intended to follow his father's business. Hawkins and
Mrs Piozzi both say that he could bind a book. But, after two 1:
.