than that of Johnson’s Lives. The lives of British poets are recorded, and their works enumerated, from Chaucer to Mrs. Mary Chandler. The private virtues of this lady are so copiously attested, that it is late in her biography before we make acquaintance with her claims to distinction in literature. She was the author, it seems, of a poem on the Bath, which had the full approbation of the public, and when death overtook her, at the age of fifty-eight, she was meditating a nobler flight, ‘a large poem on the Being and Attributes of God, which was her favourite subject.’ But this work, like the mammoth, was never seen by the eye of modern man save in impressive fragments.
Last of all comes Johnson’s Lives of the Poets in 1781. The choice of names, whereby it appears that English poetry began with Abraham Cowley, was made not by Johnson, but by the booksellers of London who employed him. Johnson procured the insertion of the names of some few poets not originally included in the scheme. The Lives, except in some special cases, exhibit no laborious industry in the discovery of fact. They were written from a full mind, and with a flowing pen, at a time when Johnson’s critical opinions had long been formed, and when he was quite indisposed to renew the detailed labours of the Dictionary. ‘To adjust the minute events of literary history,’ he says very truly in his Life of Dryden, ‘is tedious and troublesome; it requires indeed no great force of understanding, but often depends upon enquiries which there is no opportunity of making, or is to be fetched from books and pamphlets not always at hand.’ New information concerning the life of Pope was offered him, but he refused even to look at it; and he wrote
