VI
JOHNSON’S LIVES OF THE POETS
The most memorable of Johnson’s literary works was not initiated or planned by himself. On May 3, 1777, he wrote to Boswell, ‘I am engaged to write little Lives, and little Prefaces, to a little edition of The English Poets.’ The whole course of his life and studies had been an admirable preparation for this task of biography, and when, at the age of sixty-seven, he consented to forego his leisure, he must have felt how timely was the opportunity to establish his great critical reputation upon a solid base.
The origin of the scheme was explained by Mr. Edward Dilly in a letter to Boswell. The Martins, an Edinburgh firm, had printed, and had put on sale in London, an edition of the English Poets, presenting a very inaccurate text in type hardly large enough to be readable. This roused the London booksellers, who, in order to protect their own copyrights and to keep possession of the market, agreed together to produce an elegant and uniform edition of all the English Poets of repute, from Chaucer onwards, with a concise account of the life of each of them. A deputation waited upon Johnson; he ‘seemed exceedingly pleased with the proposal,’ and named two hundred guineas as his fee. We are not told how it happened that the earlier poets, from Chaucer to Cowley, dropped out of the scheme; doubtless the desire to preserve copyright in the later
