JOHNSON'S LIVES. 



2S3 



Lost," in connection with the life of Milton ; 

 "Absalom and Achitophel," and the "Dedica- 

 tion of the J3neis," in connection with the life 

 of Dryden ; in connection with Swift's life, the 

 " Battle of the Books ; " with Addison's, the 

 " Coverley Papers ; " with Pope's, the imitations 

 of the " Satires " and " Epistles " of Horace. 

 The "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" every- 

 body knows, and will have it present to his mind 

 when he reads the life of Gray. But of the 

 other works which I have mentioned how little 

 can this be said ; to how many of us are Pope, 

 and Addison, and Dryden, and Swift, and even 

 Milton himself, mere names, about whose date 

 and history and supposed characteristics of style 

 we may have learned by rote something from a 

 handbook, but of the real men and of the power 

 of their works we know nothing ! From John- 

 son's biographies the student will get a sense of 

 what the real men were, and with this sense fresh 

 ' in his mind he will find the occasion propitious 

 for acquiring also, in the way pointed out, a sense 

 of the power of their works. 



This will seem to most people a very unam- 

 bitious discipline. But the fault of most of the 

 disciplines proposed in education is that they are 

 by far too ambitious. Our improvers of educa- 

 tion are almost always for proceeding by way of 

 augmentation and complication ; reduction and 

 simplification, I say, is what is rather required. 

 We give the learner too much to do, and we are 

 over-zealous to tell him what he ought to think. 

 Johnson himself has admirably marked the real 

 line of our education through letters. He says 

 in his life of Pope : " Judgment is forced upon 

 us by experience. He that reads many books 

 must compare one opinion or one style with an- 

 other; and, when he compares, must necessarily 

 distinguish, reject, and prefer." The aim and 

 end of education through letters is to get this 

 experience. Our being told by another what its 

 results will properly be found to be, is not, even 

 if we are told aright, at all the same thing as 

 getting the experience for ourselves. The dis- 

 cipline, therefore, which puts us in the way of 

 getting it cannot be called an inconsiderable or 

 inefficacious one. We should take care not to 

 imperil its acquisition by refusing to trust to it 

 in its simplicity, by being eager to add, set right, 

 and annotate. It is much to secure the reading 

 by young English people, of the lives of the six 

 chief poets of our nation between the years 1650 

 and 1*750, related by our foremost man of letters 

 of the eighteenth century. It is much to secure 

 their reading, under the stimulus of Johnson's in- 



teresting recital and forcible judgments, famous 

 specimens of the authors whose lives are before 

 them. Do not let us insist on also reviewing in 

 detail and supplementing Johnson's work for 

 them, on telling them what they ought really 

 and definitively to think about the six authors 

 and about the exact place of each in English 

 literature. Perhaps our pupils are not ripe for 

 it ; perhaps, too, we have not Johnson's interest 

 and Johnson's force; we are not the power in 

 letters for our century which he was for his. 

 We may be pedantic, obscure, dull, everything 

 that bores, rather than everything that attracts ; 

 and so Johnson and his lives will repel, and will 

 not be received, because we insist on being re- 

 ceived along with them. Again, as we bar a 

 learner's approach to Homer and Virgil by our 

 chevaux-de-frise of elaborate grammar, so we are 

 apt to stop his way to a piece of English litera- 

 ture by imbedding it in a masa of notes and addi- 

 tional matter. Mr. Croker's edition of Boswell's 

 " Life of Johnson " is a good example of the labor 

 and ingenuity which may be spent upon a mas- 

 terpiece, with the result, after all, really of rather 

 encumbering than illustrating it. All knowledge 

 may be in itself good, but this kind of editing 

 seems to proceed upon the notion that we have 

 only one book to read in the course of our life, 

 or else that we have eternity to read in. What 

 can it matter to our generation whether it was 

 Molly Aston or Miss Boothby whose preference 

 for Lord Lyttelton made Johnson jealous, and pro- 

 duced in his " Life of Lyttelton " a certain tone 

 of disparagement ? With the young reader, at 

 all events, our great endeavor should be to bring 

 him face to face with masterpieces, and to hold 

 him there, not distracting or rebutting him with 

 needless excursions or trifling details. 



I should like, therefore, to reprint Johnson's 

 six chief lives, simply as they are given in the 

 edition in four volumes octavo — the edition which 

 passes for being the first to have a correct and com- 

 plete text — and to leave the lives, in that natural 

 form, to have their effect upon the reader. I 

 should like to think that a number of young peo- 

 ple might thus be brought to know an important 

 period of our literary and intellectual history, by 

 means of the lives of six of its leading and rep- 

 resentative authors, told by a great man. I should 

 like to think that they would go on, under the 

 stimulus of the lives, to acquaint themselves with 

 some leading and representative work of each 

 author. In the six lives they would at least have 

 secured, I think, a most valuable point de rcpere 

 in the history of our English life and literature, 



