DR. JOHNSON'S SELECT WORKS.* THERE is probably no man of

letters of the eighteenth century in whom we retain so vivid an interest as Dr. Johnson, and there is certainly no one with whose defects and virtues we are so familiar. What is it which attracts us so strongly in this remarkable and eccentric man ; what was it which gave him the first place in his own day, amongst men of the highest standing in literature and politics, in art and in society? As a poet and imaginative writer, he was excelled by Goldsmith ; as a politician and profound thinker, he was unworthy to hold the candle to Burke; of history he knew little, and spoke contemp- tuously of his contemporaries Gibbon and Hume ; of music and plastic art he knew still less, yet he was regarded with profound reverence and affection by Dr. Burney and Sir Joshua Reynolds ; he sneered at the histrionic art, yet Garrick loved him, and de- lighted to be in his company. Stranger still, and yet as true as it is strange, Dr. Johnson, in spite of his uncouthness and bearishness, gained the homage and affection of such refined gentlemen as Bennet Langton ; and in spite of his rough manners, provoking habits, and ungainly person, was loved and almost worshipped by women like Mrs. Thrale, Fanny Burney, and Hannah More. The truth, we believe, is

* Clarendon Press &rtes.—Johnson's Select Works, edited with Introduction and Voles. By Alfred Milnes, B.A. (Loud.) Lives of Dryden and Pope; and Banda,. Oxford : Olarendon Press. that Johnson's social and intellectual qualities, his tender- ness of heart, his love of humanity, his eagerness for

knowledge, his depth of sympathy, his humour, and general force of character, made a far greater impression in his own day, and certainly does in ours, than the merely literary work which he accomplished. The man, in Johnson's case, is superior to the author. Every one brought into contact with him felt that he was in a great presence, just as we feel now, while holding intercourse with him in our Boswell.

No doubt in certain directions Johnson deserved the fame he won as a writer. His prejudices were violent, his judgments often unsound, but he writes with the authority of one who has suffered much and knows much, and his wisdom in laying down principles for daily service shows the sterling worth of the man. There is force in all he wrote, but the taste of the pre- sent age will turn aside from Johnson's moralising, in the Rambler and Basselas, sound though some of it be ; and will also reject a large portion of his criticism. Yet much of that criticism is weighty enough and broad enough to retain a last- ing value, and whether reasonable or perverse, is always worth reading.

The volume before us affords one proof among many of the growing regard felt for Johnson, who at one period of the cen- tury, and by well-known writers, was treated with something like disdain. A year ago, Mr. Matthew Arnold published The Six Chief Lives from Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," and that volume included, of course, the famous critical biographies of Dryden and Pope. In the remarkable preface with which Mr. Arnold introduces his selection, he protests against annotating these Lives for the benefit of young people. "Our improvers of education," he writes, "are almost always for proceeding by way of augmentation and complica- tion; reduction and simplicity, I say, is rather what is re- quired. We give the learner too much to do, and we are over- zealous to tell him what he ought to think." And after insist- ing on the advantage to be gained from securing the attention of young readers to "the lives of the six chief poets of our nation, between the years 1650 and 1730, related by our fore- most' man of letters of the eighteenth century," Mr. Arnold continues to protest against telling them what they ought to think about these poets, and adds :—

"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 received along with them."

Some truth there is in these remarks, and there is, no doubt, much danger lest by over-laying the text of a great writer with

minute and wearisome comments, we destroy the interest of the work. At the same time, Mr. Arnold's objections cannot be re-

ceived without limitation. The student who should accept all Dr. Johnson's criticisms in the Lives—his remarks on Lycidas, and his remarks upon sacred poetry in the Life of TWaller, for example—would have learnt a great deal that he would be

bound to unlearn afterwards. A little judicious guidance might prove a distinct help, and it would not hinder him from forming an independent judgment, when he was more fitted, later on. In a few celebrated criticisms, Johnson, as we all know, and none knows better than Mr. Arnold, has made gross and pernicious blunders. These, however, are blunders which, in the nature of things, a young student would not detect, and it seems unreasonable that he should be left in ignorance of them ; there are also errors as to matters of fact, and why should not these be corrected?

Mr. Milnes has, perhaps, given us more of annotation than

was necessary. The book opens with a comparatively short biographical and critical introduction, but the notes occupy more than seventy closely printed pages. Johnson's place as an author is not clearly seen by the publication of two "Lives,"

and of Basselas. His Vanity of Human Wishes has appeared. in another form, under the supervision of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press ; but the Lives of Cowley and of Savage, and some of the best of the essays in the Rambler and the Idler, would form a second volume every whit as interesting and char- acteristic as the present. There are a few remarks in Mr. Milnes's brief and generally pertinent Introduction which are, perhaps, open to question. Alluding to the Lives of the Poets, he says that "perhaps no man, certainly no practised writer of his day, could cope with Johnson in the extent and accuracy of his knowledge of the English literature of the two centuries pre- ceding his own." That Johnson was profoundly acquainted with the literature of his own century, we do not question. It was, as Mr. Arnold points out, an age of prose, but Johnson was chiefly conversant with its poetry. In the literature of the seventeenth century he was also fairly read, but what signs are there that he was familiar, as Thomas Warton, for instance, was familiar, with the poetical literature of the sixteenth ? Of the great dramatists, with the exception of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, he appears to have known nothing ; he himself allowed that he had never read a play of Beaumont and Fletcher. Indeed, his knowledge of the so-called Elizabethan poets was either very limited, or wholly uninfluential. If he knew them, he did not appre- ciate them. He thanks Warton for his book on Spenser, but there are no signs that he cared for that poet, or that he had the least regard for the lyrical poets and poetical translators who made that period of our literature so famous,—for Drayton, Chapman, and Fairfax, for Herbert, Vaughan, and Herrick, for Suckling and Marvell, for Drummond and Wither, and for other poets whose verses, though few in number, are endowed with the wealth of poetry. Perhaps one of the best proofs of Johnson's ignorance or disregard of our earlier poets lies in the fact that while he recommended the booksellers to add the works of Blackmore, Pomfret, Watts, and Yalden to their col- lection of English poets, he said not a word in favour of poets like Herbert and Marvell, and commenced his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets with Cowley.

As we read Mr. Milnes's statements and criticisms, while finding much to agree with, we also find points that are, to say the least, open to question. We cannot accept the assertion that in Johnson's day learning was just emerging from almost total neglect ; neither can we agree with the statement that the Lives of the Poets, "as narratives of fact, are of very little worth." "Caring little," writes Mr. Milnes, "for the minuthe of this or that particular existence, Johnson knew the facts of human life in general, and in his Lives of the Poets has written a biography of mankind." This conveys a wrong impression ; Johnson did assuredly know the facts of human life in general, but he had also an extensive knowledge of the men whose lives he records, and if not always closely accurate, it must be re- membered that some of the mistakes into which he fell were inevitable, at the time when he wrote. Of several of the poets whose lives he records, he had a personal knowledge ; with others, Pope, for example—he had been indirectly associated; and the current gossip of the day, not always correct perhaps,

was stored up in his retentive memory. To his memory, Johnson trusted a good deal; and he did not always verify quotations—

few writers do—but his mistakes, although, no doubt, they afford scope for the annotator, are comparatively insignificant No authors are impervious to criticism, and Johnson was far from faultless. He was also often prejudiced, but it may be questioned whether the errors he commits from this cause in the Lives of the Poets can be compared in number and importance with.

those committed, in perfect good-faith, no doubt, by Lord Macaulay. The character of Johnson's mistakes may be esti- mated from Mr. Milnes's justifiable but often trivial corrections.

Take the blunders pointed out in the notes on the Life of Pope. Johnson makes Cowley print a book in his thirteenth year, in- stead of in his fifteenth; he misspells the name of Trumbull, a fault, by the way, which he shares with one of Pope's recent editors, Mr. Manes points out that Pope's Caryll was either the son or nephew of the secretary to King James's Queen, instead of being the secretary, as Johnson reports ; and that Pope does say in a note where his additions to Windsor Forest begin, though John- son says he does not. Some slight misquotations are noticed, such as "very commendable," instead of "is commendable enough," and "seems to be no very just one in regard to me," instead of "has seemed to be no very just one to me ;" some dates are corrected, one or two inconsistencies pointed out, and complaints made that Johnson occasionally made assertions on the authority of Raffhead. These trivialities form the main count of Mr. Milnes against Johnson's accuracy in his Life of Pope. They are comparatively unimportant, and, considering that Dr. Johnson could not know, though he sometimes shrewdly suspected, what Mr. Dilke's indefatigable researches have since brought to light, the errors of this biography—and they are errors which run through the series of biographies—seem to us far from warranting the terms used by Mr. Milnes. The mis- takes are comparatively insignificant and on the surface, the merits of the Lives are permanent, and the way in which John-

son blends biography with criticism makes them delightful reading. But a. book "full of errors," which, "as a narrative- of fact, is of very little worth," and a biographer who knew the facts of human life in general, but "cared little for the minutia, of this or that particular existence," do not deserve the praise which Mr. Mikes bestows upon them. And he does praise, in no niggard language, the book and, the author.

A few incidental remarks may be made before closing this volume. It was to Goldsmith, and not to Garrick, that John- son, on visiting Westminster Abbey, quoted the line of Juvenal, "Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis ;" and readers will remember how wittily it was applied. shortly afterwards by Goldsmith, who whispered the same line to his. friend when pointing to the heads on Temple Bar. The com- parison between Basselas and Candi& is judicious. Mr. Milnes observes that Johnson's tale has been "much more widely read than the far more vivacious work of Voltaire ;" Mr. Leslie Stephen, on the contrary, asserts that "the literary excellence of Cantlide has secured for it a wider and more enduring popularity than has fallen to the lot of Johnson's far heavier production." "Who shall decide, when doctors disagree ?" Mr.. /Clues, by the way, points out the humour of Baaselas, and no doubt some touches of humour do enliven the somewhat painful melancholy of the book. Yet oddly enough, he takes in sober earnest the passage in which a mechanist who proposes to make wings describes to Rasselal the process of flying :—" The labour of rising from the ground," said the artist, "will be great, and we see it in the heavier domestic fowls ; but as we mount higher, the earth's attraction and the body's gravity will be sensibly diminished, till we shall arrive at a region where the man will float in the air without any tendency to fall; no care will then be necessary but to move forward, which the gentlest impulse will effect." It is amusing to read in a note on this passage, "Johnson's conclusions are here quite erroneous," since "a body rising from the earth continues to share its motion."