was rallied for these exertions, so close to one another, his answer was, When they come to me with a dying Parson, and a dead Stay-maker ; what can a man do x ? We come now to the last of his literary labours. At the request of the Booksellers he undertook the Lives of the Poets. The first publication was in 1779, and the whole was compleated in 1781 2 . In a memo randum of that year he says, some time in March he finished the Lives of the Poets, which he wrote in his usual way, dilatorily and hastily, unwilling to work, yet working with vigour and haste 3 . In another place, he hopes they are written in such a manner as may tend to the promotion of piety 4 . That the history of so many men, who, in their different degrees, made themselves conspicuous in their time, was not written recently after their deaths, seems to be an omission that does no honour to the Republic of Letters. Their contemporaries in general looked on with calm indifference, and suffered Wit and Genius to vanish out of the world in total silence, unregarded, and un- lamented. Was there no friend to pay the tribute of a tear? No just observer of life, to record the virtues of the deceased ? Was even Envy silent ? It seemed to have been agreed, that if an author's works survived, the history of the man was to give no moral lesson to after-ages. If tradition told us that BEN JONSON went to the Devil Tavern 5 ; that SHAKSPEARE stole deer, and held the stirrup at playhouse doors 6 ; that DRYDEN
��1 Ante, p. 181. eighty-six then no I'll even keep
3 Life, iii. 109, 370 ; iv. 34. the reversion as a nest-egg for old
3 Ante, p. 96. The author of age." '
The Life of Johnson, published by 4 Ante, p. 88.
Kearsley in 1785, says (p. 65), that 5 Life, iv. 254, n. 4.
'the booksellers on going to press 'And each true Briton is to Ben
with the third edition of the Lives so civil,
offered Johnson ^200 for his rever- He swears the Muses met him at
sion of the copyhold ; but the Doc- the Devil.'
tor, meeting the offer with the same Pope, Imitations of Horace,
generosity, after pausing some time Epis. ii. i. 41.
replied, "Why, let me see fourteen 6 Johnson's Shakespeare, ed. 1765,
years 1 hence, why I shall be but Introduction, pp. 147, 172.
��1 ' The term of years allowed by the Act of Queen Anne for an author's resumption of his works not exclusively disposed of.'
VOL. I. F f frequented
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