Johnson's Life and Genius.
��Dr. Taylor, from time to time, carried with him to his pulpit. He had the LARGEST BULL in England 1 , and some of the best Sermons.
We come now to the Lives of the Poets, a work undertaken at the age of seventy, yet the most brilliant, and certainly the most popular of all our Author's writings 2 . For this perform ance he needed little preparation. Attentive always to the history of letters, and by his own natural bias fond of Biography, he was the more willing to embrace the proposition of the Booksellers. He was versed in the whole body of English Poetry, and his rules of criticism were settled with precision. The dissertation, in the Life of Cowley, on the metaphysical Poets 3 of the last century, has the attraction of novelty as well
��1 Letters, i. Preface, p. 13.
2 He was sixty-seven when he undertook the work ; sixty-nine when the first four volumes were published, and seventy-one when the last four. Life, iii. 109, 370 ; iv. 34.
Cowper wrote of the Lives'. 'Johnson has a penetrating insight into character, and a happy talent of correcting the popular opinion upon all occasions where it is er roneous ; and this he does with the boldness of a man who will think for himself, but, at the same time, with a justness of sentiment that convinces us he does not differ from others through affectation, but be cause he has a sounder judgment. This remark, however, has his nar rative for its object, rather than his critical performance.' Cowper's Works, ed. 1836, v. 12.
'The Lives of the Poets are, on the whole, the best of Johnson's works. The narratives are as enter taining as any novel. The remarks on life and on human nature are eminently shrewd and profound. The criticisms are often excellent, and even when grossly and provokingly
��unjust, well deserve to be studied.' Macaulay's Misc. Works, ed. 1871, P- 392.
3 Wordsworth writes of 'that class of curious thinkers whom Dr. John son has strangely styled metaphysical Poets.' Wordsworth's Works, ed. 1857, vi. 365. Johnson defines meta physical, ' i. versed in metaphysicks ; relating to metaphysicks ; 2. In Shakespeare it means supernatural or preternatiiral! In speaking of an author's right to his own writings, he speaks of his having 'a meta physical right, a right, as it were, of creation.' Life, ii. 259. I suppose he means that as ' creation ' is be yond the nature of man, right derived from it is preternatural or metaphysical. He used the word in a very different sense when he told Hannah More that ' he hated to hear people whine about metaphysical distresses, when there was so much want and hunger in the world.' More's Memoirs, i. 249. South had used it in much the same sense when he writes: 'Those who neither do good turns, nor give good looks, nor speak good words, have a love
as
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