372 A Biographical Sketch of Dr. Johnson
��had no charms for him. Of Gray he always spoke as he wrote, and called his poetry artificial 1 . If word and thought go together the odes of Gray were not to the satisfaction of our critic. But what composition can stand this sharp-sighted critic ? He made some fresh observations on Milton, by placing him in a new point of view : and if he has shown more of his excellencies than Addison does, he accompanies them with more defects. He took no critic from the shelf, neither Aristotle, Bossu, nor Boileau. He hardly liked to quote, much more to steal. He drew his judgments from the principles of human nature, of which the Rambler is full, before the Elements of Criticism, by Lord Kames 2 , made their appearance.
It may be inserted here, that Johnson, soon after his coming to London, had thought of writing a History of the revival of Learning 3 . The booksellers had other service to offer him 4 . But he never undertook it. The proprietors of the Universal History 5 wished him to take any part in that voluminous work. But he declined their offer. His last employers wanted him to undertake the life of Spenser 6 . But he said Warton had left
��Johnson on the merit of Prior. He attacked him powerfully; said he wrote of love like a man who had never felt it: his love verses were college verses ; and he repeated the song " Alexis shunn'd his fellow swains," &c., in so ludicrous a man ner, as to make us all wonder how any one could have been pleased with such fantastical stuff.' Life, ii. 78. ' The greatest of all Prior's amorous essays is Henry and Emma ; a dull and tedious dialogue.' Works, viii. 16.
1 Ante, i. 191 ; ii. 52, 320 ; Life, i. 402; ii. 164,327, 334; iv. 13.
2 Life, i. 393 ; ii. 89.
3 Ib. iv. 381, n. i.
4 'The booksellers gave it out as a piece of literary news, that he had an inclination to translate the Lives of Plutarch from the Greek. It appears from his literary memoran dum-book that this was one of the
��tasks he assigned himself.' Gentle man's Magazine, 1785, p. 86.
'Among Johnson's papers was found a translation from Sallust of the Bellum Catilinarium, so flatly and insipidly rendered that the suffering it to appear would have been an indelible disgrace to his memory/ Hawkins, p. 541.
5 Letters, ii. 432.
6 His 'last employers' were the proprietors of the Lives.
See ante, ii. 192, where Hannah More records : ' Johnson told me he had been with the King that morning, who enjoined him to add Spenser to his Lives of the Poets'
He told Nichols, who asked him ' to favour the world, and gratify his sovereign, by a Life of Spenser, that he would readily have done so had he been able to obtain any new mate rials for the purpose.' Life, iv. 410.
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