only the scarred veterans are fit to write a prose account of the battle.
In his Life of Waller Johnson defends the cause of age. Fenton, who produced a carefully annotated edition of Waller’s poems, had remarked that after his fifty-fifth year the genius of the poet ‘began to decline apace from its meridian.’ ‘This,’ says Johnson, ‘is to allot the mind but a small portion. Intellectual decay is doubtless not uncommon; but it seems not to be universal. Newton was in his eighty-fifth year improving his Chronology, a few days before his death; and Waller appears not, in my opinion, to have lost at eighty-two any part of his poetical power.’ The famous lines in the epilogue to the Divine Poems, which were written at about the age of eighty, may well be quoted here, for they contain Waller’s contribution to the question:
The soul’s dark cottage, batter’d and decay’d,
Lets in new light thro’ chinks that time has made:
Stronger by weakness, wiser, men become,
As they draw near to their eternal home.
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view,
That stand upon the threshold of the new.
The Lives of the Poets shows Johnson’s vigour of judgement, as a critic of life and of letters, at its zenith. His power of putting into a single sentence all that can be profitably said on a subject, whether by way of summary or of comment, was never more brilliantly displayed. Addison’s Spectator could not be better described than by being ranked, as Johnson ranks it, among those books which attempt ‘to teach the minuter decencies and inferior duties, to regulate the practice of daily conversation, to correct those depravities which are rather ridiculous than criminal, and remove those grievances which, if they produce no lasting calamities, impress
