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The essay on the two-hundredth anniversary of Johnson’s birth appeared first in the Literary Supplement of the Times; that on Early Lives of the Poets in the Scottish Historical Review. For permission to reprint these essays I desire to thank the proprietors of the Times and Mr. James MacLehose. The Delegates of the Clarendon Press have kindly granted a similar permission for the essays on Samuel Johnson and on Johnson’s Shakespeare. The essays on Johnson without Boswell and on Johnson’s Lives of the Poets are here printed for the first time. I must not omit to express my deep obligations to the editions of Dr. Birkbeck Hill, which make the study of Johnson the easiest of pastimes.
