the style of Edmund Spenser, but, all in high preservation, the names of John Pomfret, and George Stepney, and Richard Duke; no Oliver Goldsmith[1] even, but a supply quite tolerable and not to be endured, of Sprats and other such small fish that came to the Doctor's net. Sprat among the Most Eminent English Poets! Reverse we Mercutio's apostrophe, and say, O fish, fish, how art thou fleshified! Invert we the adage, and talk not of a Triton among the minnows, but of a minnow among the Tritons. Still this too is incorrect, for in Johnson's Lives the minnows ave in the majority, and the Tritons are but one or two, rari nantes in gurgite vasto.
Glad are we, notwithstanding, to welcome this edition of a work that, say its detractors what they list, will take a long time yet to die,—to die, and go we know not where, to lie in cold obstruction and to rot. Like its author, it is rough, tough, burly, and can stand a good deal of critical horse-play without "knocking under." Mr. Cunningham is right an his remark that wherever the world has dissented from Johnson's judgments, the world is still curious to preserve his opinions—because, even when wrong, he is still sagacious and penetrating, and the reader never loses the presence of a clear intellect. A reflective reader will find incomparably more enjoyment and instruction, in following, under protest, the lead of a masculine mind, devious and astray though the route may be, than in keeping up with, and potentially outrunning and "preventing," a common-place writer of sympathies and convictions accurately en rapport with his own. Thus an intelligent man will, though three-pile Tory, infinitely prefer intercourse with Macaulay's history to dosing over stolid prosings to which he heartily assents; and though sturdy Protestant, will more profitably and pleasurably go through the opera omnia of John Newman than the operose orthodoxies of that Father's fourth-rate foes; and though an old-fashioned art-student, will be more refreshed and healthily exercised by collision with the crotchets of Ruskin, than by torpid assent to conventionalities to which he has subscribed all his days and with all his soul. Johnson is felt to be prejudiced, to be frequently superficial in taking exception, to be curiously nearsighted in his perception of petty particulars, curiously short-sighted in his perception of comprehensive generals. Nevertheless he is heard with respect—albeit with stifled interruptions from his auditory, and pressed murmurs,—with the respect and the interest due to a speaker who has thought out his thoughts, such as they are;, and gives them to us in the clearness and with the emphasis of original production, uttered in big manly voice, and with a bluff genuine air of sincerity and truth. At least we have a man to do with, and not an echo; a living presence, and not the shadow of a shade; if a bear, then a great bear, with power as well as clumsiness in that shaggy paw of his,—and no mere frog in the marsh, on the fume and fret for identification with the bull in the meadow. Where understanding alone, Mr. Cunningham contends, is sufficient for poetical criticism, the decisions of Johnson are generally right. Coleridge would have objected that this is just what the under-
- ↑ "It is much to be regretted," says Mr. Cunningham, in his editorial preface, "that the petty interest of a bookseller named Carnan should have excluded Goldsmith from the number of his Lives."
