standing never is sufficient for; that poetical criticism, in any sense worthy the same, is the province of something above and beyond the understanding. But allowing, if only by courtesy, that certain versemakers of established repute are "poets," whose "poetry" is characterised in fact by a prominent and pervading exercise of the "understanding," and wholly devoid of "the light that never was on sea or shore, the consecration and the poet's dream,"—then surely Johnson was qualified to do them justice; to gauge their merits, to appreciate their several characteristics, to show wheron lav their weakness and wherein their strength. Now, with scant exception, this is the very class of "poets" with which his volumes are concerned. Just the singing-men whose strains the "understanding" is adapted to "understand," are they whom Johnson undertakes to review. Hence, few admirers of those earlier minstrels whom he passes over, the poets of Tudor and paulo-post-Tudor times, will regret the Doctor's exclusion of them from his critical biographies, however they may resent the slight implied in such exclusion. Southey once said, that the poets before the Restoration were to Johnson what the world before the flood is to historians. If the good Doctor can ensure supplies of our contemporary poets, in the elysian fields,—and he once smiled a benign smile on the notion that a lady, who loved Shakspeare too fondly to conceive of paradise without him, would, as she crossed the very limen Olympi, be presented with a glorious copy of his works,—one may marvel what he thinks, supposing him still the manner of man he was, of our "Most Eminent English Poets" since the French Revolution. But the world can probably do as well without his criticism on the latter Georgian and Victorian era of song, as it does without that on the Elizabethan and its after-math.
it is as good as a sermon to note some of the names included in Johnson's constellation of bards. They twinkled, twinkled in their day, each little star, though now we only wonder what they are. Poets, mayhap, there are of our own day, who will at best be reckoned poetasters to-morrow, and the day after will be known only as some of Johnson's poets are known, to be wondered at as interlopers and impostors, who have at length been found out. Thus may we see, quoth the fool in the forest, how the world wags. The world changes its mind as well as its population, and allows no century to set up a court from which there is no appeal. Only run over the names at the beginning of the second volume before us, and meditate on the worth of present "eminence" among English poets. John Pomfret: who was John Pomfret? Why, for the matter of that, even his biographer as much as says that "nothing is known," so far as the man John is concerned; but as to the poet John, he, we find, "has been always the favourite of that class of readers who, without variety or criticism, seek only their own amusement." The Doctor adds, "He pleases many, and he who pleases many must have some species of merit." John "pleases the many" no more; his title to be "always the favourite" has run out, longer since tjan the memory of the eldest inhabitant can extend. William Walsh: who was he? The best critic in the nation, said Dryden, and that, he assures us, "without flattery." As for his poetry, he is known more, says his biographer, by his familiarity with greater men, than by anything done or written by himself. Edmund Smith: what about him? He, Johnson
