testifies, is one of those lucky writers who have, without much labour, attained high reputation and who are mentioned with reverence rather for the possession than the exertion of uncommon abilities. What did he write? "Mr. Smith's 'Pocockius' is of the sublimer kind," says Oldisworth. Enough: pass on to the next case. Richard Duke: what report hear we of Richard? Only that in character as a man he was dissolute, and that his poems are neither below mediocrity of merit nor above mediocrity of praise. William King: this eminent English poet was born in London, educated at Oxford, made Gazetteer, and buried in Westminster Abbey; and his poems are pronounced by his biographer to be rather the amusements of idleness than efforts of study, calculated rather to divert than astonish. He neither diverts nor astonishes now; and as for a tomb in Westminster Abbey, except a few habitués of the cathedral, and here and there a savant in Mr. Cunningham's line of things, no man knoweth his sepulchre unto this day. John Hughes: him let Pope describe—the description will not offend many now, however depreciatory may be its tone—"Hughes was a good humble-spirited man, a great admirer of Mr. Addison, and but a poor writer, except his play, that is very well"—the play being "The Siege of Damascus," "of which it is unnecessary," said Johnson, in whose time it was still a stock-piece on the London boards, "to add a private voice to such continuance of approbation." "I never heard of the man in my life," wrote Swift to Pope, on receiving "the works of John Hughes, Esquire." A good many are in the same category with the Dean; they have never read the "Court of Neptune," seen the "Siege of Damascus," or heard of the man in their life. Thomas Yalden: this reverend doctor (Youlding he should be spelt) wrote poems "of that irregular kind which was supposed to be Pindaric," and now boasts of a still smaller circle of readers than Pindar himself, without the solatium of being, like Pindar, praised to the skies by a catholic tradition of quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus.
With regard to the poets still known and accepted as such, who come under Johnson's notice, it was Cowley whose life and writings he believed himself to have most happily and completely analysed. Boswell ascribes this preference to the Doctor's sense of the value of certain contents of this particular essay—namely, of the dissertation on the Metaphysical Poets, which cost him rather heavily in time and trouble, as he had to "get up" the subject for the occasion,—and again, of the investigation of the nature of Wit. The Life of Milton, that much-canvassed and heartily-abused affair, which illustrates better perhaps than any other of his writings the Doctor's prejudices and powers as a good hater, is considered by Mr. Cunningham unsurpassed as a piece of English composition, and also as an expression of criticisms fine and true upon "Paradise Lost" itself. "His alleged virulence," Mr. Cunningham contends, "is indeed always more in the manner of his matter than the matter itself"—a remark which, if we understand its bearing at all, tells all the more against the biographer, who, failing evidence against his victim, quits particular charges for general abuse. "He had no inclination to narrate the events of Milton's career; and he tells us in the very outset of the memoir that he would have contented himself with the addition of a few notes to Fenton's elegant Abridgment, but that a new narrative, for
