According to Sir Walter Scott, a gentleman named Pot was mentioned to the sage as admiring his "Irene," beyond all tragedies of the time. "If Pot says so," was Johnson's comment, "Pot lies." One would give something to hear Johnson discoursing in Elysium on the innumerable Pots of the present day. For him, at any rate, poetry was no esoteric mystery; it was all in the day's work, and he went at it—occasionally “for” it -with plain common sense, a clear if a narrow vision, and a dogged determination not to accept counters for coin. The result is that, with all its defects of taste, its bull-in-a-china-shop vagaries, and its occasional lapses into sheer philistinism, there is no more stimulating book in the language than "The Lives of the Poets." No doubt it was not exactly as a tonic that Johnson thought of his work. He hoped it was "written in such a manner as may tend to the promotion of piety." But habent sua fata libelli, and it is not Johnson's fault that the "Lives" contribute less to our piety than to our pleasure. Macaulay went so far as to say that they were as entertaining as any novel." But Macaulay, like Habbakuk in the Voltairean anecdote, was capable de tout. For "pleesure and deevilment" I fancy the lives of the Three Musketeers, and other Gentlemen of France, are better than those of Richard Savage and Abraham Cowley and NambyPamby Philips.

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Each of the more important "Lives" splits up into two parts, a part of narrative and a part of critical

John

exegesis; and by general consent the first is far superior to the second. The reason is not far to seek. son's experience of life, his native shrewdness, his sturdiness of character, made him an admirable judge of men's actions. He was a born moralist. But a born critic he was not, nor anything like it. He lacked the primary requisites of the critical temperament—pliability, ready sympathy, responsiveness to the mood and the mind criticised. Nothing could be more apt than Boswell's remark that in drawing Dryden's character Johnson delineated much of his own. "The power that predominated in his intellectual operations was rather strong reason than quick sensibility. Upon all occasions that were presented he studied rather than felt; and produced sentiments not such as Nature enforces but meditation supplies." It is this quick sensibility which differentiates the new from the old criticism; if it makes a gap between Johnson and Matthew Arnold or Sainte-Beuve, it makes a yawning gulf between Johnson and Walter Pater or Anatole France. Even in his own day, as Boswell is compelled -grudgingly-to record, Johnson's critical deficiencies were too patent to be ignored. "By some violent Whigs he was arraigned of injustice to Milton; by some Cambridge men of depreciating Gray; and his expressing with a dignified freedom what he really thought of George, Lord Lyttelton, gave offence to some of the friends of that nobleman, and particularly produced a declaration of war against him from Mrs. Montagu, the

ingenious essayist on Shakespeare, between whom and his lordship a commerce of reciprocal compliments had long been carried on." About what Johnson really thought of George, Lord Lyttelton, we need not greatly care, but his "Gray" is certainly one of his most melancholy performances, while there are passages in the "Milton" which Flaubert would call "gigantesque " in their ineptitude. "To select a singular event and swell it to a giant's bulk by fabulous appendages of spectres and predictions, has little difficulty; for he that forsakes the probable may always find the marvellous. And it has little use; we are affected only as we believe; we are improved only as we find something to be imitated or declined. I do not see that 'The Bard' promotes any truth, moral or political." Such is Johnson's singular criticism of Gray's "Bard," to which it was about as relevant as to the Binomial Theorem or the South Sea Bubble. As for his analysis of "Lycidas," it is one of the famous "howlers" of criticism. Jeffrey on Wordsworth was not more hopelessly at fault. "It is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion, for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions. Passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and the ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of 'rough satyrs' and 'fauns with cloven heel.' When there is leisure for fiction, there is little grief. . . . Surely no man could have fancied that he read 'Lycidas' with pleasure had he not known its author." This passage positively

bristles with blunders as Drury Lane (in the advertisements) with exits. It not only condemns all elegiac poetry, but all poetry and all art of any kind. When there is no leisure for fiction, there can be no art. If passion runs not after remote allusions, neither does it run after such artifices as clear syntax, metre, and rhyme. The natural language of grief is not poetry at all, but "Ah" and "Oh" and "Boo-oo." But the task of refuting Johnson's heresies is too easy. The judicious will rather cherish them as rounding off a vigorous personality. They will not go to Johnson for critical light and leading, but for ripe knowledge of men and things, for a rich intellectual vitality, and, above all, for a style which, despite all that has been said against it, is perhaps a better model of English than a Key-Note novel or a piece of Hill Top-ography. Whether we like his language or not, it always meant something, which is by no means the case with some of our modern prose. It was a marvel of conciseness. It had a fine monumental stateliness. "Sir," he said of some rival biographers, "the dogs don't know how to write trifles with dignity." He, at any rate, was a dog who did.

Among Ladies.-The subtle forces which attract a man, and make him attractive, to this or that particular lady, whether in the way of friendship or of a more tender sentiment, would require a greater than Newton to discover. All that can be stated about

them with certainty is that they do not vary directly with the mass, or inversely as the square of the distance, of the parties concerned. And so it is useless to inquire why it was that all women (except Mrs. Boswell and Mrs. Montagu) and girls liked the Doctor, and why the Doctor, in the language of the Minerva Press, "reciprocated their affection." Whatever the reason, this fact of the mutual attraction of elderly gentlemen and pretty young ladies is a very common one. Mr. Samuel Pickwick's is a case in point. He was surrounded by rosy-cheeked and (as was the passing fashion of the hour) giggling damsels, who all with one accord declared him "a perfect old dear." The lady with the fur-topped boots and her friends gave him no peace when there was any mistletoe about, and would even take a sip of his somewhat too frequent potations. Now, it is not recorded that they ever honoured Mr. Wardle or Mr. Tracy Tupman with these marks of their esteem. Kissing goes by favour, even when it is the mere symbol of mutual respect between artless maidens and elderly gentlemen. Among modern examples, Ernest Renan may be cited as one whose decline into the sere and yellow leaf was soothed by the innocent admiration of the gentler sex. His exchange of views on the eternal verities with Mlle. Victorine Demay, of the Alcazar Music Hall, is now "legendary," and will remind Landorians of the dialogue between Epicurus, Leontion, and Ternissa. By his own admission M. Renan preferred ladies young and