success, to correct the animosity they must natu→ rally excite, by turning to the more temperate works of that very copious and admirable writer, particularly to his exquisite paper in the Rambler (No. 54) on the deaths and asperity of literary men. It is hardly possible, I think, to read the paper I have mentioned without losing, for some time at least, all sensations of displeasure towards the eloquent, the tender moralist, and reflecting, with a sort of friendly satisfaction, that as long as the language of England exists, the name of Johnson will remain and deserve to remain

Magnum et memorabile nomen.

As long as eloquence and morality are objects of public regard, we must revere that great mental physician, who has given to us all, infirm mortals as the best of us are, such admirable prescriptions for the regimen of mind, and we should rather speak in sorrow than in anger, when we are forced to recollect, that, like other physicians, however able and perfect in theory, he failed to correct the infirmity of his own morbid spirit. You, my dear War

ton, whom an opposite temperament has made a critic of a more airy and cheerful complexion, you are one of the best witnesses that I could possibly produce, if I had any occasion to prove that my ideas of Johnson's malevolent prejudices against Milton are not the offsprings of a fancy equally prejudiced itself against the great author, whose prejudices I have presumed to oppose; you, my dear friend, have heard the harsh critic advance in conversation an opinion against Milton, even more severe than the detractive sarcasms with which his life of the great poet abounds; you have heard him declaim against the admiration excited by the poetry of Milton, and affirm it to be nothing more than the cant (to use his own favorite phrase) of affected sensibility.

I have presumed to say, that Johnson sometimes appears as an insidious enemy to the poet. Is there not some degree of insidious hostility in his introducing into his dictionary, under the article Sonnet, the very sonnet of Milton, which an enemy would certainly chuse, who

wished to represent Milton as a writer of

verses entitled to scorn and derision? You will immediately recollect that I allude to the sonnet which begins thus:

"A book was writ of late call'd Tetrachordon."

The sonnet is, in truth, contemptible enough, if we suppose that Milton intended it as a serious Composition; but I apprehend it was an idle lusus poeticus, and either meant as a ludicrous parody on some other sonnet, which has sunk into oblivion, or merely written as a trifling pastime, to shew that it is possible to compose a sonnet with words most unfriendly to rhyme. However this may be, it was barbarous surely towards Milton, (and, I might add, towards the poetry of England) to exhibit this unhappy little production, in so conspicuous a manner, as a specimen of English sonnets. Yet I perceive it is possible to give a milder interpretation of Johnson's design in his display of this unfortunate sonnet; and as I most sincerely wish not to charge him with more malevolence towards Milton than he really exerted, I will observe on this occasion, that as he had little, or rather no relish

for sonnets, which the stern logician seems to have despised as perplexing trifles, (difficiles nugæ) he might only mean to deter young poetical students from a kind of verse that he disliked, by leading them to remark, how the greatest of our poets had failed in this petty composition. You, who perfectly know how much more inclined I am to praise than to censure, will give me full credit for my sincerity in saying, that I wish to acquit Johnson of malevolence in every article where my reason will allow me to do so. I have been under the painful necessity of displaying continually, in the following work, the various examples of his severity to Milton. Nothing is more apt to excite our spleen than a stroke of injustice against an author whom we love and revere; but I should be sorry to find myself infected by the acrimony which I was obliged to display, and I should be equally sorry to run into an opposite failing, and to indulge a spirit of obloquy, like Mrs. Candour, in the School for Scandal, with all the grimaces of affected good nature. I have, spoken, therefore my own feelings, without bitterness and without timidity. I cannot

say that I speak of Johnson, " sine ira et studio," as Tacitus said of other great men, (very differently great!) for, in truth, I feel towards the same object those two opposite sources of prejudice and partiality: as a critical biographer of the poets he often excites my transient indignation; but as an eloquent teacher of morality he fills me with more lasting reverence and affection.

His lives of the poets will probably give birth, in this or the next century, to a work of literary retaliation. Whenever a poet arises with as large a portion of spleen towards the critical writers of past ages, as Johnson indulged towards the poets in his poetical biography, the literature of England will be enriched with "the Lives of the Critics," a work from which you, my dear Warton, will have little to apprehend; you, whose essay teaches, as the critical biographer very truly and liberally observed," how the brow of criticism may be smoothed, and how she may be enabled, with all her severity, to attract and delight."

Yet to shew how apt a writer of verses is to