Thy act may mercy finde, least thy great story I wish thy merit, laboured cruelty; He that can bravely do, can bravely bear. Thou wouldst find strength for such another stroke. Let the duke's name solace and crown thy thrall; And I dare boldly write, as thou dar'st die, Stout Felton, England's ransom, here doth lie!* This is to be a great poet. Felton, who was celebrated in such elevated strains, was, at that moment, not the patriot but the penitent. In political history it frequently occurs that the man who accidentally has effectuated the purpose of a party, is immediately invested by them with all their favourite virtues; but in reality having acted from motives originally insignificant and obscure, his character may be quite the reverse they have made him; and such was that of our "honest Jack." Had Townley had a more intimate acquaintance with his Brutus, we might have lost a noble poem on a noble subject. *This poem has been collated afresh from the original in the Sloane MS. No. 603. It concludes with the four lines forming the duke's epitaph, as printed in p. 369. 380 JOHNSON'S HINTS FOR THE LIFE OF POPE. I SHALL preserve a literary curiosity, which perhaps is the only one of its kind. It is an original memorandum of Dr. Johnson's, of hints for the Life of Pope, written down, as they were suggested to his mind, in the course of his researches. The lines in Italics Johnson had scratched with red ink, probably after having made use of them. These notes should be compared with the Life itself. The youthful student will find some use, and the curious be gratified, in discovering the gradual labours of research and observation, and that art of seizing on those general conceptions which afterwards are developed by meditation and illustrated by genius. I once thought of accompanying these hints by the amplified and finished passages derived from them; but this is an amusement which the reader can contrive for himself. I have extracted the most material notes. This fragment is a companion-piece to the engraved facsimile of a page of Pope's Homer, in this volume. That fac-simile, a minutely perfect copy of the manuscript, was not given to show the autograph of Pope, a practice which has since so generally prevailed, but to exhibit to the eye of the student the fervour and the diligence required in every work of genius. This could only be done by showing the state of the manuscript itself, with all its erasures, and even its half-formed lines; nor could this effect be produced by giving only some of the corrections, which Johnson had already, in printed characters. My notion has been approved of, because it was comprehended by writers of genius: yet this fac-simile has been considered as nothing more than an autograph by those literary blockheads, who, without taste and imagination, intruding into the province of literature, find themselves as awkward as a once popular divine, in his "Christian Life," assures us certain sinners would in paradise,-like "pigs in a drawing-room." РОРЕ. Nothing occasional. No haste. No rivals. No compulsion. Emulated former pieces. Cooper's-hill. Dryden's ode. Affected to disdain flattery. Not happy in his selection of patrons. * He has added in the Life the name of Burlington. Cibber's abuse will be better to him than a dose of hartshorn. Poems long delayed. Satire and praise late, alluding to something past. He had always some poetical plan in his head.* Echo to the sense. Would not constrain himself too much. Felicities of language. Watts.+ Luxury of language. Motives to study; want of health, want of money; helps to study; some small patrimony. Prudent and frugal; pint of wine. LETTERS. Amiable disposition-but he gives his own character. Elaborate. Think what to say-say what one thinks. Letter on sickness to Steele. On Solitude. Ostentatious benevolence. Professions of sincerity. Neglect of fame. Indifference about everything. Sometimes gay and airy, sometimes sober and grave. Too proud of living among the great. Probably forward to make acquaintance. No literary man ever talked so much of his fortune. Grotto. Importance. Post-office, letters open. Cant of despising the world. Affectation of despising poetry. His easiness about the critics. Something of foppery. His letters to the ladies-pretty. Abuse of Scripture-not all early. Thoughts in his letters that are elsewhere. ESSAY ON MAN. Ramsay missed the fall of man. Others the immortality of the soul. Address to our Saviour. Excluded by Berkeley. Bolingbroke's notions not understood. Scale of Being turn it in prose. Part and not the whole always said. Conversation with Bol. R. 220.+ Crousaz. Resnel. Warburton. Good sense. Luxurious-felicities of language. Wall. Loved labour-always poetry in his head. Extreme sensibility. Ill-health, headaches. He never laughed. No conversation. No writings against Swift. In the Life, Johnson gives Swift's complaint that Pope was never at leisure for conversation, because he had always some poetical scheme in his head. + Johnson, in the Life, has given Watts' opinion of Pope's poetical diction. Ruffhead's "Life of Pope." Parasitical epithets. Six lines of Iliad.* He used to set down what occurred of thoughts—a line-a couplet. First line made for the sound, or v. versa. Foul lines in Jervas. More notices of books early than late. DUNCIAD. The line on Phillips borrowed from another poem. MODERN LITERATURE-BAYLE'S CRITICAL DICTIONARY A NEW edition of Bayle in France is an event in literary history which could not have been easily predicted. Every work which creates an epoch in literature is one of the great monuments of the human mind; and Bayle may be considered as the father of literary curiosity, and of modern literature. Much has been alleged against our author: yet let us be careful to preserve what is precious. Bayle is the inventor of a work which dignified a collection of facts constituting his text, by the argumentative powers and the copious illustrations which charm us in his diversified commentary. Conducting the humble pursuits of an Aulus Gellius and an Athenæus with a high spirit, he showed us the philosophy of Books, and communicated to such limited researches a value which they had otherwise not possessed. This was introducing a study perfectly distinct from what is pre-eminently distinguished as "classical learning," and the subjects which had usually entered into philological pursuits. Ancient literature, from century to century, had constituted the sole labours of the learned; and "variæ lec *In the Life Johnson says, "Expletives he very early rejected from his verses; but he now and then admits an epithet rather commodious than important. Each of the six first lines of the "Iliad" might lose two syllables with very little diminution of the meaning; and sometimes, after all his art and labour, one verse seems to be made for the sake of another. He has a few double rhymes, but always, I think, unsuccessfully, except one, in the Rape of the Lock.-"Life of Pope." Mrs. Thrale, in a note on this passage, mentions the couplet Johnson meant, for she asked him: it is The meeting points the fatal lock dissever tiones" were long their pride and their reward. Latin was the literary language of Europe. The vernacular idiom in Italy was held in such contempt that their youths were not suffered to read Italian books, their native productions. Varchi tells a curious anecdote of his father sending him to prison, where he was kept on bread and water, as a penance for his inveterate passion for reading Italian books! Dante was reproached by the Italians for composing in his mothertongue, still expressed by the degrading designation of il volgare, which the "resolute" John Florio renders "to make common;" and to translate was contemptuously called volgarizzare. Petrarch rested his fame on his Latin poetry, and called his Italian nugellas vulgares! With us Roger Ascham was the first who boldly avowed "To speak as the common people, to think as wise men;" yet, so late as the time of Bacon, this great man did not consider his "Moral Essays" as likely to last in the moveable sands of a modern language, for he has anxiously had them sculptured in the marble of ancient Rome. Yet what had the great ancients themselves done, but trusted to their own volgare? The Greeks, the finest and most original writers of the ancients, observes Adam Ferguson, "were unacquainted with every language but their own; and if they became learned, it was only by studying what they themselves had produced." During fourteen centuries, whatever lay out of the pale of classical learning was condemned as barbarism; in the meanwhile, however, amidst this barbarism, another literature was insensibly creating itself in Europe. Every people, in the gradual accessions of their vernacular genius, discovered a new sort of knowledge, one which more deeply interested their feelings and the times, reflecting the image, not of the Greeks and the Latins, but of themselves! A spirit of inquiry, originating in events which had never reached the ancient world, and the same refined taste in the arts of composition caught from the models of antiquity, at length raised up rivals, who competed with the great ancients themselves; and modern literature now occupies a space which appears as immensity, compared with the narrow and the imperfect limits of the ancient. A complete collection of classical works, all the bees of antiquity, may be hived in a glasscase; but those we should find only the milk and honey of our youth; to obtain the substantial nourishment of European knowledge, a library of ten thousand volumes will |