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air, and then with a gentle smile added, "'Twas a vision." Bolingbroke said touchingly, "I have known him these thirty years, and value myself more for that man's love than "and his voice broke down. In his last days Pope always had a kind word for his friends; in Spence's comment, " as if his humanity had outlasted his understanding." And it is pleasant to think that the man who was never known in his life to laugh smiled cheerfully on his deathbed. He died quietly on May 30, 1744.

In a concluding estimate of Pope one is confronted by the conflicting elements that made up his whole life. For at the same time that one feels contempt for his littlenesses, his deceit, his silly vanities, one's admiration is excited by his occasional genuineness, one's respect by the consecration of his life, in spite of almost overwhelming obstacles, to a literary ideal, and one's sympathy by the tender-hearted affection which, after all, was the deepest quality in his character. His love and hate, like his little crooked body, were frail, spasmodic. Where Addison had been displeased, and Swift completely, crushingly angry, Pope would have been only peevish. And his love—a passing mood — lacked, by the same comparison, the serenity of Addison's and the consuming fire of Swift's. Yet for all this, Pope's is a permanent personality; in no other man is the truest and most characteristic worth of the Augustan Age so completely revealed.

One must not fail, furthermore, always to think of Pope as a writer. No less a man than Dr. Johnson told Boswell that "a thousand years may elapse before there shall appear another man with a power versification equal to that of Pope." But, more than

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his technical skill, Pope did a lasting service to literature as an art. "The master passion in his breast," concludes A. W. Ward, in his preface to the Cambridge edition of Pope," was not his vanity; it was his veneration for what is great and noble in intellectual life, and his loathing for what is small and mean and noxious. He could not exterminate Grub Street; but as long as he lived and battled against it, it felt that it was only Grub Street, and the world around was conscious of the fact. He served literature neither for power, like Swift; nor, like nearly all his contemporaries, for place and pay; not even for fame chiefly, but for her own sake."

SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1709-1784

No critic has been more alive to the importance of biography than Samuel Johnson; his Lives of the Poets show him at his best, and he always took pains to collect from competent authority details about the personality of the author with whom he was dealing. In return, Fate has given Johnson himself the best biography that ever was written. Moreover, this same biography has furnished the material and the inspiration for a life of Johnson which is unrivaled in its vivid descriptions of the man and of his times. Every schoolboy reads Macaulay and should look forward to the reading of Boswell.

Samuel Johnson as a representative man of letters is a supremely good example of character outlasting performance. Even more than in Macaulay's day his actual work as a writer has fallen into neglect. His dictionary has long been out of date; the moral essays of the Rambler, once so widely read and imitated, are unknown even to the most general reader. A few of his Lives of the Poets have been edited and praised, but they would probably not have been edited or praised save for a desire to rescue at least something of the great man's work from oblivion, and vindicate his place in the world of letters. The modern editor of Shakespeare sneers at Johnson's notes, and suppresses, often with injustice, Johnson's comments on character and plot. Even Rasselas, a piece of allegorical fiction once thought supremely good, is unread. But his personality,

his actual sayings and doings, remain as fresh as ever, as well on account of the personality itself as of the vivid biography which describes it.

Johnson was born at Lichfield, a somewhat sleepy old market and cathedral town, on September 18, 1709. His father, Michael Johnson, a fair scholar and at one time a man of considerable means, who held the office of churchwarden and even of sheriff, though the close of his life was darkened by loss of property, was a bookseller and stationer. From him the son inherited not only a sturdy frame and a mind of unusual strength, but also "that vile melancholy" which colored his whole life, fostered his indolence, and by natural reaction drove him into the social habits of which he was so fond. Unwilling to write except under the pressure of necessity, Johnson was always ready to talk; but for this melancholy which made him fear solitude, the world would have had more of his composition and less of his conversation and would probably now know little or nothing about him. Johnson's mother was "a woman of distinguished understanding," and it may well be that the piety which was so marked in Samuel was due to her precept and example. Tales of his childhood, partly from his own recollection and partly from that of his friends, are plentiful. He developed when very young extraordinary powers of memory, learning by heart a Collect from the Prayer-Book while his mother was going up one flight of stairs. He was taken to London, one of the last instances of a very old superstition, to be "touched" for the King's Evil, or scrofula; and he had "a sort of solemn recollection of a lady in diamonds and a long black hood," that is, of Queen Anne, whose touch unfortunately failed to effect a cure. In the dame

school he was the best scholar his teacher ever had. Next he was under the master in English whom he afterwards called Tom Brown, author of a spelling-book "dedicated to the Universe;" and then for two years learned Latin with Mr. Hawkins, under-master of Lichfield school. The head-master, Mr. Hunter, made a bad impression upon Johnson, using the rod on all occasions and inspiring this characteristic comment: "Now, sir, if a boy could answer every question, there would be no need of a master to teach him." Yet on another occasion Johnson accounted for his knowledge of Latin by saying, "My master whipped me very well. Without that, sir, I should have done nothing." He was a big clumsy boy, best scholar in his school, but without capacity and liking for games of any kind. He was an enormous reader. In 1763 he said to Boswell, “Sir, in my early years I read very hard; it is a sad reflection but a true one that I knew almost as much at eighteen as I do now."

At fifteen he was sent to a school in Worcestershire, staying there a year, and then seems to have spent two years at home in comparative idleness; but his father's bookshop was a school in itself. In an irregular manner, he says, he "looked into a great many books which were not commonly known at the Universities." Even a provincial collection such as Michael Johnson kept for sale differed absolutely from the corresponding mass of fiction and other popular reading with which we are now familiar. Learned works of all kinds, translations from the classics and foreign languages, essays and treatises in theology, passed under his eyes in those two years, and, thanks to his amazing memory, helped to make him in after years one of the best-read men of

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