one volume Svo, in 1687, are little more than the characters of Phillips extended by common biographic matter, and in a style of insufferable vulgarity.

Giles Jacob, in 1723, printed in two volumes octavo, "The Poetical Register: or the lives and characters of all the English poets, with an account of their writings.-Adorned with curious sculptures, engraven by the best masters." Of this work, the second volume is devoted to the dramatic poets, but the first, which is more immediately our object, includes no less than two hundred and seventeen names! Except in the industry, however, of collecting together many almost forgotten writers, it possesses little value.

To a Mr. Coxeter, a man well versed in old English literature, and an industrious collector of scarce books, we are indebted for many curious materials for the biography of our poets. Johnson, when talking to Mr. Boswell of the propriety of forming a collection of all the English Poets who had published a volume of poems, added, "that a Mr. Coxeter, whom he knew, had gone the greatest lengths toward this; having collected about five hundred volumes of poets whose works were little known; but that upon his death Tom Osborne bought them, and they were dispersed; which he thought a pity, as it was curious

to see any series complete; and in every volume of poems something good may be found." Mr. Coxeter died in 1747; but the materials which he had so laboriously amassed, were made use of in a publication which appeared in 1753, in five volumes duodecimo, under the following title:

"The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, to the time of Dean Swift.-Compiled from ample materials, scattered in a variety of books, and especially from the MS notes of the late ingenious Mr. Coxeter and others, collected for this design. By Mr. Cibber."

Dr. Johnson believed that Mr. Shiels, a Scotchman, and one of his amanuenses, was the sole author of these lives; and that the booksellers imposed upon the public, by giving ten guineas to Theophilus Cibber, that they might be allowed to place Mr. Cibber on the title-page; by which means, they were in hopes that the work would be ascribed to the elder Cibber, and obtain, in consequence, a rapid sale.*

This account, however, which our author considered as a fact, and has himself published in the Life of Hammond, has been clearly disproved in the Monthly Review for May, 1792; which informs us, that " Shiels was the principal collector and digester of the materials for the work: but

* See Boswell's Life of Johnson, vol. 3, p. 29, 30, 31.

as he was very raw in authorship, an indifferent writer in prose, and his language full of Scotticisms, Cibber, who was a clever, lively fellow, and then soliciting employment among the booksellers, was engaged to correct the style and diction of the whole work, then intended to make only four volumes, with power to alter, expunge, or add, as he liked. He was also to supply notes, occasionally, especially concerning those dramatic poets with whom he had been chiefly conversant. He also engaged to write several of the Lives; which (as we are told,) he, accordingly, performed. He was farther useful, in striking out the jacobitical and tory sentiments, which Shiels had industriously interspersed, wherever he could bring them in--and, as the success of the work appeared, after all, very doubtful, he was content with twenty-one pounds for his labour, beside a few sets of the books, to disperse among his friends. Shiels had nearly seventy pounds, beside the advantage of many of the best lives in the work being communicated by friends to the undertaking, and for which Mr. Shiels had the same consideration as for the rest, being paid by the sheet, for the whole.

"As to the alleged design of making the compilement pass for the work of old Mr. Cibber, the charges seem to have been founded on a

We are

somewhat uncharitable construction. assured that the thought was not harboured by some of the proprietors, who are still living; and we hope that it did not occur to the first designer of the work, who was also the printer of it, and. who bore a respectable character.

"We have been induced to enter thus circumstantially into the foregoing detail of facts, relating to the Lives of the Poets compiled by Messrs. Cibber and Shiels, from a sincere regard to that sacred principle of truth, to which Dr. Johnson so rigidly adhered, according to the best of his knowledge; and which, we believe, no consideration would have prevailed on him to violate. In regard to the matter, which we now dismiss, he had, no doubt, been misled by partial and wrong information : Shiels was the Doctor's amanuensis; he had quarrelled with Cibber; it is natural to suppose, that he told his story in his own way; and it is certain that he was not " a very sturdy moralist."

Cibber's Lives are not devoid of merit; they communicate some traditionary information; are, in point of style, tolerably correct; and embrace two hundred and thirteen names, from the period of Chaucer, to about the middle of the eighteenth century.

Such were the productions on English Poetic

Biography, before the era of Johnson; and it must be allowed, I think, by every one conversant with the subject, that very little had been done, and that much more was required, in this department.

The immediate origin of our author's "Lives of the Poets" must be ascribed, however, to the booksellers, and has been circumstantially related by Mr. Dilly, in a letter to Mr. Boswell. From this account, it appears that the idea of an invasion of their literary property, by the publication of Martin and Bell's small edition of the Poets, occasioned a meeting of the principal booksellers in London, who agreed to print an accurate and uniform edition of the English Poets, from Chaucer to their own times; and, to secure the utmost respectability to the plan, solicited Dr. Johnson to write a concise narrative of the life of each author. To this the Doctor very readily consented, and, commencing the undertaking in his sixtyeighth year, completed it in his seventy-second, and in the year 1781.

Fortunately for the literary world, our biographer was induced to extend his original design, and, instead of a meagre catalogue of dates, to enter fully into the merits and defects of the productions which fell beneath his notice. So sensible were the proprietors of the great additional