life which they display, and the pure morality which they ever inculcate. His indiscriminate hatred of Whig principles; his detestation of blank verse; his dislike of pastoral, lyric, and descriptive poetry; his total want of enthusiasm ; and his perpetual efforts to veil the splendor of genius, are frequently lost in the admiration which the blaze and vigour of his intellectual powers so strongly excite. This is, in fact, the work in which the excellencies and defects of Johnson are placed before the reader with their full prominence; in which the lovers of philology and biography, the friends of moral and ethic wisdom, will find much to applaud; but in which also the disciples of candour and impartiality, the votaries of creative fancy, and of genuine poetry, will have much to regret, and much to condemn.

The first volume of the "Lives of the English Poets," in Mr. Murphy's edition, contains fourteen names, viz. Cowley, Denham, Milton, Butler, Rochester, Roscommon, Otway, Waller, Pomfret, Dorset, Stepney, J. Philips, Walsh, and Dryden. Of these, only two, Miton and Dryden, can claim the appellation of great poets; in a secondary class, we may enumerate four, Cowley, Butler, Waller, and Philips; but the remaining eight merit no place either in this, or any other selection. In making this remark, I must

be understood not to allude to the Dramatic powers of Otway, which, in the pathetic, are above all praise.

It is certainly desirable, both to the philologist, and the lover of poetry, to possess a collection, in which every poet, who has, in the smallest degree, contributed to the progress of our language, and the improvement of versification, may be included; but a selection for general use, such as Johnson's was intended to be, should exhibit only our best and most pleasing poets; such, for instance, as display either considerable sublimity, pathos, beauty, or wit. I should be tempted, indeed, in a selection, to omit the name of Cowley; for though his volumes abound in what, in his days, was deemed wit, a more improved age has discovered it to be worthless and false; neither do I think that much regret would be felt by any reader, if the mythological and insipid love verses of Waller had no place in such a work.

Johnson's Life of Cowley, however, is one of his most valuable pieces of biography; and particularly so, for his most able exposure of the absurd mode of writing, to which the poets, at the commencement of the seventeenth century, were so unfortunately addicted; a mode which

happily not long survived the death of Cowley, its last and greatest disciple.

The unconquerable bias, the vehement prejujudices which jaundiced the mind of Johnson, are very offensively prominent in his biography of Milton, whose public life he viewed with abhorrence, and whose poetry he professed not to enjoy. who should judge of the character of Milton from this Life, would conclude him to have been not only unamiable, but that his breast was the seat of the most violent and vindictive passions: he who should look into it for an estimate of his poetical worth, would be told that his “Paradise Lost" is an object of forced admiration ; that “ it is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again." It is true, that the critique on the "Paradise Lost," is one of the most splendid and eloquent passages in criticism; but the encomium terminates in a sentence which totally destroys the effect of the previous eulogy.

It has been the lot of Milton to encounter implacable enemies, and enthusiastic friends; when probably the mean would have given the true character of the man. In saying this, I allude merely to his political, moral, and domestic conduct; for of his poetical excellence, no encomium

can be sufficiently expressive. What a harsh, what a gloomy and ferocious tinting, has Johnson given to his portrait of Milton, in the two following paragraphs! it would seem rather intended for a delineation of the "arch apostate" of the poet.

"Milton's republicanism was, I am afraid, founded in an envious hatred of greatness, and a sullen desire of independence; in petulance impatient of controul, and pride disdainful of superiority. He hated monarchs in the state, and prelates in the church; for he hated all whom he was required to obey. It is to be suspected, that his predominant desire was to destroy, rather than establish; and that he felt not so much the love of liberty, as repugnance to authority.

"It has been observed, that they who most loudly clamour for liberty, do not most liberally grant it. What we know of Milton's character, in domestick relations, is, that he was severe and arbitrary. His family consisted of women; and there appears in his books, something like a Turk-, ish contempt of females, as subordinate and inferior beings. That his own daughters might not break the ranks, he suffered them to be depressed by a mean and penurious education. He thought women made only for obedience, and man only for rebellion."

A more striking contrast to this dark and hostile colouring, cannot be produced than from the pages of the very last biographer of our great poet, who concludes his bold and ardent delineation in the subsequent terms:

"We have now completed the history of JOHN MILTON, a man in whom were illustriously combined all the qualities that could adorn, or could elevate the nature to which he belonged ;-a man, who at once possessed beauty of countenance, symmetry of form, elegance of manners, benevolence of temper, magnanimity and loftiness of soul, the brightest illumination of intellect, knowledge the most various and extended, virtue that never loitered in her career, nor deviated from her course;—a man, who, if he had been delegated as the representative of his species to one of the superior worlds, would have suggested a grand idea of the human race, as of beings affluent in moral and intellectual treasure-raised and distinguished in the universe, as the favourites and heirs of heaven.”

I cannot here forbear inserting the very glowing and highly-finished tribute which Dr. Symmons has paid to the poems of Milton; a tribute from which no true critic, however free from enthusiasm, would wish to subduct an atom:

* Symmons's Life of Milton, p. 526, 527.