even the Vision of Mirza itself—becomes almost insignificant. Take Addison's Westminster Abbey paper and set it for a moment beside any expression by Johnson of a similar train of thought. How thin, how savourless, how unsatisfying, how commonplace, seem the speculations of the earlier writer! How robust, how manly, how imposing, those of the later! No; Addison for patches, for hoops, for the fashions, for the Spectator's Club; but Johnson for serious criticism of literature, of morals, and of life.

In one respect Johnson's fate has been a hard one. No man's fame ever suffered so much as his from the slavish adulation of stupid and incompetent imitators; no man's admirers ever did his reputation so many disobliging turns. For many years after his death, the sound and beneficial convention he had established was mimicked, distorted, burlesqued, almost beyond recognition, by the blundering ingenuity, not only of pedants and blockheads, but, of many people by no means to be placed in either of these classes. Of all such writers no more need be said than that they richly deserved to have applied to them what Burke in his happiest moment said of one Croft, who communicated to Johnson the greater part of the Life of Young: They had all the nodosity of the oak without its strength, and all the contortions of the Sibyl without the inspiration. But the blockheads and the pedants have long ago sought out other conventions; and the ghost of the sage may perhaps be further appeased by the reflection, that in the greater part of what has been written in the 'grand style' since he commenced author, his influence is, in some way or other, plainly discernible. To have had were it only Gibbon and Macaulay for pupils might well gratify a master's loftiest ambition. And even if Johnson, in respect of literary posterity, be after all per

versely deemed no better than a 'barren rascal,' here without more ado are the Lives of the Poels, the greatest among 'those incomparable works which . . . will be read and admired so long as the English language shall be spoken or understood.'

J. H. MILLAR.

LIVES OF THE POETS

COWLEY

THE Life of Cowley, notwithstanding the penury of English biography, has been written by Dr. Sprat, an author whose pregnancy of imagination and elegance of language have deservedly set him high in the ranks of literature; but his zeal of friendship, or ambition of eloquence, has produced a funeral oration rather than a history: he has given the character, not the life of Cowley; for he writes with so little detail, that scarcely anything is distinctly known, but all is shown confused and enlarged through the mist of panegyric.

Abraham Cowley was born in the year one thousand six hundred and eighteen. His father was a grocer, whose condition Dr. Sprat conceals under the general appellation of a citizen; and, what would probably not have been less carefully suppressed, the omission of his name in the register of St. Dunstan's parish gives reason to suspect that his father was a sectary. Whoever he was, he died before the birth of his son, and consequently left him to the care of his mother; whom Wood represents as struggling earnestly to procure him a literary education, and who, as she lived to the age of eighty, had her solicitude rewarded by seeing her son eminent, and, I hope, by seeing him fortunate, and partaking his prosperity. We know at least, from Sprat's account, that he always acknowledged her care, and justly paid the dues of filial gratitude.

In the window of his mother's apartment lay Spenser's Fairy Queen; in which he very early took delight to read,

VOL. I.

A

till, by feeling the charms of verse, he became, as he relates, irrecoverably a poet. Such are the accidents, which, sometimes remembered, and perhaps sometimes forgotten, produce that particular designation of mind, and propensity for some certain science or employment, which is commonly called genius. The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the great painter of the present age, had the first fondness for his art excited by the perusal of Richard

son's treatise.

6

By his mother's solicitation he was admitted into Westminster school, where he was soon distinguished. He was wont, says Sprat, to relate, that he had this defect in his memory at that time, that his teachers never could bring it to retain the ordinary rules of grammar.'

This is an instance of the natural desire of man to propagate a wonder. It is surely very difficult to tell anything as it was heard, when Sprat could not refrain from amplifying a commodious incident, though the book to which he prefixed his narrative contained its confutation. A memory admitting some things, and rejecting others, an intellectual digestion that concocted the pulp of learning, but refused the husks, had the appearance of an instinctive elegance, of a particular provision made by nature for literary politeness. But in the author's own honest relation, the marvel vanishes: he was, he says, such an enemy to all constraint, that his master never could ✓ prevail on him to learn the rules without book.' He does not tell that he could not learn the rules, but that, being able to perform his exercises without them, and being an 'enemy to constraint,' he spared himself the labour.

Among the English poets, Cowley, Milton, and Pope, might be said to lisp in numbers'; and have given such early proofs, not only of powers of language, but of comprehension of things, as to more tardy minds seems scarcely credible. But of the learned puerilities of Cowley there is no doubt, since a volume of his poems was not only written but printed in his thirteenth year; containing, with other poetical com