taste. In this nicer graduation of styles, if mine should be determined by a plurality of voices to be too remote from the just point, I must submit to be censured, and must content myself with imputing the fault to the vice rather of my nature than of my judgment. I never strain after allusion, or laboriously beat the thicket for game: it springs around me in abundance; and I am compelled to refuse more than I take. If I could show my readers what I reject before it drops upon the paper and what is subsequently withdrawn by my prudence, they would perhaps pardon the errors which I have committed, for those which, under the impulse of temptation and with something of violence to my feelings, I have virtuously abstained from committing.

Having intimated, with reference to my own case, a contrariety in some of the decisions of public criticism, I may be asked the cause of this opposition of judgment in writers, who profess to determine without passion and on principles which are established and

invariable.

But not to remark that, in the

trial of literary composition, much must always be left to the discretion of individual taste, and that in criticism, as in law, there is something of a glorious uncertainty, it must be observed that, in consequence of the present eager demand for periodical criticism which seems to be increasing with the hour, every man, who can arrange a common sentence, is invited, with the helmet of Orcus on his head, to assume the office of a critic, and thus to pass sentence on the merits, if not on the destinies of authors. The pen on these occasions is frequently, as I know, in the hand of ability and learning: but it is also, as I am likewise certain, not infrequently in that of imbecillity and ignorance. I am far however from objecting to this indiscriminate exercise of criticism, which, productive as it may be of partial evil, must, in my view of its operation, have a tendency to general good. I wish, indeed, that every man who can spell would turn critic; and from the extended agitation of opinion, which

would thus be excited, I am satisfied that the cause of truth would eventually flourish. Beneath the flood, which covers the plain, fertility will rest upon the soil, and though the weaker vegetation may perish, the root of the stronger will be cherished, and the branch of the loftier be adorned with more copious and animated green.

By more than one of the public critics I have been charged with injustice to the memory of Dr. Johnson; and for my treatment of this extraordinary and inconsistent man, in whom so many traits of great and so many of little and mean character concur to excite in the same moment our respect and our pity, I have been censured with some degree of harshness by a writer, of whose conduct to me in other respects I feel no reason to complain. The intellectual power of Dr. Johnson with his numerous virtues, and those prejudices which united him with a potent faction in the state, conciliated during his life the attachment of many illustrious friends,

d

The Cabinet, Vo. 1, p. 35.

and, when he ceased to breathe, communicated a species of sanctity to his grave. Of this I was aware in the commencement of my undertaking; and, repressed by a sensibility of which he had shewn himself to be insusceptible when he violated the ashes of Milton, my hand paused, as I reflected that he, on whom it was to fall, had paid the last debt of human infirmity, and was no longer in a condition to offend or resist. The suggestions of feeling in this instance pressed me more strongly than those of prudence; and, superior as I was conscious of being with the weapons of truth, I wished him to

"be alive again,

"To dare me to the desert with his sword."

But death can consecrate only virtue and truth; and with the fear of posthumous conviction and disgrace would be extinguished one of the most powerful restraints of human enormity and excess. If every villain were assured of an inviolable asylum for his memory in the tomb; and a James or a Wild

But

were to rest unmolested by the side of an Antoninus or a Socrates, the desire of fame and the terror of reproach would be deprived of half of their beneficial influence; and every wretch, who could defy the laws and was not afraid of God, would indulge his selfish passions without the check of a controll. the case is too clear to admit of illustration; and if we cannot, like the old Egyptians with respect to their deceased monarchs, submit the dead to the striking solemnity of a judicial process, it belongs to the historian and the biographer to bring their conduct to the bar of Truth, and firmly to pronounce her sentence of acquittal or condemnation. On the dead indeed only can the sentence of truth, at all times and without the pleading of any opposing duty, be pronounced. Have I then advanced against Dr. Johnson a single charge unsupported by sufficient evidence? Have I accused him of malignity to Milton, when the crime can be denied by the most bigotted of his adherents? Have I called him the coadjutor and accomplice of Lauder,