re beginning to feel the effect of time and of
disease, and that the old man would best consult his credit by writing
no more.

But this was a great mistake. Johnson had failed, not because his mind
was less vigorous than when he wrote Rasselas in the evenings of a week,
but because he had foolishly chosen, or suffered others to choose for
him, a subject such as he would at no time have been competent to treat.
He was in no sense a statesman. He never willingly read or thought or
talked about affairs of state. He loved biography, literary history, the
history of manners; but political history was positively distasteful to
him. The question at issue between the colonies and the mother country
was a question about which he had really nothing to say. He failed,
therefore, as the greatest men must fail when they attempt to do that
for which they are unfit; as Burke would have failed if Burke had tried
to write comedies like those of Sheridan; as Reynolds would have failed
if Reynolds had tried to paint landscapes like those of Wilson. Happily,
Johnson soon had an opportunity of proving most signally that his
failure was not to be ascribed to intellectual decay.

On Easter Eve 1777, some persons, deputed by a meeting which consisted
of forty of the first booksellers in London, called upon him. Though he
had some scruples about doing business at that season, he received his
visitors with much civility. They came to inform him that a new edition
of the English poets, from Cowley downwards, was in contemplation, and
to ask him to furnish short biographical prefaces. He readily undertook
the task, a task for which he was pre-eminently qualified. His knowledge
of the literary history of England since the Restoration was unrivalled.
That knowledge he had derived partly from books, and partly from sources
which had long been closed; from old Grub Street traditions; from the
talk of forgotten poetasters and pamphleteers who had long been lying in
parish vaults; from the recollections of such men as Gilbert Walmesley,
who had conversed with the wits of Button; Cibber, who had mutilated the
plays of two generations of dramatists; Orrery, who had been admitted to
the society of Swift; and Savage, who had rendered services of no very
honourable kind to Pope. The biographer therefore sate down to his task
with a mind full of matter. He had at first intended to give only
a paragraph to every minor poet, and only four or five pages to the