known virtue, and, wherever
that is the taste, look for libels by wholesale. Too often even the
unnatural and the monstrous is courted, rather than miss the object of
arresting and startling. Now, Dr. Johnson's calumnies or romances were
not of that order. He had a healthy spirit of reverence for truth; but
he was credulous to excess, and he was plagued by an infirmity not
uncommon amongst literary men who have no families of young people
growing up around their hearth--the hankering after gossip. He was
curious about the domestic habits of his celebrated countrymen;
inquisitive in a morbid degree about their pecuniary affairs: 'What have
you got in that pocket which bulges out so prominently?' 'What did your
father do with that hundred guineas which he received on Monday from
Jacob Jonson?' And, as his 'swallow' was enormous--as the Doctor would
believe more fables in an hour than an able-bodied liar would invent in
a week--naturally there was no limit to the slanders with which his
'Lives of the Poets' are overrun.

Of the four great biographical works which we have mentioned, we hold
Dr. Johnson's to be by far the best in point of composition. Even
Plutarch, though pardonably overrated in consequence of the great
subjects which he treats (which again are 'great' by benefit of distance
and the vast abstracting process executed by time upon the petty and the
familiar), is loose and rambling in the principles of his _nexus_; and
there lies the great effort for a biographer, there is the strain, and
that is the task--viz., to weld the disconnected facts into one
substance, and by interfusing natural reflections to create for the
motions of his narrative a higher impulse than one merely chronologic.
In this respect, the best of Dr. Johnson's 'Lives' are undoubtedly the
very best which exist. They are the most highly finished amongst all
masterpieces of the biographic art, and, as respects the Doctor
personally, they are, beyond comparison, his best work. It is a great
thing in any one art or function, even though it were not a great one,
to have excelled all the literature of all languages. And if the reader
fancies that there lurks anywhere a collection of lives, or even one
life (though it were the 'Agricola' of Tacitus), which as a work of
refined art and execution can be thought equal to the best of Dr.
Johnson's, we should be grateful to him if he would assign it in a
letter to Mr. Blackwood:

'And t