aneous reflections, criticisms,
emendations, notes.

'History of the Constitution.

'Comparison of Philosophical and Christian Morality, by sentences
collected from the moralists and fathers.

'Plutarch's Lives, in English, with notes.

'POETRY and works of IMAGINATION.

'Hymn to Ignorance.

'The Palace of Sloth,--a vision.

'Coluthus, to be translated.

'Prejudice,--a poetical essay.

'The Palace of Nonsense,--a vision.'

Johnson's extraordinary facility of composition, when he shook off his
constitutional indolence, and resolutely sat down to write, is admirably
described by Mr. Courtenay, in his Poetical Review, which I have several
times quoted:

'While through life's maze he sent a piercing view,
His mind expansive to the object grew.
With various stores of erudition fraught,
The lively image, the deep-searching thought,
Slept in repose;--but when the moment press'd,
The bright ideas stood at once confess'd;
Instant his genius sped its vigorous rays,
And o'er the letter'd world diffus'd a blaze:
As womb'd with fire the cloud electrick flies,
And calmly o'er th' horizon seems to rise;
Touch'd by the pointed steel, the lightning flows,
And all th' expanse with rich effulgence glows.'

We shall in vain endeavour to know with exact precision every production
of Johnson's pen. He owned to me, that he had written about forty
sermons; but as I understood that he had given or sold them to different
persons, who were to preach them as their own, he did not consider
himself at liberty to acknowledge them. Would those who were thus aided
by him, who are still alive, and the friends of those who are dead,
fairly inform the world, it would be obligingly gratifying a reasonable
curiosity, to which there should, I think, now be no objection. Two
volumes of them, published since his death, are sufficiently
ascertained; see vol. iii. p. 181. I have before me, in his
hand-writing, a fragment of twenty quarto leaves, of a translation into
English of Sallust, _De Bella Catilinario_. When it was done I have no
notion; but it seems to have no very superior merit to mark it as his.
Beside the publications heretofore mentioned, I am satisfied, from
internal evidence, to admit also as genuine the following, which,
notwithstanding all my chronological care, escaped me in the course of
this work:

'Considerations on the Case of Dr. Trapp's Sermons,' +