author. He always goes straight to the
man. And he knows that the individuality which makes the life of
portraits is a matter of detail. Consequently he takes pains to record
every detail that he can collect about his poets. The clothes of
Milton, the chair Dryden occupied and its situation in summer and in
winter. Pope's silver saucepan {222} and potted lampreys, the reason
why Addison sometimes absented himself from Button's, the remark which
Swift made to Lord Orrery about a servant's faults in waiting at table
and which Lord Orrery himself related to Johnson, these things and a
hundred like them make Johnson's little biographies among the most
vivid in the world. When once we have read them the poets they
describe are for ever delivered from the remoteness of mere fame.
Johnson has gone very close to them and he has taken us with him. And
to have got close to men like Dryden, Pope, Swift and Addison is not
among the smaller experiences of life. Two of them may indeed seem to
us not to be poets at all, and the other two, possessing in such
splendid abundance so many of a great poet's gifts, to have lacked the
greatest and most essential of all: but great men the whole four
undoubtedly were, among the greatest and most representative in the
England of the century between the death of Milton and the birth of
Wordsworth.

And Johnson belonged whole-heartedly to that century, lived in it, knew
it more intimately perhaps than any man, believed in it and loved it
without ever the shadow of a fear that there might be revolutionary
surprises in store for the complacent self-assurance of its attitude
towards literature, society and {223} life. These were plainly unusual
qualifications for interpreting its great men to us. And when to these
qualifications is added, as it was in Johnson's case, a mind of great
power, and great pleasure in using its power, and a gift of expression
which has seldom been surpassed, it is evident that a book like the
_Lives_ is certain to be, what it is, one of the great monuments and
landmarks of our literature. No literary excursionist who has
travelled to look at it has ever regretted his journey. For there is
in it the mind of a whole age: yet not fossilized or mummified as in
other hands it might so easily have become by now, as the mind of any
age must soon become when it is left entirely to itself. Johnson did
not leave it entirely to itself. It is true that in all matters of