Transcribed from the 1891 Cassell and Co. edition by DavidPrice,
CASSELL’S NATIONAL LIBRARY.
LIVES
of the
English Poets
Waller Milton Cowley
BY
SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D.
CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited:
LONDON, PARIS &MELBOURNE.
1891.
INTRODUCTION.
Samuel Johnson, born at Lichfieldin the year 1709, on the 7th of September Old Style, 18th NewStyle, was sixty-eight years old when he agreed with thebooksellers to write his “Lives of the EnglishPoets.” “I am engaged,” he said,“to write little Lives, and little Prefaces, to a littleedition of the English Poets.” His conscience wasalso a little hurt by the fact that the bargain was made onEaster Eve. In 1777 his memorandum, set down among prayersand meditations, was “29 March, Easter Eve, I treated withbooksellers on a bargain, but the time was not long.”
The history of the book as told to Boswell by Edward Dilly,one of the contracting booksellers, was this. An edition ofPoets printed by the Martins in Edinburgh, and sold by Bell inLondon, was regarded by the London publishers as an interferencewith the honorary copyright which booksellers then respectedamong themselves. They said also that it was inaccuratelyprinted and its type was small. A few booksellers agreed,therefore, among themselves to call a meeting of proprietors ofhonorary or actual copyright in the various Poets. In Poetswho had died before 1660 they had no trade interest at all. About forty of the most respectable booksellers in Londonaccepted the invitation to this meeting. They determined toproceed immediately with an elegant and uniform edition of Poetsin whose works they were interested, and they deputed three oftheir number, William Strahan, Thomas Davies, and Cadell, to waiton Johnson, asking him to write the series of prefatory Lives,and name his own terms. Johnson agreed at once, andsuggested as his price two hundred guineas, when, as Malone says,the booksellers would readily have given him a thousand. Hethen contemplated only “little Lives.” Hisenergetic pleasure in the work expanded his Preface beyond thelimits of the first design; but when it was observed to Johnsonthat he was underpaid by the booksellers, his reply was,“No, sir; it was not that they gave me too little, but thatI gave them too much.” He gave them, in fact, hismasterpiece. His keen interest in Literature as the soul oflife, his sympathetic insight into human nature, enabled him toput all that was best in himself into these studies of the livesof men for whom he cared, and of the books that he was glad tospeak his mind about in his own shrewd independent way. Boswell was somewhat disappointed at finding that the selectionof the Poets in this series would not be Johnson’s, butthat he was to furnish a Preface and Life to any Poet thebooksellers pleased. “I asked him,” writesBoswell, “if he would do this to any dunce’s works,if they should ask him.” Johnson. “Yes, sir; andsay he was a dunce.”
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