# Six Essays on Johnson/Essay 5

V EARLY LIVES OF THE POETS
A student of history, who has to contend every day with the scarcity and inaccuracy of human records, finds himself forced to admit that men are wise, and care little for fame. Each generation of men goes about its business and its pleasure with immense energy and zest; each, when it has passed away, leaves the historians of a later era to spell out what they can from a few broken stones and documents preserved by chance. The opinion of Shakespeare, that
Nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence,
is the opinion of the sane world; and the desire for posthumous fame, 'that last infirmity of noble mind,' is a rare infirmity. The Romans were content to bequeath to us their blood and their law. If every human creature were provided with some separate and permanent memorial, we could not walk in the fields for tombstones.
I desire in this paper to trace the late and gradual growth of an interest in the Lives of English Authors, and to give some brief account of the earlier collections of printed biographies. Biography is not the least valuable part of modern literary history, and its origin is to be found in the new conceptions of literature and of history which were introduced at the time of the Renaissance. In the Middle Ages a writer was wholly ​identified with his work. His personal habits and private vicissitudes of fortune excited little curiosity; Vincent of Beauvais and Godfrey of Viterbo are the names not so much of two men as of two books. Literature was regarded as the chief means of preserving and promulgating ancient truths and traditions; and authors were mechanical scribes, recorders, and compilers. The distinction between fact and fiction, which we all make to-day with so airy a confidence, was hardly known to the mediaeval writer. Even the bard who celebrated the exploits of Arthur, the Christian king, or of Fierabras, the Pagan giant, based his claim to credit on the historical truth of his narrative, and supported himself by the authority of the books from which he copied. Poet or historian, he would have been indignant to be refused the name of copyist. Whence should he derive his wisdom but from the old books whose lessons he desired to hand on to coming generations?—
For out of oldè feldès, as men seith, Cometh al this newè corn from yeer to yere; And out of oldè bokès, in good feith, Cometh al this newè science that men lere.
While this was the dominant conception of art and of science, of history and of literature, authors were, in every sense of the word, a humble class. Where it was their function to instruct, they were conduit-pipes for the wisdom of the ages; where they set themselves to amuse, they held a rank not far above that of the professional jesters and minstrels who were attached as servitors to the household of some great lord or king.
With the revival of letters in the Sixteenth Century ​there came the first serious attempt to put on record such facts as could be recovered concerning the great writers who had flourished in these islands. The dissolution of the monasteries caused the destruction of so large a mass of valuable material that it was impossible for scholars to stand by without making an effort to save some remnants. Leland, Bale, and Pits, whose joint activity covers the whole of the Sixteenth Century, each of them made a collection of the lives and works of the writers of Great Britain. Three of the most conspicuous features of later antiquarian learning are exemplified in their work, as it is estimated by Fuller: 'J. Leland,' he says, 'is the industrious bee, working all: J. Bale is the angry wasp, stinging all: J. Pits is the idle drone, stealing all.' But these three men made no new departure in method. The bulk of the writers whom they commemorated were monks and friars, concerning whom biographical details were wholly to seek. Their works, which were compounded, with large additions, into a single folio volume by Bishop Tanner, can hardly be said to exhibit the faint beginnings of modern biography.
It is difficult to persuade man that his contemporaries are valuable and important persons. The industrious scholar bars his doors and windows, and shuts himself up in his room, that he may bequeath to future ages his views on the Primitive Church or the Egyptian Dynasties. His works, too often, go to swell the dust-heap of learning. And what is passing in the street, on the other side of his shutter, is what future ages will probably desire, and desire in vain, to know. At the time of the Renaissance, when writers of knowledge and power were Latinists and scholars, who ​had been nurtured in an almost superstitious veneration for the ancient classics, the poor playwright or poet in the vernacular tongue was little likely to engage the labours of a learned pen. Those Elizabethan authors whose lives are fairly well known to us were always something other than mere authors men of noble family, it may be, or distinguished in politics and war. We know more of Sir Walter Raleigh’s career than of Shakespeare’s, and more of Essex than of Spenser. On the other hand, while the works of Shakespeare and Spenser have come down to us almost intact, most of the poems of Raleigh and Essex are lost. Men of position held professional authorship in some contempt, and wrote only for the delectation of their private friends. And when Sir Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, wrote a brief life of his friend and ancient schoolfellow, Sir Philip Sidney, it was not the author of the Arcadia or the Sonnets that he desired to celebrate, but rather the statesman of brilliant promise and the soldier whose death had put a nation into mourning. So that this ceremonial little treatise, which is the earliest notable English life of an English poet, is the life of a poet almost by accident.
With the Seventeenth Century, a century rich in all antiquarian and historical learning, literary biography begins. Early in the century, Thomas Heywood, the dramatist, planned a volume to contain ‘the lives of all the poets, foreign and modern, from the first before Homer to the novissimi and last.’ He never carried out his scheme, and so we have lost an invaluable work. But his other prose works and compilations give us reason to fear that his Lives would have been borrowed almost wholly from books and would have ​contained all too little of direct impression or reminiscence. The scheme for a complete account of the lives of English poets was not taken up again till towards the close of the century, and then Shakespeare and the Elizabethans were beyond the reach of living memory.
Nevertheless, during the course of the century poets began to find biographers. The patriotic impulse that had produced the Elizabethan Chronicles, and Camden’s Britannia, and Drayton’s Polyolbion moved Thomas Fuller to write his History of the Worthies of England (1662), which included the lives of many poets. In undertaking this work Fuller proposed to himself five ends ‘first, to give some glory to God; secondly, to preserve the memories of the dead; thirdly, to present examples to the living; fourthly, to entertain the reader with delight; and lastly (which I am not ashamed publicly to profess) to procure some honest profit to myself.’ He died a year before his book appeared, so he failed in the last of his aims. He did his best to make his subject attractive to readers. ‘I confess,’ he says, ‘the subject is but dull in itself, to tell the time and place of men’s birth, and deaths, their names, with the names and number of their books; and therefore this bare skeleton of time, place, and person must be fleshed with some pleasant passages. To this intent I have purposely interlaced… many delightful stories.’ He will always be valued for the facts that he records and for the many surprising turns of fanciful wit with which he relieves the monotony of his work. In endeavouring to make his biographies literary he had the advantage of a matchless model. For before Fuller wrote, Izaak Walton had produced two of his famous ​Lives. Walton was drawn into the writing of biography by his desire to leave the world some memorial of the virtues of men whom he had known. The men whom he chose for his subject were men like-minded with himself, men who had studied to be quiet, ‘to keep themselves in peace and privacy, and behold God’s blessing spring out of their mother earth.’ The Life of Dr. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s, the first that he wrote, was contributed as preface to a collection of Donne’s sermons in 1640. Sir Henry Wotton, whose Life appeared in 1651, had been Walton’s friend and fellow angler during the quiet years that he spent at Eton College after his retirement from the service of the State—‘the College being to his mind as a quiet harbour to a seafaring man after a tempestuous voyage…. Nor did he forget his innate pleasure of angling’ (for an angler, according to Walton, is born, not made), ‘which he would usually call “his idle time not idly spent;” saying often, he would rather live five May months than forty Decembers.’ To these two lives Walton subsequently added three more, the Lives of Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert, and Dr. Robert Sanderson, the last being written almost forty years later than the Life of Donne. Walton had not known all these men, though they were all contemporary with his long life. But he was drawn by natural sympathy to their characters, and his portraits of them are masterpieces of delicate insight.
Indeed, Walton’s Lives are almost too perfect to serve as models. They are obituary poems; each of them has the unity and the melody of a song or a sonnet; they deal with no problems, but sing the praises of obscure beneficence and a mind that seeks its ​happiness in the shade. No English writer before Walton had so skilfully illustrated men’s natural disposition and manners from the most casual acts and circumstances. It is not in the crisis of great events that he paints his heroes, but in their most retired contemplations and the ordinary round of their daily life. We see Hooker as he was found by his pupils at Drayton Beauchamp tending his small allotment of sheep in a common field, with the Odes of Horace in his hands, and hear him called away by the voice of his wife to rock the cradle; we find George Herbert tolling the bell and serving at the altar of his little church at Bemerton, and overhear his conversations with his parishioners by the roadside; we come upon Dr. Sanderson, a man whose only infirmities were that he was too timorous and bashful, as Walton met him in the bookseller’s quarter of Little Britain, where he had been to buy a book; we notice that he is dressed ‘in sad-coloured clothes, and, God knows, far from being costly;’ and, on the sudden coming-on of a shower of rain, we are allowed to accompany him and his biographer to ‘a cleanly house,’ where they have bread, cheese, ale, and a fire for their money, and where we are permitted to overhear their talk on the troubles of the times. Or we see Dr. John Donne dressed in his winding sheet, with his face exposed and his eyes shut, standing for his picture in his study, that so his portrait when it was finished might serve to keep him in mind of his death. All these sketches and many more in Walton’s Lives are as perfect, in their way, as the Idylls of Theocritus.
Intimate biography of this kind was the creation of the Seventeenth Century, and Walton had many ​followers and disciples. Some of the formal collections of Lives are little better, it is true, than compilations of dry facts and dates. The Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum (1675) by Milton’s nephew, Edward Phillips; the Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) by William Winstanley, an industrious barber, who stole from Phillips as Phillips had stolen from Fuller; the Account of the English Dramatic Poets (1691) by Gerard Langbaine; Sir Thomas Pope Blount’s De Re Poetica, or Remarks upon Poetry, with Characters and Censures of the most considerable Poets (1694)—all these are valuable as authorities, but they draw no portraits of authors in their habit as they lived, and intrude upon no privacy. Even where the material for a familiar and life-like portrait existed it was too often suppressed in the supposed interests of the dignity of literature. Sprat in his Life of Cowley (1667) confesses that he had a large collection of Cowley’s letters to his private friends, in which were expressed ‘the Native tenderness and Innocent gayety of his Mind.’ But ‘nothing of this nature,’ says Sprat, ‘should be published…. In such Letters the Souls of Men should appear undress’d: And in that negligent habit, they may be fit to be seen by one or two in a Chamber, but not to go abroad into the Streets.’ So we have lost the letters of a man whom we can easily believe to have been the best letter-writer of his century and country.
Nevertheless, some familiar details have escaped suppression; not all the literary portraits of the time are conventional and stiff. Edward Phillips’ Life of John Milton (1694), prefixed to an edition of Milton’s Latin letters, preserves for us some minute and personal reminiscences of the poet. Moreover, the Seventeenth ​Century is rich in religious biography, written with a homiletic and didactic intent. The Lives of Eminent Persons (1683) by Samuel Clarke, although, like the mediaeval Lives of Saints, they are too monotonously alike, too little quickened with the caprices and humours of the unregenerate, yet occasionally display, in the interstices between Biblical quotation and edifying sentiment, real glimpses of living human character. We are told, for instance, of Mr. Richard Blackerby, that ‘he was exceeding careful to have none of Gods Creatures lost; he would always have a Fowl or two allowed to come familiarly into his Eating Room, to pick up the lesser Crumbs that would fall from the Table.’ But evangelical biography, which attempts to exhibit human life as a design nearly resembling a fixed pattern, has never been strong in portrait-painting. These sketches are seen to be merely childish in conception and execution if they be set beside the vivid and masterly work of John Aubrey, the best of seventeenth-century gossips. He was despised by his learned contemporaries for an idle man of fashion and a pretender to antiquities. Anthony à Wood, the author of that great work the Athenae Oxonienses—perhaps the most valuable of all early biographical collections—speaks of Aubrey as ‘a shiftless person, roving and magotieheaded, and sometimes little better than crased.’ Yet Aubrey had the true spirit of an antiquary; nothing was too trivial to be set down in his Brief Lives. He records how, walking through Newgate Street, he saw a bust of the famous Dame Venetia Stanley in a brasier’s shop, with the gilding on it destroyed by the Great Fire of London, and regrets that he could never see the bust again, for ‘they melted it down.’ ‘How these ​curiosities,’ he adds, ‘would be quite forgott, did not such idle fellowes as I am putt them downe!’
We owe to Aubrey a world of anecdote that but for his idleness would have been lost. He has the quickest eye for the odd humours and tricks of thought and gesture which distinguish one man from another. He was credulous, no doubt, for he was insatiably inquisitive, and the possibilities of human nature seemed to him to be inexhaustible. Character is what he loves, and he found the characters of men to be full of novelties and surprises. To him we owe the portrait of Hobbes the philosopher, at the age of ninety, lying in bed, and, when he was sure that the doors were barred and nobody heard him (for he had not a good voice), singing from a printed book of airs, to strengthen his lungs and prolong his life. Again, he tells how Thomas Fuller, the historian, had a memory so good that ‘he would repeate to you forwards and backwards all the signes from Ludgate to Charing Crosse.’ Or how Sir John Suckling, the poet, when he was at his lowest ebb in gaming, ‘would make himselfe most glorious in apparell, and sayd that it exalted his spirits.’ Or how William Prynne, the Puritan chastiser of the theatre, studied after this manner: ‘He wore a long quilt cap, which came 2 or 3, at least, inches over his eies, which served him as an umbrella to defend his eies from the light. About every 3 houres his man was to bring him a roll and a pott of ale to refocillate his wasted spirits. So he studied and dranke and munched some bread: and this maintained him till night; and then he made a good supper.’ Sometimes it is a witty saying or happy retort that sticks in Aubrey’s memory. So he relates of Sir Henry Savile, Provost of Eton, ​that he could not abide Wits; ‘when a young scholar was recommended to him for a good witt, Out upon him, says he, I’ll have nothing to do with him; give me the plodding student. If I would look for witts I would goe to Newgate, there be the witts.’ Again, he tells how Sir Walter Raleigh, dining with his graceless son at a nobleman’s table, when his son made a profane and immodest speech, struck him over the face. ‘His son, as rude as he was, would not strike his father, but strikes over the face the gentleman that sate next to him, and sayd: “Box about: ’twill come to my father anon.”’
Aubrey takes as keen a delight as Samuel Pepys himself in the use of his natural senses, and his zest in observation sometimes gives an air of exaggeration to his recorded impressions. Of Sir Henry Savile he says, ‘He was an extraordinary handsome and beautiful man; no lady had a finer complexion.’ Of Sir William Petty, ‘He is a proper handsome man, measured six foot high, good head of browne haire moderately turning up…. His eies are a kind of goose-grey, but very short-sighted, and, as to aspect, beautifull, and promise sweetnes of nature, and they do not deceive, for he is a marveillous good-natured person.’ Aubrey's unbounded faculty for enjoyment and admiration is seen even in his description of the mechanical contrivances and scientific inventions that were shown to him by his friends. Now it is a new kind of well—‘the most ingenious and useful bucket well that ever I saw…. ’Tis extremely well worth the seeing.’ Or it is a device for relieving those who are troubled with phlegm—‘a fine tender sprig,’ with a rag tied at the end to put down the throat of the patient. ‘I could never make it ​goe downe my throat,’ says Aubrey, ‘but for those that can ’tis a most incomparable engine.’ And there is nothing that he takes more delight in than a funeral or an obituary monument. His descriptions of tombstones almost make you feel that it is worth the pains of dying to get so admirable a thing contrived in your honour. Of Selden he says:
He was magnificently buried in the Temple Church…. His grave was about ten foot deepe, or better, walled up a good way with bricks, of which also the bottome was paved, but the sides at the bottome for about two foot high were of black polished marble, wherein his coffin (covered with black bayes) lyeth, and upon that wall of marble was presently let downe a huge black marble stone of great thicknesse, with this inscription:
Heic jacet corpus Johannis Seldeni.
…Over this was turned an inch of brick… and upon that was throwne the earth, etc., and on the surface lieth another finer grave-stone of black marble with this inscription:
I Seldenus I. C. heic situs est.
…On the side of the wall above is a fine inscription of white marble: the epitaph he made himself.
This is merely one instance of Aubrey’s loving care for grave-stones and monuments. He recognized them perhaps as being among the best friends of the antiquary, and desired that they should receive all care and honour. Of Ben Jonson he says:
O Rare Ben Johnson,
And Aubrey did not forget his own epitaph. Among his papers he left two suggestions, made at different times, for an inscription to be placed on his tomb. ‘I would desire,’ he says at the foot of one of these, ‘that this Inscription sho$^d$ be a stone of white M$^{ble}$ about the bigness of a royal sheet of paper, scilicet about 2 foot square. Mr. Reynolds of Lambeth, Stone-cutter (Fox-hall), who married Mr. Elias Ashmole’s widow, will help me to a Marble as square as an imperial sheet of paper for 8 shillings.’
But Aubrey’s greatest quality as an antiquary is his sympathy with the living, and with life in all its phases. He writes best when he is recording his memories of men that he had seen and known. Where these men were famous, and remembered by after generations, his vivid phrases have long since been embodied in biographical dictionaries. Some of his best work, however, is done on perishable names, and no better example of his art can be found than his account of Dr. Ralph Kettell, for forty-five years President of Trinity College, Oxford, a humorous pedagogue of the old school, who died soon after Aubrey came into residence at the college:
The abundant human sympathy that takes delight in all these passing incidents and trivial characteristics is ​a necessary part of the equipment of an antiquary. The whole tribe of antiquaries suffers under the false imputation that their work is ‘dry-as-dust.’ No doubt there are minute, exact, and arid minds in that, as in other callings. No doubt there is useful work to be done, here as elsewhere, by men who ply a dull mechanical trade and forswear imagination. But imaginative sympathy is, none the less, the soul of an antiquary, the impulse that urges him on to years of tedious labour, and the refreshment that keeps him alive in a desert of dust and tombs. ‘Methinks,’ says Aubrey, ‘I am carried on by a kind of Oestrum, for nobody else hereabout hardly cares for it, but rather makes a scorn of it. But methinks it shews a kind of gratitude and good nature, to revive the memories and memorials of the pious and charitable Benefactors long since dead and gone.’ But if gratitude is the prevailing motive, it is by a wide faculty of imagination that the antiquary comes to understand that there is but one human society on earth, and that, for good or for evil, the living are the least part of it. When other men see only a wave of green rising ground, he calls up in his thought a bygone civilization, he sees the Roman soldiers relieving guard and exchanging gossip on the ramparts of a world-empire, he witnesses excursions and alarums, and hears the strange jargon of the long-haired prisoners brought captive into camp. Where others see only a scrap of brown parchment inscribed with unintelligible characters he reconstructs in thought the mediaeval church and the despotism that it wielded in all the dearest relations of life. He knows that a great institution never perished without leaving a legacy to those that come after it, and that the present is inextricably entangled with the past. ​He builds up a vanished society from tiles and buttons, black-jacks, horn books, and battered pewter vessels. Whatever humanity has touched has a story for him. It is not an accident that the greatest novelist of Scotland was first an antiquary. And, to return to my tale, it was only by accident that John Aubrey, with his interest in witchcraft and mechanical science, in astrology and education, in Stonehenge and the Oxford colleges, did not leave some more considerable monument of his powers than the voluminous scattered papers which were published for the most part long after his death.
What antiquaries suffer from the neglect of the public is a small thing compared to what they suffer at the hands of one another. Aubrey’s biographical materials were compounded, with worse than no acknowledgement, by Anthony à Wood in his Athenae Oxonienses, an Exact History of all the Writers and Bishops who have had their Education in the University of Oxford (1691–2). This great work, as splendid a benefaction as has ever been conferred by a single donor on any University, was conceived and executed by its author out of love for the place where he was born and had his education. Like a disdainful beauty, the University of Oxford has often been careless of those who love and serve her best. Her native fascination keeps her truest lovers her slaves, and leaves her free to bestow her kindness on those who will not swell her following till they are assured of her favour. Anthony à Wood did not grudge a lifetime spent in the service of Oxford, but that he felt her indifference is evident from his preface, To the Reader:
One reason why the company of Anthony was not agreeable to the fellows even of his own college is not unconnected with his professional excellence. ‘I am told,’ says Hearne, ‘by one of the fellows of Merton College that Mr. Ant. à Wood formerly used to frequent their common-room; but that a quarrel arising one night between some of the fellows, one of them, who thought himself very much abused, put some of the rest of them into the court; but when the day for deciding the matter came, there wanted sufficient evidence. At last Mr. Wood, having been in company all the time the quarrel lasted, and put down the whole in writing, gave a full relation, which appeared so clear for the plaintiff, that immediate satisfaction was commanded to be given. This was so much resented, that Mr. Wood was afterwards expelled the common-room, and his company avoided, as an observing person, and not fit to be present where matters of moment were discussed.’ In his autobiography Wood himself relates how it was said that ‘the society of Merton would not let me live in the college for fear I should pluck it down to search after antiquities.’
​But no one can read the Athenae Oxonienses without recognizing that the author was also a man of a naturally satirical wit, with a great talent for sketching the characters of men or books in a scornful phrase, or a few incisive epithets. His depreciation is the more effective in that it falls at random, with none of the air of a studied invective. He knows that the indifference of contempt, which is professed a hundred times in human society for once that it is really felt, may be better and more bitingly conveyed in a subordinate clause than in the main sentence. So in speaking of the music of his time, he says, ‘Mr. Davis Mell was accounted hitherto the best for the violin in England, as I have before told you; but after Baltzar came into England, and showed his most wonderful parts on that instrument, Mell was not so admired; yet he played sweeter, was a well-bred gentleman, and not given to excessive drinking as Baltzar was.’ So Mell loses his musical pre-eminence, and Baltzar his reputation for courtesy and sobriety.
If we consider, therefore, the enormous learning of Anthony à Wood, in a kind for which the Oxford of his day had little sympathy, his love of a solitary and retired life, his liberty of speech, his quickness of observation, even when ‘he seemed to take notice of nothing and to know nothing,’ his independent pride and sarcastic severity of judgement, we shall find no reason to wonder that the fellows of Merton, solicitous chiefly, it may be, for the dignity and comfort of the high table, were not sorry to be rid of his company.
About the greatness of his achievement there can be no question. His account of the learned writers and poets who had their education at Oxford has been used by a hundred later compilers; it has been edited with ​additions, and may be so edited again and again; but it can never be wholly superseded. The Athenae is a monument of literature; it records in its thousands of columns all that Oxford meant to the world, all of learning and beauty that she gave to the world, during centuries of her existence; and its author might justly boast, in the words of the poet-painter who drew the portrait of his mistress—
Let all men note That in all time (O Love, thy gift is this!) He that would look on her must come to me.
The subject is large, and a brief mention of some later compilations must suffice. Aubrey and Wood had appealed chiefly to an audience of professed students and lovers of antiquity. But at the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, the public, having enjoyed such an education as is obtainable in the noisy school of political and religious controversy, began to ask for books. This was the genesis of the publisher. Before this date the author said what he had to say, and the bookseller introduced it to such readers as were likely to appreciate it. Then, as now, an author often failed to find a bookseller or printer who would be at the risk of printing his work. But while the bookseller reigned, the chain of causation often began with the author, who was a man writing, and writing, it might even be, because he thought or knew. When the publisher succeeded to power, the order was reversed. The main fact to be recognized by him was that here was a public which had already taken to reading, as a man may take to drink. The public must be supplied with something that it could consume in large quantities without loss of appetite. Hence the novel, the review, the periodical essay, the collection of ​private letters, and though last, not least, the intimate lives of notable men. Tonson, the first great publisher, deserves to be named with Copernicus, Harvey, Kepler, James Watt, and other famous discoverers. But it was reserved for Edmund Curll, Pope’s victim and accomplice, to carry the discovery a step further, and so to play Newton to Tonson’s Kepler. Whether by happy chance or by laborious induction we cannot tell; but Curll hit on one of those epoch-making ideas which are so simple when once they are conceived, so difficult, save for the loftiest genius, in their first conception. It occurred to him that, in a world governed by the law of mortality, men might be handsomely entertained on one another’s remains. He lost no time in putting his theory into action. During the years of his activity he published some forty or fifty separate Lives, intimate, anecdotal, scurrilous sometimes, of famous and notorious persons who had the ill fortune to die during his lifetime. He had learned the wisdom of the grave-digger in Hamlet, and knew that there are many rotten corpses nowadays, that will scarce hold the laying in. So he seized on them before they were cold, and commemorated them in batches. One of his titles runs: The Lives of the most Eminent Persons who died in the Years 1711, 12, 13, 14, 15, in 4 Vols. 8$^o$. His books commanded a large sale, and modern biography was established.
The new taste reacted on the older poets, whose works were steadily finding a larger and larger audience. In 1723 one Giles Jacob, who was the son of a maltster in Hampshire, and had been bred to the law, edited, for Curll, a collection in two volumes called The Poetical Register, or the Lives and Characters of all the English Poets, with an account of their Writings. His work, ​which is founded on Langbaine for the dramatic part, is meanly written, and, like many other meanly written works, is profusely illustrated. ‘I have been very sparing,’ says the editor, ‘in my Reflections on the Merits of Writers, which is indeed nothing but anticipating the judgment of the Reader, and who after all will judge for himself.’ Pope, perhaps after reading this sentence, called Jacob ‘the scourge of grammar.’ He and Congreve and other living writers were treated by the servile Jacob with a vapid monotony of commendation. In short, the book, like so much of later reviewing, is not critical; it belongs rather to the huge family of trade circulars and letters of introduction.
The effort to recover information concerning our older English poets was continued in the Eighteenth Century by the successors of Aubrey and Wood, chief among whom must be mentioned William Oldys and Thomas Coxeter.
Oldys (1696–1761) was one of those true antiquaries who are content to collect and arrange material to be used by others. ‘The generous assistance of the candid Mr. Oldys’ is acknowledged with gratitude by Mrs. Elizabeth Cooper in the preface to her book called The Muses Library; Or a Series of English Poetry, from the Saxons, to the Reign of King Charles II. Containing The Lives and Characters of all the known Writers in that Interval, the Names of their Patrons; Complete Episodes, by way of Specimen of the larger Pieces, very near the intire Works of some, and large Quotations from others. Vol I (1737). Mrs. Cooper is a modest and timid writer, but her brief Lives, prefixed to large selections from the English poets down to the time of Spenser, are something better than hack-work. She ​examined books and consulted manuscripts for herself; having heard high praises of Lydgate, she ‘gave a considerable Price for his Works, and waded thro’ a large Folio,’ only to be disappointed by the industrious monk. She has the courage of her opinions; William Warner, she says, is ‘an Author only unhappy in the Choice of his Subject, and Measure of his Verse.’ Her book was never completed; it was printed for Osborne, who some years later employed Johnson and Oldys as fellow-labourers in the compilation of the Harleian Miscellany.
The other antiquary, Thomas Coxeter, who was of Aubrey’s college in Oxford, devoted the whole of his busy life (1689–1747) to collecting the works of forgotten poets and amassing historical material. His books were dispersed at his death, but some of his material fell into the hands of Griffiths, Goldsmith’s employer, who asserted that it was the basis for the last biographical collection that I shall discuss—The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland to the Time of Dean Swift. By Mr. Cibber (1753). 5 vols. This important compilation, which probably suggested Johnson’s great work, has had very little justice done to it in literary history. It is seldom mentioned save in connexion with the dispute about its authorship. There is no reason to distrust the categorical statements of Johnson, who must have been well informed. ‘It was not written,’ says Johnson, ‘nor, I believe, ever seen, by either of the Gibbers; but was the work of Robert Shiels, a native of Scotland, a man of very acute understanding, though with little scholastic education, who, not long after the publication of his book, died in London of a consumption. His ​life was virtuous, and his end was pious. Theophilus Cibber, then a prisoner for debt, imparted, as I was told, his name for ten guineas. The manuscript of Shiels’, he adds, ‘is now in my possession.’
In some of its details this account has been amended and corrected. Cibber, it appears, did actually supervise and edit the work, striking out the Jacobite and Tory sentiments which Shiels had plentifully interspersed in the Lives that he contributed. For this labour of revision Cibber received twenty guineas. Shiels, on the other hand, wrote the chief part of the book, and received almost seventy pounds. Cibber and Shiels, as might be expected, quarrelled, and Shiels, who was for a time one of Johnson’s dictionary amanuenses, doubtless communicated to Johnson his version of the affair.
That Shiels is entitled to the chief credit of the work cannot be doubted. Internal evidence, as it is called, would alone be sufficient to establish his claim. Here, for instance, is a description of Edinburgh society, ​extracted from the Life of Mr. Samuel Boyse, who came to that city from the lighter air of Dublin. The description seems to me to prove two things: that the author was a Scot; and that, consciously or unconsciously, he had formed his literary style wholly on the Johnsonian model.
The Life of Samuel Boyse, from which I have quoted, gives, like Johnson’s Life of Richard Savage, a vivid picture of the straits to which professional authors were reduced under the rule of Walpole. It is narrated how, about the year 1740, Boyse was brought to the extremity of distress. Having pawned all his clothes he was confined to bed with no other covering but a blanket. ‘He sat up in bed with the blanket wrapt about him, through which he had cut a hole large enough to admit his arm, and placing the paper upon his knee, scribbled in the best manner he could the verses he was obliged to make. Whatever he got by ​those, or any of his begging letters, was but just sufficient for the preservation of his life.’
‘Whenever his distresses so pressed as to induce him to dispose of his shirt, he fell upon an artificial method of supplying one. He cut some white paper in strips, which he tied round his wrists, and in the same manner supplied his neck. In this plight he frequently appeared abroad, with the additional inconvenience of want of breeches.’
‘He fell upon some strange schemes of raising trifling sums. He sometimes ordered his wife to inform people that he was just expiring, and by this artifice work on their compassion…. At other times he would propose subscriptions for poems of which only the beginning and the conclusion were written; and by this expedient would relieve some present necessity.’
‘He had so strong a propension to groveling that his ​acquaintance were generally of such a cast, as could be of no service to him.’
‘The manner of his becoming intoxicated was very particular. As he had no spirit to keep good company, so he retired to some obscure ale-house, and regaled himself with hot twopenny, which though he drank in very great quantities, yet he had never more than a pennyworth at a time.’
‘It was an affectation in Mr. Boyse to appear very fond of a little lap-dog which he always carried about with him in his arms, imagining it gave him the air of a man of taste.’ When his wife died, ‘Boyse, whose circumstances were then too mean to put himself in mourning, was yet resolved that some part of his family should. He step’d into a little shop, purchased half a yard of black ribbon, which he fixed round his dog’s neck by way of mourning for the loss of its mistress.’
In 1749, the unhappy poet, whose works had been praised by Johnson and Fielding, died in obscure lodgings near Shoe Lane. ‘The remains of this son of the Muses,’ says his biographer, ‘were with very little ceremony hurried away by the parish officers, and thrown amongst common beggars.’
Perhaps the chief value of Cibber’s Lives is to be found in these obscurer memoirs, which give information concerning poets who would otherwise be forgotten. For the rest, the scheme of the work is more generous ​than that of Johnson’s Lives. The lives of British poets are recorded, and their works enumerated, from Chaucer to Mrs. Mary Chandler. The private virtues of this lady are so copiously attested, that it is late in her biography before we make acquaintance with her claims to distinction in literature. She was the author, it seems, of a poem on the Bath, which had the full approbation of the public, and when death overtook her, at the age of fifty-eight, she was meditating a nobler flight, ‘a large poem on the Being and Attributes of God, which was her favourite subject.’ But this work, like the mammoth, was never seen by the eye of modern man save in impressive fragments.
Last of all comes Johnson’s Lives of the Poets in 1781. The choice of names, whereby it appears that English poetry began with Abraham Cowley, was made not by Johnson, but by the booksellers of London who employed him. Johnson procured the insertion of the names of some few poets not originally included in the scheme. The Lives, except in some special cases, exhibit no laborious industry in the discovery of fact. They were written from a full mind, and with a flowing pen, at a time when Johnson’s critical opinions had long been formed, and when he was quite indisposed to renew the detailed labours of the Dictionary. ‘To adjust the minute events of literary history,’ he says very truly in his Life of Dryden, ‘is tedious and troublesome; it requires indeed no great force of understanding, but often depends upon enquiries which there is no opportunity of making, or is to be fetched from books and pamphlets not always at hand.’ New information concerning the life of Pope was offered him, but he refused even to look at it; and he wrote ​his criticism on the dramas of Rowe without opening the book to refresh the memories of his reading of thirty years before. This indolence, which would be a sin in an archaeologist or an historian, is almost a virtue in Johnson. His Lives make a single great treatise, defining and illustrating the critical system which he had built up during long years of reading and writing. He writes at ease, in the plenitude of his power, and with a full consciousness of his acknowledged authority. His work closes an age; it is the Temple of Immortality of the great Augustans, and, when it was published, already Burns and Blake, Crabbe and Cowper, were beginning to write. With them came in new ideals, destined to affect both criticism and biography. So that the mention of Johnson’s Lives, which demand a separate essay for their proper appreciation, may fitly close this catalogue.