WHEN, at the age of sixty-eight, Johnson was writing these “Lives of the
English Poets,” he had caused omissions to be made from the poems of
Rochester, and was asked whether he would allow the printers to give all
the verse of Prior. Boswell quoted a censure by Lord Hailes of “those
impure tales which will be the eternal opprobrium of their ingenious
author.” Johnson replied, “Sir, Lord Hailes has forgot. There is
nothing in Prior that will excite to lewdness;” and when Boswell further
urged, he put his questionings aside, and added, “No, sir, Prior is a
lady’s book. No lady is ashamed to have it standing in her library.”
Johnson distinguished strongly, as every wise man does, between offence
against convention, and offence against morality.
In Congreve’s plays he recognised the wit but condemned the morals, and
in the case of Blackmore the regard for the religious purpose of
Blackmore’s poem on “The Creation” gave to Johnson, as to Addison, an
undue sense of its literary value.
With his “Life of Pope,” which occupies more than two-thirds of this
volume, Johnson took especial pains. “He wrote it,” says Boswell, “‘_con
amore_,’ both from the early possession which that writer had taken of
his mind, and from the pleasure which he must have felt in for ever
silencing all attempts to lessen his poetical fame. . . . I remember once
to have heard Johnson say, ‘Sir, a thousand years may elapse before there
shall appear another man with a power of versification equal to that of
Pope.’”
Pope’s laurel, since Johnson’s days, has flourished, without showing a
dead bough, for all the frosts of hostile criticism.