Lives of the Poets, vol 1 | Page 3

illustrious names to posterity, to take care lest their readers be misled by ambiguous examples. That writer may justly be condemned as an enemy to goodness, who suffers fondness or interest to confound right with wrong, or to shelter the faults, which even the wisest and the best have committed, from that ignominy which guilt ought always to suffer, and with which it should be more deeply stigmatized, when dignified by its neighbourhood to uncommon worth: since we shall be in danger of beholding it without abhorrence, unless its turpitude be laid open, and the eye secured from the deception of surrounding splendour[3]." "If nothing but the bright side of characters should be shown," he once remarked to Malone, "we should sit down in despondency, and think it utterly impossible to imitate them in any thing[4]." It was this conscientious freedom, we believe, that has, more than any other cause, subjected the Lives of the Poets to severe censure. We readily avow this our belief, since we are persuaded that it is now generally admitted by all, but those who are influenced by an irreligious or a party spirit. We might diffuse these remarks to a wide extent, by allusions to the opinions of different authors on the Lives, and by critiques on the separate memoirs themselves; but we will not longer occupy our readers, since the literary history of the Lives has been elsewhere so fully detailed, and is now so almost universally known[5].
What we have already advanced, has chiefly been with a view to invite to the perusal of a work, which, for sound criticism, instructive memoir, pleasing diction, and pure morality, must constitute the most lasting monument of Johnson's fame.
[Footnote 1: See sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poetry.]
[Footnote 2: See vol. vi. 153.]
[Footnote 3: Rambler, 164.]
[Footnote 4: See Malone's letter, in Boswell, iv. 55.]
[Footnote 5: See Boswell; Dr. Drake's Literary Life of Johnson; and, since we dread not examination, Potter's Inquiry into some Passages in Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets; Graves's Recollections of Shenstone; Mitford's preface to Gray's works; Roscoe's preface to Pope's works, &c.]
COWLEY
The life of Cowley, notwithstanding the penury of English biography, has been written by Dr. Sprat, an author whose pregnancy of imagination and elegance of language have deservedly set him high in the ranks of literature; but his zeal of friendship, or ambition of eloquence, has produced a funeral oration rather than a history: he has given the character, not the life, of Cowley; for he writes with so little detail, that scarcely any thing is distinctly known, but all is shown confused and enlarged through the mist of panegyrick.
Abraham Cowley was born in the year one thousand six hundred and eighteen. His father was a grocer, whose condition Dr. Sprat conceals under the general appellation of a citizen; and, what would probably not have been less carefully suppressed, the omission of his name in the register of St. Dunstan's parish gives reason to suspect that his father was a sectary. Whoever he was, he died before the birth of his son, and, consequently, left him to the care of his mother; whom Wood represents as struggling earnestly to procure him a literary education, and who, as she lived to the age of eighty, had her solicitude rewarded, by seeing her son eminent, and, I hope, by seeing him fortunate, and partaking his prosperity. We know, at least, from Sprat's account, that he always acknowledged her care, and justly paid the dues of filial gratitude.
In the window of his mother's apartment lay Spenser's Fairy Queen; in which he very early took delight to read, till, by feeling the charms of verse, he became, as he relates, irrecoverably a poet. Such are the accidents which, sometimes remembered, and, perhaps, sometimes forgotten, produce that particular designation of mind, and propensity for some certain science or employment, which is commonly called genius. The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the great painter of the present age, had the first fondness for his art excited by the perusal of Richardson's treatise.
By his mother's solicitation he was admitted into Westminster school, where he was soon distinguished. He was wont, says Sprat, to relate, "that he had this defect in his memory at that time, that his teachers never could bring it to retain the ordinary rules of grammar."
This is an instance of the natural desire of man to propagate a wonder. It is, surely, very difficult to tell any thing as it was heard, when Sprat could not refrain from amplifying a commodious incident, though the book to which he prefixed his narrative, contained its confutation. A memory admitting some things and rejecting others, an intellectual digestion that concocted the pulp of learning, but refused