Lives of the Poets

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lives of the English Poets: Prior, etc.
by Samuel Johnson
(#7 in our series by Samuel Johnson)
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Title: Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope
Author: Samuel Johnson
Release Date: February, 2004 [EBook #5101]
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0. START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, LIVES OF
THE ENGLISH POETS ***
Transcribed from the 1891 Cassell and Company edition by David
Price, email [email protected]

THE LIVES OF THE ENGLISH POETS: PRIOR, CONGREVE,
BLACKMORE AND POPE
INTRODUCTION
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.

H. M.
PRIOR
Matthew Prior is one of those that have burst out from an obscure
original to great eminence. He was born July 21, 1664, according to
some, at Wimborne, in Dorsetshire, of I know not what parents; others
say that he was the son of a joiner of London: he was perhaps willing
enough to leave his birth unsettled, in hope, like Don Quixote, that the
historian of his actions might find him some illustrious alliance. He is
supposed to have fallen, by his father's death, into the hands of his
uncle, a vintner near Charing Cross, who sent him for some time to Dr.
Busby, at Westminster; but, not intending to give him any education
beyond that of the school, took him, when he was well advanced in
literature, to his own house, where the Earl of Dorset, celebrated for
patronage of genius, found him by chance, as Burnet relates, reading
Horace, and was so well pleased with his proficiency, that he undertook
the care and cost of his academical education. He entered his name in
St. John's College, at Cambridge, in 1682, in his eighteenth year; and it
may be reasonably supposed that he was distinguished among his

contemporaries. He became a Bachelor, as is usual, in four years, and
two years afterwards wrote the poem on the Deity, which stands first in
his volume.
It is the established practice of that College to send every year to the
Earl of Exeter some poems upon sacred subjects, in
acknowledgment
of a benefaction enjoyed by them from the bounty of his ancestor. On
this occasion were those verses written, which, though nothing is