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.
