is man” (to use the language of Soame Jenyns, in that essay on “The Origin of Evil,” which Johnson, in the Literary Review, so mercilessly lashed); and from assailing premiers, parliaments, and the vices of London and England, he passes, in a very solemn spirit, to expose the vain hopes, wishes, and efforts of humanity at large.  Parts of this poem are written more in sorrow than in anger, and parts more in anger than in sorrow.  The portraits of Wolsey, Bacon, and Charles the Twelfth, are admirable in their execution, and in their adaptation to the argument of the piece; and the last paragraph, for truth and masculine energy is unsurpassed, we believe, in the whole compass of ethical poetry.  We are far from assenting to the statement we once heard ably and elaborately advocated, “that there had been no strong poetry in Britain since the two satires of Johnson;” and we are still further from classing their author with the Shakspeares, Miltons, Wordsworths, and Coleridges of song; but we are nevertheless prepared, not only for the sake of these two satires, of his prologue, and of some other pieces in verse, but on account of the general spirit of much of his prose, to pronounce him potentially, if not actually, a great poet.

* * * * *

JOHNSON’S POEMS.

LONDON: 

A POEM IN IMITATION OF THE THIRD SATIRE OF JUVENAL, 1738.

                     “—­Quis ineptae
  Tam patiens urbis, tam ferreus ut teneat se?”

—­JUVENAL.

Though grief and fondness in my breast rebel
When injured Thales[1] bids the town farewell,
Yet still my calmer thoughts his choice commend;
I praise the hermit, but regret the friend;
Resolved, at length, from vice and London far,
To breathe in distant fields a purer air,
And, fix’d on Cambria’s solitary shore,
Give to St David one true Briton more.

   For who would leave, unbribed, Hibernia’s land,
  Or change the rocks of Scotland for the Strand? 10
  There none are swept by sudden fate away,
  But all whom hunger spares, with age decay: 
  Here malice, rapine, accident, conspire,
  And now a rabble rages, now a fire;
  Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay,
  And here the fell attorney prowls for prey;
  Here falling houses thunder on your head,
  And here a female atheist talks you dead.

   While Thales waits the wherry that contains
  Of dissipated wealth the small remains, 20
  On Thames’s bank in silent thought we stood,
  Where Greenwich smiles upon the silver flood;
  Struck with the seat that gave Eliza[2] birth,
  We kneel and kiss the consecrated earth;
  In pleasing dreams the blissful age renew,
  And call Britannia’s glories back to view;
  Behold her cross triumphant on the main,
  The guard of commerce, and the dread of Spain;
  Ere masquerades debauch’d, excise oppress’d,
  Or English honour grew a standing jest. 30