“Sir, if he really thinks so, his perceptions are disturbed, he is mad.  If he does not think so, he lies.”  Exit opposition.  There is nothing more to be said.  Curiously enough, it is often the palpable blunders of these monologues that now attract us, as if we were enjoying a good joke at the dictator’s expense.  Once a lady asked him, “Dr. Johnson, why did you define pastern as the knee of a horse?” “Ignorance, madame, pure ignorance,” thundered the great authority.

When seventy years of age, Johnson was visited by several booksellers of the city, who were about to bring out a new edition of the English poets, and who wanted Johnson, as the leading literary man of London, to write the prefaces to the several volumes.  The result was his Lives of the Poets, as it is now known, and this is his last literary work.  He died in his poor Fleet Street house, in 1784, and was buried among England’s honored poets in Westminster Abbey.

JOHNSON’S WORKS.  “A book,” says Dr. Johnson, “should help us either to enjoy life or to endure it.”  Judged by this standard, one is puzzled what to recommend among Johnson’s numerous books.  The two things which belong among the things “worthy to be remembered” are his Dictionary and his Lives of the Poets, though both these are valuable, not as literature, but rather as a study of literature.  The Dictionary, as the first ambitious attempt at an English lexicon, is extremely valuable, notwithstanding the fact that his derivations are often faulty, and that he frequently exercises his humor or prejudice in his curious definitions.  In defining “oats,” for example, as a grain given in England to horses and in Scotland to the people, he indulges his prejudice against the Scotch, whom he never understood, just as, in his definition of “pension,” he takes occasion to rap the writers who had flattered their patrons since the days of Elizabeth; though he afterwards accepted a comfortable pension for himself.  With characteristic honesty he refused to alter his definition in subsequent editions of the Dictionary.

The Lives of the Poets are the simplest and most readable of his literary works.  For ten years before beginning these biographies he had given himself up to conversation, and the ponderous style of his Rambler essays here gives way to a lighter and more natural expression.  As criticisms they are often misleading, giving praise to artificial poets, like Cowley and Pope, and doing scant justice or abundant injustice to nobler poets like Gray and Milton; and they are not to be compared with those found in Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry, which was published in the same generation.  As biographies, however, they are excellent reading, and we owe to them some of our best known pictures of the early English poets.