In the year 1777, the misfortunes of Dr. Dodd excited his compassion.  He wrote a speech for that unhappy man, when called up to receive judgment of death; besides two petitions, one to the king, and another to the queen; and a sermon to be preached by Dodd to the convicts in Newgate.  It may appear trifling to add, that, about the same time, he wrote a prologue to the comedy of a Word to the Wise, written by Hugh Kelly.  The play, some years before, had been damned by a party on the first night.  It was revived for the benefit of the author’s widow.  Mrs. Piozzi relates, that when Johnson was rallied for these exertions, so close to one another, his answer was, “When they come to me with a dying parson, and a dead stay-maker, what can a man do?”

We come now to the last of his literary labours.  At the request of the booksellers, he undertook the Lives of the Poets.  The first publication was in 1779, and the whole was completed in 1781.  In a memorandum of that year, he says, some time in March he finished the Lives of the Poets, which he wrote in his usual way, dilatorily and hastily, unwilling to work, yet working with vigour and haste.  In another place, he hopes they are written in such a manner, as may tend to the promotion of piety.  That the history of so many men, who, in their different degrees, made themselves conspicuous in their time, was not written recently after their deaths, seems to be an omission that does no honour to the republic of letters.  Their contemporaries, in general, looked on with calm indifference, and suffered wit and genius to vanish out of the world in total silence, unregarded and unlamented.  Was there no friend to pay the tribute of a tear?  No just observer of life to record the virtues of the deceased?  Was even envy silent?  It seemed to have been agreed, that if an author’s works survived, the history of the man was to give no moral lesson to after-ages.  If tradition told us that Ben Jonson went to the Devil tavern; that Shakespeare stole deer, and held the stirrup at play-house doors; that Dryden frequented Button’s coffee-house; curiosity was lulled asleep, and biography forgot the best part of her function, which is, to instruct mankind by examples taken from the school of life.  This task remained for Dr. Johnson, when years had rolled away; when the channels of information were, for the most part, choked up, and little remained besides doubtful anecdote, uncertain tradition, and vague report.

  “Nunc situs informis premit et deserta vetustas.”

The value of biography has been better understood in other ages, and in other countries.  Tacitus informs us, that to record the lives and characters of illustrious men, was the practice of the Roman authors, in the early periods of the republic.  In France, the example has been followed.  Fontenelle, D’Alembert, and monsieur Thomas, have left models in this kind of composition.  They have embalmed the dead.  But it is true, that they had incitements and advantages,