It will not be useless to mention two more volumes, which may form a proper supplement to this edition.  They contain a set of sermons, left for publication by John Taylor, ll.D.  The reverend Mr. Hayes, who ushered these discourses into the world, has not given them, as the composition of Dr. Taylor.  All he could say for his departed friend was, that he left them, in silence, among his papers.  Mr. Hayes knew them to be the production of a superior mind; and the writer of these memoirs owes it to the candour of that elegant scholar, that he is now warranted to give an additional proof of Johnson’s ardour in the cause of piety, and every moral duty.  The last discourse in the collection was intended to be delivered by Dr. Taylor, at the funeral of Johnson’s wife; but that reverend gentleman declined the office, because, as he told Mr. Hayes, the praise of the deceased was too much amplified.  He, who reads the piece, will find it a beautiful moral lesson, written with temper, and nowhere overcharged with ambitious ornaments.  The rest of the discourses were the fund, which Dr. Taylor, from time to time, carried with him to his pulpit.  He had the largest bull[dd] in England, and some of the best sermons.

We come now to the Lives of the Poets, a work undertaken at the age of seventy, yet, the most brilliant, and, certainly, the most popular, of all our author’s writings.  For this performance he needed little preparation.  Attentive always to the history of letters, and, by his own natural bias, fond of biography, he was the more willing to embrace the proposition of the booksellers.  He was versed in the whole body of English poetry, and his rules of criticism were settled with precision.  The dissertation, in the life of Cowley, on the metaphysical poets of the last century, has the attraction of novelty, as well as sound observation.  The writers, who followed Dr. Donne, went in quest of something better than truth and nature.  As Sancho says, in Don Quixote, they wanted better bread than is made with wheat.  They took pains to bewilder themselves, and were ingenious for no other purpose than to err.  In Johnson’s review of Cowley’s works, false wit is detected in all its shapes, and the Gothic taste for glittering conceits, and far-fetched allusions, is exploded, never, it is hoped, to revive again.

An author who has published his observations on the Life and Writings of Dr. Johnson, speaking of the Lives of the Poets, says, “These compositions, abounding in strong and acute remark, and with many fine, and even sublime, passages, have, unquestionably, great merit; but, if they be regarded, merely as containing narrations of the lives, delineations of the characters, and strictures of the several authors, they are far from being always to be depended on.”  He adds:  “The characters are sometimes partial, and there is, sometimes, too much malignity of misrepresentation, to which, perhaps, may be joined no inconsiderable portion of erroneous criticism.”  The several clauses of this censure deserve to be answered, as fully as the limits of this essay will permit.