In the first place, the facts are related upon the best intelligence, and the best vouchers that could be gleaned, after a great lapse of time.  Probability was to be inferred from such materials, as could be procured, and no man better understood the nature of historical evidence than Dr. Johnson; no man was more religiously an observer of truth.  If his history is any where defective, it must be imputed to the want of better information, and the errors of uncertain tradition.

  “Ad nos vix tenuis famae perlabitur aura.”

If the strictures on the works of the various authors are not always satisfactory, and if erroneous criticism may sometimes be suspected, who can hope, that in matters of taste, all shall agree?  The instances, in which the public mind has differed, from the positions advanced by the author, are few in number.  It has been said, that justice has not been done to Swift; that Gay and Prior are undervalued; and that Gray has been harshly treated.  This charge, perhaps, ought not to be disputed.  Johnson, it is well known, had conceived a prejudice against Swift.  His friends trembled for him, when he was writing that life, but were pleased, at last, to see it executed with temper and moderation.  As to Prior, it is probable that he gave his real opinion, but an opinion that will not be adopted by men of lively fancy.  With regard to Gray, when he condemns the apostrophe, in which father Thames is desired to tell who drives the hoop, or tosses the ball, and then adds, that father Thames had no better means of knowing than himself; when he compares the abrupt beginning of the first stanza of the bard, to the ballad of Johnny Armstrong, “Is there ever a man in all Scotland;” there are, perhaps, few friends of Johnson, who would not wish to blot out both the passages.

It may be questioned, whether the remarks on Pope’s Essay on Man can be received, without great caution.  It has been already mentioned, that Crousaz, a professor in Switzerland, eminent for his Treatise of Logic, started up a professed enemy to that poem.  Johnson says, “his mind was one of those, in which philosophy and piety are happily united.  He looked, with distrust, upon all metaphysical systems of theology, and was persuaded, that the positions of Pope were intended to draw mankind away from revelation, and to represent the whole course of things, as a necessary concatenation of indissoluble fatality.”  This is not the place fur a controversy about the Leibnitzian system.  Warburton, with all the powers of his large and comprehensive mind, published a vindication of Pope; and yet Johnson says, that, “in many passages, a religious eye may easily discover expressions not very favourable to morals, or to liberty.”  This sentence is severe, and, perhaps, dogmatical.  Crousaz wrote an Examen of the Essay on Man, and, afterwards, a commentary on every remarkable passage; and, though it now appears, that Mrs. Elizabeth Carter translated the foreign critic, yet it is certain, that