|
Transcribed from the 1891 Cassell and Company edition by David
Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
THE LIVES OF THE ENGLISH POETS: PRIOR, CONGREVE, BLACKMORE AND POPE
INTRODUCTION
When, at the age of sixty-eight, Johnson was writing these "Lives of
the English Poets," he had caused omissions to be made from the
poems of Rochester, and was asked whether he would allow the
printers to give all the verse of Prior. Boswell quoted a censure
by Lord Hailes of "those impure tales which will be the eternal
opprobrium of their ingenious author." Johnson replied, "Sir, Lord
Hailes has forgot. There is nothing in Prior that will excite to
lewdness;" and when Boswell further urged, he put his questionings
aside, and added, "No, sir, Prior is a lady's book. No lady is
ashamed to have it standing in her library." Johnson distinguished
strongly, as every wise man does, between offence against
convention, and offence against morality.
In Congreve's plays he recognised the wit but condemned the morals,
and in the case of Blackmore the regard for the religious purpose of
Blackmore's poem on "The Creation" gave to Johnson, as to Addison,
an undue sense of its literary value.
With his "Life of Pope," which occupies more than two-thirds of this
volume, Johnson took especial pains. "He wrote it," says Boswell,
"'con amore,' both from the early possession which that writer had
taken of his mind, and from the pleasure which he must have felt in
for ever silencing all attempts to lessen his poetical fame. . . . I
remember once to have heard Johnson say, 'Sir, a thousand years may
elapse before there shall appear another man with a power of
versification equal to that of Pope.'"
Pope's laurel, since Johnson's days, has flourished, without showing
a dead bough, for all the frosts of hostile criticism.
H. M.
PRIOR
Matthew Prior is one of those that have burst out from an obscure
original to great eminence. He was born July 21, 1664, according to
some, at Wimborne, in Dorsetshire, of I know not what parents;
others say that he was the son of a joiner of London: he was
perhaps willing enough to leave his birth unsettled, in hope, like
Don Quixote, that the historian of his actions might find him some
illustrious alliance. He is supposed to have fallen, by his
father's death, into the hands of his uncle, a vintner near Charing
Cross, who sent him for some time to Dr. Busby, at Westminster; but,
not intending to give him any education beyond that of the school,
took him, when he was well advanced in literature, to his own house,
where the Earl of Dorset, celebrated for patronage of genius, found
him by chance, as Burnet relates, reading Horace, and was so well
pleased with his proficiency, that he undertook the care and cost of
his academical education. He entered his name in St. John's
College, at Cambridge, in 1682, in his eighteenth year; and it may
be reasonably supposed that he was distinguished among his
contemporaries. He became a Bachelor, as is usual, in four years,
and two years afterwards wrote the poem on the Deity, which stands
first in his volume.
It is the established practice of that College to send every year to
the Earl of Exeter some poems upon sacred subjects, in
acknowledgment of a benefaction enjoyed by them from the bounty of
his ancestor. On this occasion were those verses written, which,
though nothing is said of their success, seem to have recommended
him to some notice; for his praise of the countess's music, and his
lines on the famous picture of Seneca, afford reason for imagining
that he was more or less conversant with that family.
The same year he published "The City Mouse and Country Mouse," to
ridicule Dryden's "Hind and Panther," in conjunction with Mr.
Montague. There is a story of great pain suffered, and of tears
shed, on this occasion by Dryden, who thought it hard that "an old
man should be so treated by those to whom he had always been civil."
|
|
