INTRODUCTION.
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AMUEL JOHNSON, born at Lichfield in the year 1709, on the 7th ofSeptember Old Style, 18th New Style, was sixty-eight years old when heagreed with the booksellers to write his “Lives of the English Poets.”“I am engaged,” he said, “to write little Lives, and little Prefaces, toa little edition of the English Poets.” His conscience was also a littlehurt by the fact that the bargain was made on Easter Eve. In 1777 hismemorandum, set down among prayers and meditations, was “29 March, EasterEve, I treated with booksellers on a bargain, but the time was not long.” The history of the book as told to Boswell by Edward Dilly, one of thecontracting booksellers, was this. An edition of Poets printed by theMartins in Edinburgh, and sold by Bell in London, was regarded by theLondon publishers as an interference with the honorary copyright whichbooksellers then respected among themselves. They said also that it wasinaccurately printed and its type was small. A few booksellers agreed,therefore, among themselves to call a meeting of proprietors of honoraryor actual copyright in the various Poets. In Poets who had died before1660 they had no trade interest at all. About forty of the mostrespectable booksellers in London accepted the invitation to thismeeting. They determined to proceed immediately with an elegant anduniform edition of Poets in whose works they were interested, and theydeputed three of their number, William Strahan, Thomas Davies, andCadell, to wait on Johnson, asking him to write the series of prefatoryLives, and name his own terms. Johnson agreed at once, and suggested ashis price two hundred guineas, when, as Malone says, the booksellerswould readily have given him a thousand. He then contemplated only“little Lives.” His energetic pleasure in the work expanded his Prefacebeyond the limits of the first design; but when it was observed toJohnson that he was underpaid by the booksellers, his reply was, “No,sir; it was not that they gave me too little, but that I gave them toomuch.” He gave them, in fact, his masterpiece. His keen interest inLiterature as the soul of life, his sympathetic insight into humannature, enabled him to put all that was best in himself into thesestudies of the lives of men for whom he cared, and of the books that hewas glad to speak his mind about in his own shrewd independent way.Boswell was somewhat disappointed at finding that the selection of thePoets in this series would not be Johnson’s, but that he was to furnish aPreface and Life to any Poet the booksellers pleased. “I asked him,”writes Boswell, “if he would do this to any dunce’s works, if they shouldask him.” JOHNSON. “Yes, sir; and _say_ he was a dunce.” The meeting of booksellers, happy in the support of Johnson’sintellectual power, appointed also a committee to engage the bestengravers, and another committee to give directions about paper andprinting. They made out at once a list of the Poets they meant to give,“many of which,” said Dilly, “are within the time of the Act of QueenAnne, which Martin and Bell cannot give, as they have no property inthem. The proprietors are almost all the booksellers in London, ofconsequence.” In 1780 the booksellers published, in separate form, four volumes ofJohnson’s “Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the most Eminent ofthe English Poets.” The completion followed in 1781. “Sometime inMarch,” Johnson writes in that year, “I finished the Lives of the Poets.”The series of books to which they actually served as prefaces extended tosixty volumes. When his work was done, Johnson then being in hisseventy-second year, the booksellers added £100 to the price first asked.Johnson’s own life was then near its close. He died on the 13th ofDecember, 1784, aged seventy-five. Of the Lives in this collection, Johnson himself liked best his Life ofCowley, for the thoroughness with which he had examined in it the styleof what he called the metaphysical Poets. In his Life of Milton, thesense of Milton’s genius is not less evident than the difference in pointof view which made it difficult for Johnson to know Milton thoroughly.They know each other now. For Johnson sought as steadily as Milton to doall as “in his great Taskmaster’s eye.”
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