That he was a poet there is no doubt, but the paucity of his verses does not allow us to rank him in that high station, where his genius might have carried him. There must be bulk, variety and grandeur of design to constitute a first-rate poet. The Deserted Village, Traveller and Hermit are all specimens beautiful as such, but they are only birds eggs on a string, and eggs of small birds too. One great magnificent whole must be accomplished before we can pronounce upon the maker to be the ToTиs. Pope himself never earned this title by a work of any magnitude but his Homer, and that being a translation only constitutes him an accomplished versifier. Distress drove Goldsmith upon undertakings, neither congenial with his studies, nor worthy of his talents. I remember him, when in his chamber in the Temple, he shewed me the beginning of his Animated Nature; it was with a sigh, such as genius draws, when hard necessity diverts it from its bent to drudge for bread, and talk of birds and beasts and creeping things, which Pidcock's show-man would have done as well. Poor fellow, he hardly knew an ass from a mule, nor a turkey from a goose, but

when he saw it on the table. But publishers hate poetry, and Paternoster-Row is not Parnassus. Even the mighty Doctor Hill, who was not a very delicate feeder, could not make a dinner out of the press till by a happy transformation into Hannah Glass he turned himself into a cook, and sold receipts for madedishes to all the savoury readers in the kingdom. Then indeed the press acknowledged him second in fame only to John Bunyan; his feasts kept pace in sale with Nelson's fasts, and when his own name was fairly written out of credit, he wrote himself into immortality under an alias. Now though necessity, or I should rather say the desire of finding money for a masquerade, drove Oliver Goldsmith upon abridging histories and turning Buffon into English, yet I much doubt if without that spur he would ever have put his Pegasus into action; no, if he had been rich, the world would have been poorer than it is by the loss of all the treasures of his genius and the contributions of his pen.

Who will say that Johnson himself would have been such a champion in literature, such a front-rank soldier in the fields of fame, if he

had not been pressed into the service, and driven on to glory with the bayonet of sharp necessity pointed at his back? If fortune had turned him into a field of clover, he would have laid down and rolled in it. The mere manual labour of writing would not have allowed his lassitude and love of ease to have taken the pen out of the inkhorn, unless the cravings of hunger had reminded him that he must fill the sheet before he saw the table cloth. He might indeed have knocked down Osbourne for a blockhead, but he would not have knocked him down with a folio of his own writing. He would perhaps have been the dictator of a club, and wherever he sate down to conversation, there must have been that splash of strong bold thought about him, that we might still have had a collectanea after his death; but of prose I guess not much, of works of labour none, of fancy perhaps something more, especially of poetry, which under favour I conceive was not his tower of strength. I think we should have had his Rasselas at all events, for he was likely enough to have written at Voltaire, and brought the question to the test, if infidelity is any aid to wit. An orator he must

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have been; not improbably a parliamentarian, and, if such, certainly an oppositionist, for he preferred to talk against the tide. He would indubitably have been no member of the Whig Club, no partisan of Wilkes, no friend of Hume, no believer in Macpherson'; he would have put up prayers for early rising, and laid in bed all day, and with the most active reso lutions possible been the most indolent mortal living. He was a good man by nature, a great anan by genius, we are now to enquire what he was by compulsion.

Johnson's first style was naturally energetic, his middle style was turgid to a fault, his latter style was softened down and harmonized into periods, more tuneful and more intelligible. His execution was rapid, yet his mind was not easily provoked into exertion; the variety we find in his writings was not the variety of choice arising from the impulse of his proper genius, but tasks imposed upon him by the dealers in ink, and contracts on his part submitted to in satisfaction of the pressing ealls of hungry want; for, painful as it is to relate, I have heard that illustrious scholar assert (and he never varied from the truth of fact)

that he subsisted himself for a considerable

space of time upon the scanty pittance of fourpence halfpenny per day. How melancholy to reflect that his vast trunk and stimulating appetite were to be supported by what will barely feed the weaned infant! Less, much less, than Master Betty has earned in one night, would have cheered the mighty mind, and maintained the athletic body of Saniuel Johnson in comfort and abundance for a twelvemonth. Alas! I am not fit to paint his character; nor is there need of it; Etiam mortuus loquitur: every man, who can buy a book, has bought a Boswell; Johnson is known to all the reading world. I also knew him well, respected him highly, loved him sincerely it was never my chance to see him in those moments of moroseness and ill humour, which are imputed to him, perhaps with truth, for who would slander him? But I am not warranted by any experience of those humours to speak of him otherwise than of a friend, who always met me with kindness, and from whom I never separated without regret.When I sought his company he had no capricious excuses for withholding it, but lent him