Essays

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: POETRY AND CRITICISM. Dr. Johnson, in more than a century and a half of English literary history, beginning with Cowley and ending with Gray, found less than threescore writers in verse whom he deemed worthy of a place in his biographical collection. Though, in his own line, and in cases where partiality...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: POETRY AND CRITICISM. Dr. Johnson, in more than a century and a half of English literary history, beginning with Cowley and ending with Gray, found less than threescore writers in verse whom he deemed worthy of a place in his biographical collection. Though, in his own line, and in cases where partiality did not disturb his judgment, a tolerably correct arbiter of literary reputation, the Doctor would find hard work to persuade any well-read person of the present day, that more than half the verse-writers whose lives he has composed have any claim to be called poets, or even men of distinguished talents. Perhaps the account might be balanced by the addition to his list of as many names as a modern judgment of the literary celebrities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would erase from it. We have learned to look for other qualities in those we honour withthe name of poets than-such as pleased the critics of Johnson's age; or, at least, we have learned a different relative estimate of poetical gifts, and are used to flatter ourselves that ours is a truer and deeper view than the one held by our grandmothers. The result is that reputations have since that time both sunk and risen, forgotten writers have been dug up from the dust of oblivion, and others who lived then per ora vir