twice, is seldom a sufficient warrant for a criticism. Perhaps the critic reads the work in a state of bodily irritation or mental pain. Perhaps while he is reading it his thoughts and heart are a thousand miles away; or perhaps his stomach is foul; or perhaps he has risen from a sleepless night; or perhaps he is waiting for the advent of a friend, or has just been reading the abuse of an enemy; or he can not in short tell how--but his critical "hand is out," and is critical appetite is either entirely dulled or unhealthily sharpened; and thus, in various ways, his judgments may be rendered worthless.

Dr. Johnson being peculiarly a man of moods-often in low depressions, often in towering passions, often shaken by pain, and often drowzed by indolence-his criticisms require, more than of most writers, to be taken cum grano salis. He never, indeed, plays us false; he is always desirous to be faithful, but seems often working with imperfect materials, and rather struggling to form than calmly expressing a judgment. Macaulay has been grossly unjust to Johnson's criticisms on poetry, and compares him to Rymer, who is, he truly says, "the worst critic of poetry that ever existed." But although Johnson is not the best of poetic critics, he is very far from being comparable to the worst. The great test we propose to a critic on poetry is-is to be a poet himself. Now, Johnson was himself a poet; we do not say of the highest order. He never could have written a 66 Macbeth," or a Comus," or a "Rime of the Anciente Marinere." He had not the power of consecutive poetic invention and combination; but his "Rasselas," his "Vultures," and a hundred other apologues and essays in his works, prove that he had genuine poetic imagination as well as feeling, and that, under that purblind vision and shaggy frame, there lurked the soul of a Maker." Many of the lines, too, in " London," the "Vanity of Human Wishes," and those he contributed to Goldsmith's "Traveller," are truly poetical. And when we turn to his criticism, we find a great deal of a very noble character-massive as marble, and clear as crystal. The "Lives of the Poets" have been subjected to much obloquy, as well as larded with much undue praise, but have not as yet, we think, been fairly appreciated. Now, in the first place, it has often been objected to them that they omit three of the greatest of all our poets Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakspeare. But this was not Dr. Johnson's fault, but that of the booksellers for whom he wrote, who, we sup

pose, excluded Chaucer from their list on account of his obsolete spelling and language Spenser, for the unwieldly size of his poem-and Shakspeare, because his poetry, so called, was then counted unworthy of his genius. These reasons, whether right or wrong, were their reasons, and not suggested, or perhaps approved of, by him. It has been objected again, that his book has eternized the memory of many men who were mere poetasters. Johnson here again, did in general the bidding of his taskmasters, as all such Ariels must obey the behests of their Prosperos till the day of their deliverance arrive. When Boswell asked if he would allow the names of blockheads to be added to the series, he replied, "Yes, and tell the world that they are blockheads." And so, in effect, he has done to such dull dogs as Walsh, Smith, Duke, King, and the rest. He disdains to worry them at length, but lifts them up, as a Newfoundland dog does a cur of low degree, and pops them, with quiet contempt, into the waters. His praise of Blackmore has been adduced against him, by those who have been unable to perceive the vein of irony which pervades that life, and which more effectually damns the poetry of the unlucky knight than the witty wrath of Gay and all the authors associated with him prevailed to do. He respected indeed Blackmore for his probity and piety, and praised with evident sincerity one of his poems-that on the "Creation"--but so did honest Matthew Henry (who gives great screeds of it in his Commentary), and so did as great a man as even Johnson, John Locke. A more formidable objection has been made to his "Lives," on account of his treatment of Milton. Here we can not defend him. His hatreds to the Puritans, and to Milton as a man, amounted to fury and malignant madness. On such subjects he raved, and boiled over with rage. But let us remember that Milton himself ransacked the kennel for epithets to express his contempt, disgust and loathing of his enemies. He assailed them in the tenderest points, and dragged to light the details of their private history. In this he erred; but we can not wonder that his error should be used as a precedent by the most formidable of his later foes. The differences, too, between Johnson and Milton were so great, that it was impossible for the one to do full justice to the other. These have been admirably pointed out by Dr. Channing, who shows how, while Milton was of ethereal race, Johnson was only the strongest of earthborn Titans; so that in the life you have

Raphael critcized by Polyhemus. But Milton, although an angel, was a "giant-angel.' "giant-angel." And hence Johnson, from his sympathy with all that is great and colossal, is compelled to praise him. It is not his ethereality he admires, it is his vastness. Had he been simply a "stripling cherub," he would have underrated and abused him--treating him as a mere winged ephemeron, dancing in the departing light of a summer day. And hence he has undervalued his minor poems--his "Sonnets," his "Lycidas," and his "Comus" --not so much for what they are in themselves, as for their inferiority to that scale of magnitude according to which he would like to see a Milton working. He cried out to Hannah More, "Milton, madam, can cut out a Colossus from a rock, but not carve heads upon cherry-stones." Hence his breath of praise is all husbanded for "Paradise Lost," and when he reaches that poem, it comes out in a torrent of manly eulogium. The praise of an enemy is not only more valuable, but very often more eloquent than that of a friend. When we look with admiration on a foe, we look through tears. A certain softness, and a certain swelling emotion of heart, generally accompany the tribute;-produced partly by a latent remorse for previous injustice, partly by a quick sense of our own generosity, and partly by a foresight of the effect of our panegyric upon the party praised, or on his friends. So with Johnson on Milton's "Paradise Lost." Not to be compared critically with some other tributes, morally it excells them all. You see a great man discerning his own quality of mind displayed on a grander scale, by one whom he personally hates, and crying out with irresistible impulse, with sudden and soft eyed enthusiasm, "Magnificent-the more that the man is my foe." A sight like this reaches the sublime: for, although it may be said to be the result of compulsion, it is a compulsion which could only he produced by the influence of power on power, and reminds you of that eternal law by which a Jupiter is bound to revolve around a Sun, through the force of mere superior magnitude - although the planet is a mass of clouds and snowy ice, and the sun a ball of fire.

The gay and gallant figure of Murat as he rushed into the opposite ranks, as if to grasp the head of Death and lead him down a measure on a bloody ball-room, is said to have excited from the Cossacks cries of admiration. When O'Connell rose into his altitudes in the House of Commons, Peel VOL. XXXIV.-NO. IV.

and Disraeli, we are told, sometimes dropped their pencils and gazed in fascinated admira| tion at the orator, with his wondrous words, and still more wondrous attitudes and tones. And so, to compare great to comparatively small things, when Milton soars "above all Greek and Roman fame," and talks the large utterance of the early gods, Johnson is forced to throw away his measuring rule, to stifle the sneer on his lip, and brush away the frown from his brow; and lo! the critic is sublimated into the man and the poet.

Another objection to Johnson's "Lives" is the way in which he has criticized Gray, Collins, Akenside, Churchill, and some other contemporary poets. And here, again. we admit that he has partly exposed himself to the censure of his critics. His account of Collins is, we confess, miserably meagre. The fact was, that he seems, by an unconscious act of the mind, to have transferred his pity for the fate, and his disapprobation of the personal habits of the poor bard, to his poetry; which, besides, with all his ideal and exquisite beauties, wants entirely that strength of thought, that manliness of purpose, and that solid magnitude of structure, which alone were able to overpower objections, and to storm Johnson into admiration. In reference to Gray, again, he was right in his criticism on the "Bard" and the "Progress of Poetry," which seem to most now stiff and laborious exaggerations - mere mimicries of real power, trying to do by effort what can only be done by magic; the poet spurring a large and clumsy dray-horse, instead of Pegasus. To the "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard" he does ample justice. The only one of Gray's poems which he rates below its real value is the delightful "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College." One of his objections is exceedingly trifling and unfair. He says, "His supplication to Father Thames to tell him who drives the hoop or tosses the ball, is useless and puerile; Father Thames has no better means of knowing than himself." This is sad work; the more so as, in "Rasselas," Johnson himself had apostrophized the Nile as the "Great Father of Waters," and asked him if he swept through any country in which he did not hear the language of distress? Critics, like liars, should have good memories. His account of Akenside is perhaps a little under-colored, but can not be called unjust. He commends him for "great felicity of genius, and uncommon amplitude of acquisition," and blames him for luxuriance and

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Probably the greatest error, after all, committed by Johnson as a critic is the prodigious liking he has to Dryden and Pope, and the preference he gives them above Young and Thomson, if not above Milton and Shakspeare themselves. That Dryden and Pope were true poets, and that the latter was in many respects an exquisite artist, we dare not deny. But that in nature, in genius-in that power which creates-which throws out masses of molten ore they attain either to the measure of the author of the "Seasons" or of the "Night Thoughts," we venture, in common with most critics now, to doubt. Yet Johnson sums up the life of Thomson in a few pages, scarcely noticing his "Castle of Indolence," and hands over that of Young to the portentous puppy Herbert Croft, to be executed in a bad mimicry of his own worst manner; while he expends all his strength, learning, and eloquence in praising Dryden and Pope, and contrives to make their lives the most masterly critical essays which his pen ever produced. We can understand his sympathy with Dryden, for he possessed that masculine strength which Johnson always admitted, and had a careless greatness somewhat resembling his own. But his profound wonder at and worship of the mechanical miracles and artificial harmonies of Pope are to us amazing. We could as soon have expected to have seen him adoring a puppet or bowing before Punch. The reasons may be-be found Pope's style in fashion; Pope had been a patron of his; and perhaps also he wanted to mortify the Whigs by exalting him above Addison. Having no real ear besides for versification, he seems actually to have preferred the eternal dropping and regular ding-dong of Pope to the more varied and more musical measures of higher poets. He liked too Pope's exquisite sense and wit, and was right in this, but was not right in exalting him on these accounts to the highest poetic pedestal.

His attack on sacred poetry has been often assailed. The fallacy of it lies in his forgetting that though poetry cannot heighten the Divine, it can raise us up toward a perception of it. It was strange that Dr. Johnson forgot that the highest poetry had been sacred-that of the Bible, of Dante, and of Milton. But the eloquence and power of writing in the passage are transcendent. Never does he run with such rapidity as when he is running wrong.

The two best "Lives," as narratives, in the book, are those of Savage and of Isaac

Watts. The first is a romance in interest as well as most masterly in composition; the second is remarkable for its fine tone of feeling and its thorough sympathy with moral and religious worth. It is singular how he tells best the lives of the greatest sinner and of the greatest saint in his catalogue. It is as if a writer now-a-days should publish biographies of modern poets, and should shine most in those of Byron and James Montgomery. The explanation lies in thisJohnson had once lived like Savage, and he was always aspiring to live like Watts.

In closing this paper, we are deeply impressed with the conviction that Johnson has never fully displayed the riches of his mind. He has written so well as to start the suggestion that he might have written better. All his works are desultory. They consist of little papers, little apologues, short poems, and short lives. There is no one massive whole on which you can lay your hand and say, here is a full reflection of the giant man! It is the same still to a more tantalizing degree with Johnson's great contemporary, Burke. Who can read those pregnant pages of his, so crowded with thought, fancy, genius, and not regret that the most powerful thinker his age produced had not stooped to become by practice its finest writer, and had not left some more unique and colossal monument of his powers? So far from Burke being a barbarous writer, he was often one of the most elegant; indeed, he was, after all, the most elegant and correct in style of all our great original thinkers, and needed only leisure for revisal and polish to have equalled Addison in grace and Hall in dignity and transparent purity of diction. We were amused the other day while glancing at Irving's "Life of George Buchanan,' with the following clause in a sentence, which we quote, as containing about as much nonsense as could well be crammed into the same compass:- "The elegant, yet diffuse rhapsodies of Burke and Bolingbroke, to the correct and classical precision of Junius or Hume." We never read Bolingbroke, and perhaps his writing is here fairly characterized; but to call Burke a rhapsodical and diffuse writer is egregiously absurd. His writings absolutely swarm, like an ant-hill, with thought. No writer has left so many poignant and pointed sentences. Every sentence in his works is either distended with a thought, or starred with an image. Even those splendid bursts which this writer is pleased to call rhapsodies are all interpenetrated and solidified by the most subtle re

flection, and all help to carry on the main and mighty stress of his argument. On the other hand, Hume is one of the least correct of writers, and the least precise. The charm of his writing lies in its conversational ease and abandonment, and in certain careless but inimitable touches, which moved, we remember, the envy and despair of Gibbon. As to Junius, many think he was Burke; and one great objection to this theory is, that although his language be equally precise, his thought is so much less abundant and profound.

We linger as we look back on that interesting period in our literary history, when old Johnson and Burke held high discourse and keen rencontre together; when there

was still some rule in our republic of letters, and not the wretched anarchy which at present prevails; when courtesy, candor, and kindly feeling dwelt in the breast of one of the two chiefs of intellect, and fearless honesty, magnanimity, and rough warm heart distinguished the other; when criticism had not yet become a mere craft, and that not of the most honorable kind; and above all, when our dictators in the realm of letters were not ashamed to avow themselves believers in God, and humble disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ. Well may we, sick of the present, turn to the past and pray, with more fervor than faith, that these days may return again.

THE Coffee-houses of the reign of Charles, the Second may be reckoned among the institutions which have supplied, in all ages and countries, by their mingled social and political character, the functions of modern journalism-foci of intelligence, opinion, and sentiment. Such pre-eminently were the theatre and games of Greece. It was there, rather than before the bema or the amphictyonic council, that the statesman felt the pulse of the people, that patriotism tested the treacherous or miserly citizen,—that Greece itself declared adhesion to an alliance or a philosophy. If from a drama abounding in all shades of delicate aphorism the martial thought was singled out for applause by the audience, it augured popularity to the merchant who had offered his ships to Cimon, and safety to the artizan who had taken his bribe. And it was not difficult for the judges who witnessed the fury of the populace at the sophisms of Euripides to shape their decision against that philosopher who was his patron and friend. Let it not appear too much to compare the coffee-houses of 1680 to the Greek theatre or the baths of Pompey, the tombs of the Via Sacra, the caravanserai, the resort of pilgrims, the well

of the Desert, the salons, or the Prado. Before that year, and but twenty years after their introduction, there had been proclamations in the Gazette suppressing and restor ing them; emissaries passed between them and the Court; and a long and able pamphlet war had been waged upon their merits. An historian assigns their opposition as the reason of the inefficiency of a law; a King's evidence pleads their influence as an excuse for his wonderful inventiveness. "The attempt," says the Honorable Roger North, "to send the four lords to the Tower availed nothing, for the coffee-houses still maintained the point. And no one could venture in them unless he were able to argue the point whether the Parliament were dissolved or not." "By frequenting coffee-houses," says Dangerfield, "I came to a knowledge of the times, and discovered their temper to be much inclined to sedition. Speech therein was very free, and treason was spoken with that liberty as though there were no laws against it." We propose to glance at a few of the principal coffee-houses of this epoch, and to indicate the causes of the great importance they attained.

Long before Thevenot made known the