the most considerable achieved by him after 1755. The series of poets treated in it begins with Cowley, who died in 1667, and ends with George, Lord Lyttelton, who died in 1773. Notwithstanding some eccentricities in poetical criticism, it is, of all Johnson's writings, the work which can still be read with most sustained interest. The short biographies are full of the keenest insight into character and human nature. If any one of them were to be singled out, we might mention the sketch of that erratic and unhappy genius, Richard Savage, which Macaulay—long after his essay on Croker's Boswell in the Edinburgh Review—justly recognised as a masterpiece. As Boswell records, "a friend once observed to Dr Johnson that, in his opinion, the Doctor's literary strength lay in writing biography, in which he infinitely exceeded all his contemporaries. 'Sir,' said Dr Johnson, 'I believe that is true. The dogs don't know how to write trifles with dignity.'" Judged by the standards of our own day, Johnson is more successful as a biographer than as an essayist or a critic; partly because biography gives just the right scope for his powers of observation; and partly because the tendency of his style to be heavy and pompous, especially in abstract discussion, is held in check by the story itself; he may "write trifles with dignity," but at any rate he has to write them. Next to the Lives of the Poets, the writings of Johnson which are least neglected at the present day are probably the Tour in the Hebrides, and the two satires, "London," and "The Vanity of Human
