as Johnson's. ' Let us,' he says, ' leave it to the Gods to judge what is fittest for us. Man is dearer to his Creator than to himself. If we must pray for special favour, let it be for a sound mind in a sound body. Let us pray for fortitude, that we may think the labours of Hercules and all his sufferings preferable to a life of luxury and the soft repose of SARDANAPALUS. This is a blessing within the reach of every man ; this we can give ourselves. It is virtue, and virtue only, that can make us happy.' In the translation the zeal of the Christian conspired with the warmth and energy of the poet; but Juvenal is not eclipsed T . For the various characters in the original the reader is pleased, in the English poem, to meet with Cardinal Wolsey, Buckingham stabbed by Felton, Lord Strafford, Clarendon, Charles XII. of Sweden; and for Tully and Demosthenes, Lydiat, Galileo, and Archbishop Laud. It is owing to Johnson's delight in biography that the name of LYDIAT is called forth from obscurity. It may, therefore, not be useless to tell, that LYDIAT was a learned divine and mathematician in the beginning of the last century. He attacked the doctrine of Aristotle and Scaliger, and wrote a number of sermons on the harmony of the Evangelists. With all his merit, he lay in the prison of Bocardo at Oxford, till Bishop Usher, Laud, and others, paid his debts. He petitioned Charles I. to be sent to Ethiopia to procure manuscripts. Having spoken in favour of monarchy and bishops, he was plundered by the Puritans, and twice carried away a prisoner from his rectory. He died very poor in 1646 2 .
The Tragedy of Irene 3 is founded on a passage in KNOLLES'S
1 It is in truth not easy to say literary life must be allowed to be
whether the palm belongs to the superior to Juvenal's lamentation over
ancient or to the modern poet. ... It the fate of Demosthenes and Cicero.'
must be owned that in the concluding Macaulay's Misc. Works, ed. 1871,
passage the Christian moralist has p. 379-
not made the most of his advantages, 2 Murphy follows the account given
and has fallen decidedly short of the as a note in the Supplement to the
sublimity of his Pagan model. On Gentleman's Magazine for 1748,
the other hand, Juvenal's Hannibal quoted in the Life, i. 194, n. 2.
must yield to Johnson's Charles; 3 'A manuscript page of Mac-
and Johnson's vigorous and pathetic aulay's History, thickly scored with
enumeration of the miseries of a dashes and erasures it is the passage
History
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