and there, indeed, we may meet with a slip in the matter of composition: as where he says, "He [Johnson] gives (I feel and regret) a moat undue preference to blank verse over rhyme"[1]—just what Johnson did not give, and his editor does not mean; or a slovenly mode of expression, such as, "For curiosity has been awakened since Johnson wrote more to our Elizabethan poets;"[2] and a precisian might take exception to his calling Johnson "the most distinguished of his [scil. Johnson's] contemporaries,"[3] on the same principle that Milton has been cavilled at for making
Adam the goodliest man of men since born
His sons; the fairest of her daughters Eve,
by which Adam appears his sons' brother, and Eve her daughters' sister; or again, as the same Milton makes Satan, addressing the personified horrors of Sin and Death, to exclaim—
And never saw till now
Sight more detestable than him and thee,
which exclamation denounces the present detestable sight as only to be exceeded in detestability by—itself. As to Mr. Cunningham's notes of information, it were a little surprising if, in so large a collection, he may not once in a way be caught tripping; but we will not look out for a cheap triumph over him by doing what some nibbling censors do, in order to get up an easy but stentorian eureka—viz., make use of the references he has collated with patient research, and which now lie open to all comers, and by dint of a little examination of the originals, discover with jubilant superiority that he has missed a word in transcribing, or turned Simeon into Simon, or put a seven for a nine, or committed some corresponding atrocity in prosody or punctuation, of a kind
O horrible! horrible! most horrible!
never to be forgiven or forgotten by these second-hand[4] detectives, who do anything but merely hint a fault, or blandly hesitate dislike. Let us see, then, of what sort are the corrections supplied by Mr. Cunningham. The errors with which he had to deal, are, as he observes, of two kinds—those attributable to the imperfect information available in Johnson's day, and those due to Johnson's own neglect. Thus, the good Doctor is "altogether wrong about Cowley's parentage. He makes Lord Roscommon live into King James's reign; calls Lord Rochester's daughter his sister; refers to Palaprat's 'Alcibiade,' when there is no such production; makes 'Venice Preserved' the last of Otway's plays, which it was far from being; writes the 'Life of the Earl of Dorset,' and in three other places advances him to a dukedom, which he never obtained; … confounds Sir Richard Steele with Dicky Norris, the actor; attributes a discovery to Congreve—that Pindaric odes were regular—when the dis-
- ↑ Editor's Preface, p. xxiv.
- ↑ Vol. i. p. 223, n.
- ↑ Preface, p. v.
- ↑ "It is not uncommon," says Johnson, "for those who have grown wise by the labour of others, to add a little of their own, and overlook their master." That is bad. But what shall be said of those who turn the very "little of their own" against their "master," who taught them where to find it, and instead of simply "overlooking" him, use their ill-gotten gains to his special hurt and discouragement?
