Lives of the Poets

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lives of the Poets: Waller, Milton,
Cowley by Samuel Johnson
(#6 in our series by Samuel Johnson)
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Title: Lives of the Poets: Waller, Milton, Cowley
Author: Samuel Johnson
Release Date: February, 2004 [EBook #5098]
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Language: English
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0. START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, LIVES OF
THE POETS: WALLER, ETC ***
Transcribed by David Price, email [email protected]
, from the
1891 Cassell and Co. edition.
LIVES OF THE ENGLISH POETS: WALLER, MILTON,
COWLEY
Contents:
Introduction
Waller
Milton
Cowley
INTRODUCTION.
Samuel Johnson, born at Lichfield in the year 1709, on the 7th of
September Old Style, 18th New Style, was sixty-eight years old when
he agreed with the booksellers to write his "Lives of the English Poets."
"I am engaged," he said, "to write little Lives, and little Prefaces, to a
little edition of the English Poets." His conscience was also a little hurt
by the fact that the bargain was made on Easter Eve. In 1777 his
memorandum, set down among prayers and meditations, was "29
March, Easter Eve, I treated with booksellers on a bargain, but the time
was not long."
The history of the book as told to Boswell by Edward Dilly, one of the
contracting booksellers, was this. An edition of Poets printed by the
Martins in Edinburgh, and sold by Bell in London, was regarded by the
London publishers as an interference with the honorary copyright
which booksellers then respected among
themselves. They said also
that it was inaccurately printed and its type was small. A few
booksellers agreed, therefore, among themselves to call a meeting of
proprietors of honorary or actual copyright in the various Poets. In
Poets who had died before 1660 they had no trade interest at all. About
forty of the most respectable booksellers in London accepted the
invitation to this meeting. They determined to proceed immediately
with an elegant and uniform edition of Poets in whose works they were
interested, and they deputed three of their number, William Strahan,
Thomas Davies, and Cadell, to wait on Johnson, asking him to write

the series of prefatory Lives, and name his own terms. Johnson agreed
at once, and suggested as his price two hundred guineas, when, as
Malone says, the booksellers would readily have given him a thousand.
He then contemplated only "little Lives." His energetic pleasure in the
work expanded his Preface beyond the limits of the first design; but
when it was observed to Johnson that he was underpaid by the
booksellers, his reply was, "No, sir; it was not that they gave me too
little, but that I gave them too much." He gave them, in fact, his
masterpiece. His keen interest in Literature as the soul of life, his
sympathetic insight into human nature, enabled him to put all that was
best in himself into these studies of the lives of men for whom he cared,
and of the books that he was glad to speak his mind about in his own
shrewd independent way. Boswell was somewhat disappointed at
finding that the selection of the Poets in this series would not be
Johnson's, but that he was to furnish a Preface and Life to any Poet the
booksellers pleased. "I asked him," writes Boswell, "if he would do this
to any dunce's works, if they should ask him. JOHNSON. "Yes, sir; and
SAY he was a dunce."
The meeting of booksellers, happy in the support of Johnson's
intellectual power, appointed also a committee to engage the best
engravers, and another committee to give directions about paper and
printing. They made out at once a list of the Poets they meant to give,
"many of which," said Dilly, "are within the time of the Act of Queen
Anne, which Martin and Bell cannot give, as they have no property in
them. The