lf disposed towards a Whig and a Tory.
"If," said he, "I saw a Whig and a Tory drowning, I would first save the
Tory; and when I saw that he was safe, not till then, I would go and
help the Whig; but the dog should duck first; the dog should duck;"
laughing with pleasure at the thoughts of the Whig's ducking.

The principal charm of the Lives of the Poets is in the store of
information which they contain. He had been, as he says somewhere of his
own father, "no careless observer of the passages of the times." In the
course of a long life, he had heard, and read, and seen much; and this
he communicates with such force and vivacity, and illustrates by
observations so pertinent and striking, that we recur again and again to
his pages as we would to so many portraits traced by the hand of a great
master, in spite of our belief that the originals were often
misrepresented, that some were flattered, and the defects of others
still more overcharged. In his very errors as a critic there is often
shewn more ability than in the right judgments of most other. When he is
most wrong, he gives us some good reason for his being so. He is often
mistaken, but never trivial and insipid. It is more safe to trust to him
when he commends than when he dispraises; when he enlarges the
boundaries of criticism which his predecessors had contracted, than when
he sets up new fences of his own. The higher station we can take, the
more those petty limits will disappear, which confine excellence to
particular forms and systems. The critic who condemns that which the
generality of mankind, or even the few of those more refined in their
taste, have long agreed in admiring, may naturally conclude the fault to
be in himself; that there is in his mind or his organs some want of
capacity for the reception of a certain species of pleasure. When
Johnson rejected pastoral comedy, as being representative of _scenes_
adapted chiefly "to please barbarians and children," he might have
suspected that his own eye-sight, rather than pastoral comedy, was to
blame. When he characterized blank verse, "as verse only to the eye," he
might reasonably have questioned the powers of his own hearing. But
this, and more than this, we may forgive him, for his successful
vindication of Shakspeare from the faults objected to him by the French
critics.

It is in his biographical works that Johnson is most pleasing and most
instructive. His querulousness takes away much both from