r to the modern
poet. The couplets in which the fall of Wolsey is described, though
lofty and sonorous, are feeble when compared with the wonderful lines
which bring before us all Rome in tumult on the day of the fall of
Sejanus, the laurels on the doorposts, the white bull stalking towards
the Capitol, the statues rolling down from their pedestals, the
flatterers of the disgraced minister running to see him dragged with a
hook through the streets, and to have a kick at his carcase before it
is hurled into the Tiber. It must be owned too that in the concluding
passage the Christian moralist has not made the most of his advantages,
and has fallen decidedly short of the sublimity of his Pagan model. On
the other hand, Juvenal's Hannibal must yield to Johnson's Charles;
and Johnson's vigorous and pathetic enumeration of the miseries of a
literary life must be allowed to be superior to Juvenal's lamentation
over the fate of Demosthenes and Cicero.

For the copyright of the Vanity of Human Wishes Johnson received only
fifteen guineas.

A few days after the publication of this poem, his tragedy, begun many
years before, was brought on the stage. His pupil, David Garrick, had,
in 1741, made his appearance on a humble stage in Goodman's Fields,
had at once risen to the first place among actors, and was now, after
several years of almost uninterrupted success, manager of Drury Lane
Theatre. The relation between him and his old preceptor was of a very
singular kind. They repelled each other strongly, and yet attracted
each other strongly. Nature had made them of very different clay; and
circumstances had fully brought out the natural peculiarities of both.
Sudden prosperity had turned Garrick's head. Continued adversity had
soured Johnson's temper. Johnson saw with more envy than became so great
a man the villa, the plate, the china, the Brussels carpet, which the
little mimic had got by repeating, with grimaces and gesticulations,
what wiser men had written; and the exquisitely sensitive vanity of
Garrick was galled by the thought that, while all the rest of the world
was applauding him, he could obtain from one morose cynic, whose opinion
it was impossible to despise, scarcely any compliment not acidulated
with scorn. Yet the two Lichfield men had so many early recollections in
common, and sympathised with each other on so many points on which they
sympathised with nobody else in the vast population of the capital,
that, thou