generations admired them
greatly. To have been praised ardently by Sir Walter Scott, by Byron,
and by Tennyson should seem sufficient to demonstrate that he was a poet,
were it not that, as I could prove if time allowed, poets are almost
invariably bad critics of poetry. Sir Walter Scott read _The Vanity of
Human Wishes_ with "a choking sensation in the throat," and declared that
he had more pleasure in reading that and Johnson's other long poem,
_London_, than any other poetic compositions he could mention. But then
I think it was always the sentiment in verse, and not its quality, that
attracted Scott. Byron also declared that _The Vanity of Human Wishes_
was "a great poem." Certainly these poems are quotable poems. Who does
not recall the line about "surveying mankind from China to Peru," or
think, as Johnson taught us, to:--

Mark what ills the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.

Or remember his epitaph on one who:--

Left a name at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral or adorn a tale.

One line--"Superfluous lags the veteran on the stage" has done duty again
and again. I might quote a hundred such examples to show Johnson,
whatever his qualities as a poet, is very much alive indeed in his verse.
It is, however, as a great prose writer, that I prefer to consider him.
Here he is certainly one of the most permanent forces in our literature.
_Rasselas_, for example, while never ranking with us moderns quite so
high as it did with the excellent Miss Jenkins in _Cranford_, is a never
failing delight. So far from being a dead book, is there a young man or
a young woman setting out in the world of to-day, aspiring to an
all-round literary cultivation, who is not required to know it? It has
been republished continually. What novelist of our time would not give
much to have so splendid a public recognition as was provided when Lord
Beaconsfield, then Mr. Disraeli, after the Abyssinian Expedition,
pictured in the House of Commons "the elephants of Asia dragging the
artillery of Europe over the mountains of Rasselas."

Equally in evidence are those wonderful _Lives of The Poets_ which
Johnson did not complete until he was seventy-two years of age, literary
efforts which have always seemed to me to be an encouraging demonstration
that we should never allow ourselves to grow old. Many of these 'Lives'
are very beautiful. They are all suggestive. Only the other