Page:An Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson.djvu/179

 Taylor, at the funeral of Johnson's wife; but that reverend gentleman declined the office, because, as he told Mr. Hayes, the praise of the deceased was too much amplified. He, who reads the piece, will find it a beautiful moral lesson, written with temper, and nowhere overcharged with ambitious ornaments. The rest of the discourses were the fund, which Dr. Taylor, from time to time, carried with him to his pulpit. He had the in England, and some of the best sermons.

We come now to the Lives of the Poets, a work undertaken at the age of seventy, yet, the most brilliant, and, certainly, the most popular, of all our author's writings. For this performance he needed little preparation. Attentive always to the history of letters, and, by his own natural bias, fond of biography, he was the more willing to embrace the proposition of the booksellers. He was versed in the whole body of English poetry, and his rules of criticism were settled with precision. The dissertation, in the life of Cowley, on the metaphysical poets of the last century, has the attraction of novelty