Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/109

Rh and disciples. Some of the formal collections of Lives are little better, it is true, than compilations of dry facts and dates. The Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum (1675) by Milton’s nephew, Edward Phillips; the Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) by William Winstanley, an industrious barber, who stole from Phillips as Phillips had stolen from Fuller; the Account of the English Dramatic Poets (1691) by Gerard Langbaine; Sir Thomas Pope Blount’s De Re Poetica, or Remarks upon Poetry, with Characters and Censures of the most considerable Poets (1694)—all these are valuable as authorities, but they draw no portraits of authors in their habit as they lived, and intrude upon no privacy. Even where the material for a familiar and life-like portrait existed it was too often suppressed in the supposed interests of the dignity of literature. Sprat in his Life of Cowley (1667) confesses that he had a large collection of Cowley’s letters to his private friends, in which were expressed ‘the Native tenderness and Innocent gayety of his Mind.’ But ‘nothing of this nature,’ says Sprat, ‘should be published…. In such Letters the Souls of Men should appear undress’d: And in that negligent habit, they may be fit to be seen by one or two in a Chamber, but not to go abroad into the Streets.’ So we have lost the letters of a man whom we can easily believe to have been the best letter-writer of his century and country.

Nevertheless, some familiar details have escaped suppression; not all the literary portraits of the time are conventional and stiff. Edward Phillips’ Life of John Milton (1694), prefixed to an edition of Milton’s Latin letters, preserves for us some minute and personal reminiscences of the poet. Moreover, the Seventeenth