Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/137

Rh hourly vexation.’ Prior’s Solomon could not be better criticized than in the sentence which remarks on the importance of its single fault: ‘Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults; negligences or errors are single and local, but tediousness pervades the whole: other faults are censured and forgotten, but the power of tediousness propagates itself.’

Indeed, the Lives are crowded with good sayings. Here are some, taken from the first of them, the Life of Cowley:—

Not all these sayings, even when their application is limited by the context, carry immediate conviction with them; but there is none of them that does not compel