Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/139

Rh be affirmed; his studies and meditations were an habitual prayer. The neglect of it in his family was probably a fault for which he condemned himself, and which he intended to correct, but that death, as too often happens, intercepted his reformation.’ Johnson is willing to believe that Milton, like himself, was continually making vows of self-reformation. The generosity of his criticism is seen in his severe reproof to possible objectors. Samson Agonistes certainly has in it a humility foreign to the earlier poems. Yet the idea of Milton condemning himself for a fault which he strove in vain to amend is difficult to accept. Perhaps it is not irreverent to say that the evidence for this attitude in Milton is of the slightest.

The same fellow-feeling dictates the last paragraph of the Life, where the poet is praised for his independence of spirit and lofty demeanour in adversity: ‘He was naturally a thinker for himself, confident of his own abilities and disdainful of help or hindrance; he did not refuse admission to the thoughts or images of his predecessors, but he did not seek them. From his contemporaries he neither courted nor received support; there is in his writings nothing by which the pride of other authors might be gratified or favour gained, no exchange of praise nor solicitation of support. His great works were performed under discountenance and in blindness, but difficulties vanished at his touch; he was born for whatever is arduous; and his work is not the greatest of heroick poems, only because it is not the first.’

When Johnson first came to London from the obscurity of Lichfield, Henry Hervey, then an officer of the army, had paid him attention, and had entertained him among genteel company. ‘He was a vicious man,’ said Johnson,