Lives of the English Poets

Issued from 1779 to 1781 as prefaces to a booksellers' edition, these critical biographies cover English poets from Cowley and Milton through Dryden, Pope, and a crowd of lesser Augustans. Johnson combines a life, a character sketch, and a judgment of the verse, lingering on diction, meter, and whether a poem is true to nature or merely ingenious. The Milton and Pope lives are the longest arguments. The book is a sequence of independent prefaces, not an anthology of the poems themselves and not a continuous history of English literature.

Quarter bound in dark brown cloth, marbled paper boards. Pale yellow endleaves. Brown slipcase. The portrait of ‘Abraham Cowley’ originally issued with the book (facing p. 129) was in fact a portrait of Shakespeare, a cancel plate was printed and issued, but many copies survive with the erroneous plate and in some cases the erroneous plate remains in place, but a loose copy of the correct plate has been inserted.