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Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives by Henry Francis Cary
page 116 of 337 (34%)
Excepting Congreve, I do not remember that any of the poets, whose lives
have been written by Johnson, is said to have produced anything in the
shape of a novel. Of the Incognita of Congreve, that biographer
observes, not very satisfactorily, that he would rather praise it than
read it. In the present series, Goldsmith, Smollett, and Johnson
himself, if his Rasselas entitle him to rank in the number, are among
the most distinguished in this species of writing, of whom modern Europe
can boast. To these, if there be added the names of De Foe, Richardson,
Fielding, and Sterne, not to mention living authors, we may produce such
a phalanx as scarcely any other nation can equal. Indeed no other could
afford a writer so wide a field for the exercise of this talent as ours,
where the fullest scope and encouragement are given to the human mind to
expand itself in every direction, and assume every shape and hue, by the
freedom of the government, and by the complexity of civil and commercial
interests. No one has portrayed the whimsical varieties of character,
particularly in lower life, with a happier vein of burlesque than
Smollett. He delights, indeed, chiefly by his strong delineation of
ludicrous incidents and grotesque manners derived from this source. He
does not hold our curiosity entangled by the involution of his story,
nor suspend it by any artful protraction of the main event. He turns
aside for no digression that may serve to display his own ingenuity or
learning. From the beginning to the end, one adventure commonly rises up
and follows upon another, like so many waves of the sea, which cease
only because they have reached the shore.

The billows float in order to the shore,
The wave behind rolls on the wave before.

Admirable as the art of the novelist is, we ought not to confound it
with that of the poet; nor to conclude, because the characters of Parson
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