the inveterate foe of his master; for Milton's hostility to a kingly
government was the crime which he could not forgive.

The mention of Milton, and of his politics, brings to my mind two
sayings of Johnson's that were related to me by Mr. Price, of Lichfield.
After passing an evening together at Mr. Seward's, the father of the
poetess, where, in the course of conversation, the words "Me miserable!"
in Paradise Lost, had been commended as highly pathetic, they had walked
some way along the street in silence, which the good man was not likely
first to break, when Johnson suddenly stopped, and turning round to him,
exclaimed, "Sir! don't you think that 'Me miserable' is miserable
stuff?" On another occasion he thus whimsically described the different
manner in which he felt himself disposed towards a Whig and a Tory.
"If," said he, "I saw a Whig and a Tory drowning, I would first save the
Tory; and when I saw that he was safe, not till then, I would go and
help the Whig; but the dog should duck first; the dog should duck;"
laughing with pleasure at the thoughts of the Whig's ducking.

The principal charm of the Lives of the Poets is in the store of
information which they contain. He had been, as he says somewhere of his
own father, "no careless observer of the passages of the times." In the
course of a long life, he had heard, and read, and seen much; and this
he communicates with such force and vivacity, and illustrates by
observations so pertinent and striking, that we recur again and again to
his pages as we would to so many portraits traced by the hand of a great
master, in spite of our belief that the originals were often
misrepresented, that some were flattered, and the defects of others
still more overcharged. In his very errors as a critic there is often
shewn more ability than in the right judgments of most other. When he is
most wrong, he gives us some good reason for his being so. He is often