INTRODUCTION.



This volume contains a record of twenty lives, of which only one--
that of Edward Young--is treated at length. It completes our
edition of Johnson's Lives of the Poets, from which a few only of
the briefest and least important have been omitted.

The eldest of the Poets here discussed were Samuel Garth, Charles
Montague (Lord Halifax), and William King, who were born within the
years 1660-63. Next in age were Addison's friend Ambrose Philips,
and Nicholas Rowe the dramatist, who was also the first editor of
Shakespeare's plays after the four folios had appeared. Ambrose
Philips and Rowe were born in 1671 and 1673, and Isaac Watts in
1674. Thomas Parnell, born in 1679, would follow next, nearly of
like age with Young, whose birth-year was 1681. Pope's friend John
Gay was of Pope's age, born in 1688, two years later than Addison's
friend Thomas Tickell, who was born in 1686. Next in the course of
years came, in 1692, William Somerville, the author of "The Chace."
John Dyer, who wrote "Grongar Hill," and James Thomson, who wrote
the "Seasons," were both born in the year 1700. They were two of
three poets--Allan Ramsay, the third--who, almost at the same time,
wrote verse instinct with a fresh sense of outward Nature which was
hardly to be found in other writers of that day. David Mallet,
Thomson's college-friend and friend of after-years--who shares with
Thomson the curiosity of critics who would decide which of them