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Johnson's Lives of the Poets — Volume 2 by Samuel Johnson
page 58 of 193 (30%)

At this time a long course of opposition to Sir Robert Walpole had
filled the nation with clamours for liberty, of which no man felt
the want, and with care for liberty which was not in danger.
Thomson, in his travels on the Continent, found or fancied so many
evils arising from the tyranny of other governments, that he
resolved to write a very long poem, in five parts, upon Liberty.
While he was busy on the first book, Mr. Talbot died; and Thomson,
who had been rewarded for his attendance by the place of secretary
of the briefs, pays in the initial lines a decent tribute to his
memory. Upon this great poem two years were spent, and the author
congratulated himself upon it as his noblest work; but an author and
his reader are not always of a mind. Liberty called in vain upon
her votaries to read her praises, and reward her encomiast: her
praises were condemned to harbour spiders, and to gather dust: none
of Thomson's performances were so little regarded. The judgment of
the public was not erroneous; the recurrence of the same images must
tire in time; an enumeration of examples to prove a position which
nobody denied, as it was from the beginning superfluous, must
quickly grow disgusting.

The poem of "Liberty" does not now appear in its original state;
but, when the author's works were collected after his death, was
shortened by Sir George Lyttelton, with a liberty which, as it has a
manifest tendency to lessen the confidence of society, and to
confound the characters of authors, by making one man write by the
judgment of another, cannot be justified by any supposed propriety
of the alteration, or kindness of the friend. I wish to see it
exhibited as its author left it.

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