The meeting of booksellers, happy in the support of Johnson's
intellectual power, appointed also a committee to engage the best
engravers, and another committee to give directions about paper and
printing. They made out at once a list of the Poets they meant to
give, "many of which," said Dilly, "are within the time of the Act
of Queen Anne, which Martin and Bell cannot give, as they have no
property in them. The proprietors are almost all the booksellers in
London, of consequence."

In 1780 the booksellers published, in separate form, four volumes of
Johnson's "Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the most Eminent
of the English Poets." The completion followed in 1781. "Sometime
in March," Johnson writes in that year, "I finished the Lives of the
Poets." The series of books to which they actually served as
prefaces extended to sixty volumes. When his work was done, Johnson
then being in his seventy-second year, the booksellers added 100
pounds to the price first asked. Johnson's own life was then near
its close. He died on the 13th of December, 1784, aged seventy-
five.

Of the Lives in this collection, Johnson himself liked best his Life
of Cowley, for the thoroughness with which he had examined in it the
style of what he called the metaphysical Poets. In his Life of
Milton, the sense of Milton's genius is not less evident than the
difference in point of view which made it difficult for Johnson to
know Milton thoroughly. They know each other now. For Johnson
sought as steadily as Milton to do all as "in his great Taskmaster's
eye."