The
play, some years before, had been damned by a party on the first night.
It was revived for the benefit of the author's widow. Mrs. Piozzi
relates, that when Johnson was rallied for these exertions, so close to
one another, his answer was, "When they come to me with a dying parson,
and a dead stay-maker, what can a man do?"
We come now to the last of his literary labours. At the request of the
booksellers, he undertook the Lives of the Poets. The first publication
was in 1779, and the whole was completed in 1781. In a memorandum of
that year, he says, some time in March he finished the Lives of the
Poets, which he wrote in his usual way, dilatorily and hastily,
unwilling to work, yet working with vigour and haste. In another place,
he hopes they are written in such a manner, as may tend to the promotion
of piety. That the history of so many men, who, in their different
degrees, made themselves conspicuous in their time, was not written
recently after their deaths, seems to be an omission that does no honour
to the republic of letters. Their contemporaries, in general, looked on
with calm indifference, and suffered wit and genius to vanish out of the
world in total silence, unregarded and unlamented. Was there no friend
to pay the tribute of a tear? No just observer of life to record the
virtues of the deceased? Was even envy silent? It seemed to have been
agreed, that if an author's works survived, the history of the man was
to give no moral lesson to after-ages.
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