Lives of the Poets: Waller, Milton, Cowley

Excerpt

Samuel Johnson, born at Lichfield in the year 1709, on the 7th of September Old Style, 18th New Style, was sixty-eight years old when he agreed with the booksellers to write his “Lives of the English Poets.”  “I am engaged,” he said, “to write little Lives, and little Prefaces, to a little edition of the English Poets.”  His conscience was also a little hurt by the fact that the bargain was made on Easter Eve.  In 1777 his memorandum, set down among prayers and meditations, was “29 March, Easter Eve, I treated with booksellers on a bargain, but the time was not long.”