The life of Alexander Pope, the longest, most carefully labored, and last to be written of Samuel Johnson's fifty-two "Lives of the Poets" (Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, 1779, 1781), discloses much at the heart of his pioneering and influential work as a literary biographer and biographical literary critic. At a crucial moment in his account of Pope, written with a highly characteristic balance of admiration and censure, Johnson sharply rejects Pope's "favourite theory," the "Ruling Passion," a force acting on human identity "antecedent to reason and observation." Johnson valued above all else reason and observation: in his "Lives of the Poets" observation--experienced, historically informed--ranges "with extensive view" just as it does in the opening line of Johnson's signature poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), and the duty of criticism is to hold poetry up to what his Rambler essays call the "light of...