for such another stroke. 
    And now I leave thee unto Death and Fame,
    Which lives to shake Ambition with thy name;
    And if it were not sin, the court by it
    Should hourly swear before the favourite. 
    Farewell! for thy brave sake we shall not send
    Henceforth commanders, enemies to defend;
    Nor will it ever our just monarch please,
    To keep an admiral to lose our seas. 
    Farewell! undaunted stand, and joy to be
    Of public service the epitome. 
    Let the duke’s name solace and crown thy thrall;
    All we by him did suffer, thou for all! 
    And I dare boldly write, as thou dar’st die,
    Stout Felton, England’s ransom, here doth lie![259]

This is to be a great poet.  Felton, who was celebrated in such elevated strains, was, at that moment, not the patriot but the penitent.  In political history it frequently occurs that the man who accidentally has effectuated the purpose of a party, is immediately invested by them with all their favourite virtues; but in reality having acted from motives originally insignificant and obscure, his character may be quite the reverse they have made him; and such was that of our “honest Jack.”  Had Townley had a more intimate acquaintance with his Brutus, we might have lost a noble poem on a noble subject.

JOHNSON’S HINTS FOR THE LIFE OF POPE.

I shall preserve a literary curiosity, which perhaps is the only one of its kind.  It is an original memorandum of Dr. Johnson’s, of hints for the Life of Pope, written down, as they were suggested to his mind, in the course of his researches.  The lines in Italics Johnson had scratched with red ink, probably after having made use of them.  These notes should be compared with the Life itself.  The youthful student will find some use, and the curious be gratified, in discovering the gradual labours of research and observation, and that art of seizing on those general conceptions which afterwards are developed by meditation and illustrated by genius.  I once thought of accompanying these hints by the amplified and finished passages derived from them; but this is an amusement which the reader can contrive for himself.  I have extracted the most material notes.

This fragment is a companion-piece to the engraved fac-simile of a page of Pope’s Homer, in this volume.

That fac-simile, a minutely perfect copy of the manuscript, was not given to show the autograph of Pope,—­a practice which has since so generally prevailed,—­but to exhibit to the eye of the student the fervour and the diligence required in every work of genius.  This could only be done by showing the state of the manuscript itself, with all its erasures, and even its half-formed lines; nor could this effect be produced by giving only some of the corrections, which Johnson had already, in printed characters.  My notion has been approved of, because it was comprehended by writers of genius:  yet this fac-simile has been considered as nothing more than an autograph by those literary blockheads, who, without taste and imagination, intruding into the province of literature, find themselves as awkward as a once popular divine, in his “Christian Life,” assures us certain sinners would in paradise,—­like “pigs in a drawing-room.”