Walter Raleigh (professor)

"The topics of The Rambler are many, but the great majority of them are drawn from the graver aspects of life, and it is when he treats of fundamental duties and inevitable sorrows, bereavement, and disease, and death, that Johnson rises to his full stature."

"Because he had seen much of life, his last and greatest work, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, is more than a collection of facts: it is a book of wisdom and experience, a treatise on the conduct of life, a commentary on human destiny."

"The late Mr. Froude, with a poets instinct for unity, chose to regard the whole story of the English Voyages as an aspect of the Protestant Reformation."

"The Dictionary was finished in 1755, and Johnson, compelled to find some new means of livelihood, returned to Shakespeare. ... The Proposals for Printing the Dramatick Works of William Shakespeare, which he issued in 1756, are magnificent in their range and discernment. The whole duty of a Shakespearian commentator and critic is here, for the first time, expounded. The complete collation of the early editions; the tracing of Shakespeares knowledge to its sources; the elucidation of obscurities by a careful study of the language and customs of Shakespeares time; the comparison of Shakespeares work with that of other great poets, ancient and modern—all this and more is promised in the Proposals."

"Those Elizabethan authors whose lives are fairly well known to us were always something other than mere authors—men of noble family, it may be, or distinguished in politics and war. We know more of Sir Walter Raleighs career than of Shakespeares, and more of Essex than of Spenser. On the other hand, while the works of Shakespeare and Spenser have come down to us almost in tact, most of the poems of Raleigh and Essex are lost. Men of position held professional authorship in some contempt, and wrote only for the delectation of their private friends."

"A reporter remembers what he understands, and sets down what his readers will appreciate. The genius of Boswell appears not least in this, that that he was willing, on occasion, to record Johnsons most whimsical and irresponsible remarks. But he must have omitted or neglected by far the greater number. Those that he has preserved are perhaps the most delightful and convincing things in his book."