Note 8 — ENGLISH LITERATURE AT THE UNIVERSITIES

It is amusing to notice how carefully the greater part of what is most precious and instructive in Johnson's work, the lives namely of Cowley and Dryden, and the noble critique of Paradise Lost, is expressly excluded, and the greater part of what is most trivial, and regarded by himself as trivial, the lives of the minor poets of the eighteenth century, selected instead. Macaulay ranks the lives of Cowley and Dryden, with that of Pope, as the masterpieces of the work; and Johnson himself considered the life of Cowley to be the best.