Lives of the English Poets

ment to his literary talents as that of Mr. Walmsley, who lived in the Bishop's palace, and was registrar of the Ecclesiastical Court, and whom he has so eloquently commemorated in his Lives of the Poets. By this gentleman he was introduced in a letter to the Rev. Mr. Colson, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in the University of Cambridge, and the master of an academy, "as a very good scholar, and one who he had great hopes would turn out a fine dramatic writer, who intended to try his fate with a tragedy, and to get himself employed in some translation, either from the Latin or the French." The tragedy on which Mr. Walmsley founded his expectations of Johnson's future eminence as a dramatic poet, was the Irene. A shrewd sally of humour, to which the reading of this piece gave rise, evinces the terms of familiarity on which he was with his patron; for, on Walmsley's observing, when some part of it had been read, that the poet had already involved his heroine in such distress, that he did not see what further