Samuel Johnson noted the fascination of gossip, “the delight the mind feels in the investigation of secrets,” and famously declared: “the biographical part of literature is what I love best.” His penetrating intuition and insight into the lives of his subjects, his formidable knowledge and narrative skill, and his innovative ideas about biography make the Lives of the Poets (1779–81) valuable, indeed essential, models for the modern biographer. Personally acquainted with only a few of his subjects, like Savage and Collins, Johnson believed in finding the facts. He sought out records and documents, letters and manuscripts, printed works and memoirs, interviews and anecdotes. He described the poets’ intellectual backgrounds and educations, mainly at Oxford and Cambridge. He placed them in the political contexts of their time, analyzing their views in relation to Cromwell’s Interregnum and the Restoration of Charles II, the domination of the Tories under Queen Anne and of the Whigs under the Hanoverians. Johnson was the originator of literary biography, and Boswell put Johnson’s principles into practice in his Life of Johnson. The conjunction of these two extraordinary personalities gave modern biography its first impetus and determined the course it would take for the next two centuries.

Johnson began his life of Cowley (the first in the book) with a plea for a detailed, rather than indistinct, life; for history, not funeral oration; for truth, not panegyric. But he recognized that telling all was risky and said: “the necessity of complying with times, and