Ten of the fifty-two prefaces Samuel Johnson wrote for a booksellers' edition of the English poets appear here, on Cowley, Milton, Rochester, Dryden, Congreve, Gay, Savage, Swift, Pope and Gray, in Roger Lonsdale's text. Johnson's own advertisement explains the commission's modest origin, his intention to supply only dates and a general character, and his admission that he worked with thinner materials than longer preparation would have given him. John Mullan's introduction reads the collection as biography that refuses to flatter. Johnson catalogues the occupational self-delusions of writers, the vanity that hungers for posterity, the counterfeited contempt for criticism; Pope becomes a psychological case study, Dryden a man perpetually angry at past or future censure, Savage a comic master of explaining away failure. Mullan argues that the resulting narratives are mournful in two senses, chronicling the miseries of the learned and voicing Johnson's own sensitivity to human disappointment.