'His irritable, captious love'

 Here are the 'always excellent Dick Davis' and the 'right decent geezer' Samuel Johnson back already. Davis is writing (to fellow poet R.L. Barth) about Johnson's Lives of the Poets – and about Johnson the man...

With Johnson's Lives of the Poets

He wrote these quick biographies
To be instructive and to please;
      In them we find

Among judicious anecdotes
The apt quotation that denotes
      A taste defined

And wrested from this record of
His irritable, captious love
      For failed mankind –

From fear, from his compassion for
Insanity, the abject poor,
      The world's maligned.

He laboured to be just, and where
Justice eluded him his care
      Was to be kind.

Read generously – as once he read
The words of the indifferent dead.
     Enter his mind.