'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 PoetsHe wrote these quick biographiesTo be instructive and to please; In them we findAmong judicious anecdotesThe apt quotation that denotes A taste definedAnd wrested from this record ofHis irritable, captious love For failed mankind –From fear, from his compassion forInsanity, the abject poor, The world's maligned.He laboured to be just, and whereJustice eluded him his care Was to be kind.Read generously – as once he readThe words of the indifferent dead. Enter his mind.