her had never abated by length of separation and the rapid approach of his own end.

Meantime Johnson had issued proposals for that work by which his name was afterwards to be best known. As early as 1749, two years, that is to say, before the production and failure of his tragedy of Irene, he had planned an English Dictionary. The plan was published and addressed to Lord Chesterfield. And this work was carried on by Johnson with greater energy and persistency than any of his other undertakings. For seven years it occupied most of his thoughts and his time. His own view of the years thus spent we may gather from the book itself. The letter L is near the middle of the alphabet; Johnson therefore was about half-way through his task when he came to the word 'Lexicographer,' and defined it as ‘a harmless drudge.' The book was at last published in 1755, and with it came the death-blow to patronage in literature. For Chesterfield wrote some recommendations of the work in the World newspaper, doubtless intended as a trap to catch a dedication. Johnson, however, had been, or conceived himself to have been, neglected by Chesterfield during the time the work was in hand, and was in no mood to be so caught. Besides, the two were naturally antipathetic. Johnson could have little in common with the man who published 'Letters to his Son,' containing minute directions as to how he ought to proceed who would blow his nose in company. So instead of a dedication Lord Chesterfield got the letter given below, one of the finest, if not the very finest, of the specimens of indignant epistolary composition which our language contains :

'February 7, 1755.

'MY LORD,—I have been lately informed, by the proprietor of the World, that two papers, in which my Dictionary is recommended to the public, were written by your lordship. To be so distinguished, is an honour, which, being very little accustomed to favours from the great, I know not well how to receive, or in what terms to acknowledge.

'When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited your lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, by the enchantment of your address, and could not forbear to wish that I might boast myself Le vainqueur du vainqueur de la terre; that I might obtain that regard for which I saw the world contending; but I found my attendance so little en

couraged, that neither pride nor modesty would suffer me to continue it. When I had once addressed your lordship in public, I had exhausted all the art of pleasing which a retired and uncourtly scholar can possess. I had done all that I could; and no man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little.

'Seven years, my lord, have now past, since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a patron before.

'The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks.

Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached the ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.

Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible, with less; for I have been long wakened from that dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much exultation,

'MY LORD,

'Your lordship's most humble, most obedient servant,

'SAM. JOHNSON.'

The publication of the Dictionary gave Johnson at once the first place among the literary men of his day. He was henceforth to hold a position vacant since he left it. He became a kind of literary oracle. There were not wanting, even in his own day, many who held that the position was a false one; that the realm was too wide for one man's rule; and this opinion receives sanction from the fact that no man has been able to succeed to Johnson's place. For the time being, however, he was supreme, and his supremacy was maintained till death.

b

His pecuniary troubles; however, had not yet come to an end, since he had drawn from the booksellers, during the progress of the work, more than the total sum which he was to receive for his dictionary. He was therefore again compelled to write for money, the only motive, he used to say, for which anybody but a blockhead ever wrote anything. For two years (1758-1760) he brought out the periodical called The Idler, but this did not suffice even for his very modest wants, and in 1759 he was compelled to find some special means of meeting the expenses consequent upon his mother's death. This difficulty was met by the composition of the story of Rasselas. The materials of this work were not new to Johnson. His translation of Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia supplied him with the scene, and his own leading current of thought, as formerly expressed in the Vanity of Human Wishes, was ready to come again to the surface, and form the motive of the plot. Rasselas was written in the evenings of a single week, sent to press as fast as it was written, and never again read over for correction. For this work he received £100, and £25 more for a second edition.

But the hard times in Johnson's life were now approaching their close. Soon after the accession of George III, that is to say, in 1762, in the ministry of Lord Bute, it was decided to award to Johnson a pension of £300 a year, in consideration of his distinguished services to literature. It is no small testimony to Johnson's independence of spirit that is recorded in the fact that there was much difficulty in finding any one who would undertake to inform him of his good fortune. It was in truth a dangerous errand; the same hand that had flung the new boots out of the window at Oxford, might possibly do as much in London for the messenger of Lord Bute. Contrary to expectation, however, the proposal was favourably received, and Johnson was thus placed beyond the reach of want. To induce him to accept a benefit which most men would have made considerable concessions to procure, it was expressly stated to him that it was not given with any idea that he should ever 'dip his pen in faction'; it was an acknowledgment, as Lord Bute told him, not of anything he was to do, but of what he had done. Perhaps his lordship guessed that this would be the best means for securing Johnson's aid if it was wanted; and in fact

he did afterwards write some few political articles in support of the policy of George III.

Into the remaining events of Johnson's life it will not be necessary to enter here in any detail. He was now at liberty for rest and conversation, and began to mix much more than formerly in the best society. Under such influences his manners softened considerably, nor did his real tenderness of heart abate. It is said that of his pension he only spent some £70 or £80 per annum on himself, the remainder being devoted to some form of charity. It would perhaps have produced much astonishment in the minds of some of his acquaintance if they could have followed the Doctor home after some conversational meeting prolonged far into the night, and watched the ferocious disputant of an hour ago, searching deep doorways for sleeping 'street arabs,' into whose little fingers he would slip pennies, that they might wake and find a breakfast, heaven-sent.

In 1777 Johnson was engaged to write what he himself described as 'Little Lives and little Prefaces to a little Edition of the English Poets.' The occasion of this work was the publication by the Martins at Edinburgh of a very faulty edition of the English Poets, which was both deficient and incorrect. Hereupon the London booksellers met and resolved to unite in bringing out an elegant and correct edition. Doctor Johnson was requested to write concise accounts of the lives of the various poets whose works were to be included in the edition, and the terms being left to his own decision, he named two hundred guineas, which, as might be expected from the moderation of the demand, was at once agreed to. This work occupied him till 1781, and swelled into dimensions which Johnson had never contemplated. Johnson, though he regarded all work as a task, and had a greater or less dislike for exertion of every kind, seems to have regarded this work with peculiar favour. We are informed that it was on his request and recommendation that the works of Blackmore, Watts, Pomfret, and Yalden were added to the collection. It was a work for which Johnson was peculiarly fitted. Perhaps no man, certainly no practised writer, of his day, could cope with him in the extent and accuracy of his knowledge of the English literature of the two centuries preceding his own. These lives first came out, 1 In a letter to Boswell, May 3, 1777.

in accordance with the original plan, as prefaces in the volumes which contained the poems. The first four volumes were published in 1779, and the rest in 1780. The first edition of the Lives, which was published separately, came out in 1781.

Johnson was now rapidly approaching the close of his life. In 1783 appeared the second edition of his Lives of the Poets, with some few hasty and imperfect corrections, and this was his last work of any importance.

In December 1784 he died. The one fear he had even to the last was of loss of reason. Having been informed of his condition by his friend Dr. Brocklesby, he resolved to take no more physic, not even opiates to allay his pain, for I have prayed that I may render up my soul to God unclouded.' He had his wish, his mind remaining vigorous to the last. There was now no more fear of death; ‘no man could appear more collected, more devout, or less terrified at the thoughts of the approaching minute.' His breathing, which had been for some time difficult, quietly ceased at seven in the evening of December 13, 1784

'So passed the strong heroic soul away.'

He was buried in Westminter Abbey, thus fulfilling an ancient prophecy of his, expressed to his friend Garrick, by his quoting, one day when they visited the Abbey together, Juvenal's line'Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscèbitur istis.'

Johnson's position as a classic would be assured him by his criticism alone, if other claims were wanting. His Lives of the Poets are rather critiques than biographies, and in this respect they stand almost by themselves in the contemporary literature. Criticism before Johnson's time was an almost unknown art. Dryden, it is true, had led the way, and had given, in various introductions to plays, and self-laudatory dedications, canons of criticism which had at least the merit of being sound as far as they went. But Dryden in his own day had few imitators, and what was then known as criticism was a counterfeit unworthy of the name, consisting only of unqualified lauda