full of insolence and malignant reflections, which, had they not in
them "as much folly as malignity," he should have had reason to be
offended with.

In 1747, he furnished Garrick, who had become joint-patentee and manager
of Drury Lane, with a Prologue on the opening of the house. This address
has been commended quite as much as it deserves. The characters of
Shakspeare and Ben Jonson are, indeed, discriminated with much skill;
but surely something might have been said, if not of Massinger and
Beaumont and Fletcher, yet at least of Congreve and Otway, who are
involved in the sweeping censure passed on "the wits of Charles."

Of all his various literary undertakings, that in which he now engaged
was the most arduous, a Dictionary of the English language. His plan of
this work was, at the desire of Dodsley, inscribed to the Earl of
Chesterfield, then one of the Secretaries of State; Dodsley, in
conjunction with six other book-sellers, stipulated fifteen hundred and
seventy-five pounds as the price of his labour; a sum, from which, when
the expenses of paper and transcription were deducted, a small portion
only remained for the compiler. In other countries, this national
desideratum has been supplied by the united exertions of the learned.
Had the project for such a combination in Queen Anne's reign been
carried into execution, the result might have been fewer defects and
less excellence: the explanation of technical terms would probably have
been more exact, the derivations more copious, and a greater number of
significant words now omitted [7], have been collected from our earliest
writers; but the citations would often have been made with less
judgment, and the definitions laid down with less acuteness of
discrimination.

From his new patron, whom he courted without the aid of those graces so
devoutly worshipped by that nobleman, he reaped but small advantage;
and, being much exasperated at his neglect, Johnson addressed to him a
very cutting, but, it must be owned, an intemperate letter, renouncing
his protection, though, when the Dictionary was completed, Chesterfield
had ushered its appearance before the public in two complimentary papers
in the World; but the homage of the client was not to be recalled, or
even his resentment to be appeased. His great work is thus spoken of at
its first appearance, in a letter from Thomas Warton to his brother [8].
"The Dictionary is arrived; the preface is noble. There is a grammar
prefixed, and the history of the language is pretty full; but you may
plainly perceive strokes of laxity and indolence. They are two most
unwieldy volumes. I have written to him an invitation. I fear his
preface will disgust, by the expressions of his consciousness of
superiority, and of his contempt of patronage." In 1773, when he gave a
second edition, with additions and corrections, he announced in a few
prefatory lines that he had expunged some superfluities, and corrected
some faults, and here and there had scattered a remark; but that the
main fabric continued the same. "I have looked into it," he observes, in
a letter to Boswell, "very little since I wrote it, and, I think, I
found it full as often better as worse than I expected."

To trace in order of time the various changes in Johnson's place of
residence in the metropolis, if it were worth the trouble, would not be
possible. A list of them, which he gave to Boswell, amounting to
seventeen, but without the correspondent dates, is preserved by that
writer. For the sake of being near his printer, while the Dictionary was
on the anvil, he took a convenient house in Gough Square, near
Fleet-street, and fitted up one room in it as an office, where six
amanuenses were employed in transcribing for him, of whom Boswell
recounts in triumph that five were Scotchmen. In 1748, he wrote, for
Dodsley's Preceptor, the Preface, and the Vision of Theodore the Hermit,
to which Johnson has been heard to give the preference over all his other
writings. In the January of the ensuing year, appeared the Vanity of
Human Wishes, being the Tenth Satire of Juvenal imitated, which he sold
for fifteen guineas; and, in the next month, his Irene was brought on
the stage, not without a previous altercation between the poet and his
former pupil, concerning some changes which Garrick's superior knowledge
of the stage made him consider to be necessary, but which Johnson said
the fellow desired only that they might afford him more opportunity of
tossing his hands and kicking his heels. He always treated the art of a
player with illiberal contempt; but was at length, by the intervention
of Dr. Taylor, prevailed on to give way to the suggestions of Garrick.
Yet Garrick had not made him alter all that needed altering; for the
first exhibition of Irene shocked the spectators with the novel sight of
a heroine who was to utter two verses with the bow-string about her
neck. This horror was removed from a second representation; but, after
the usual course of ten nights, the tragedy was no longer in request.
Johnson thought it requisite, on this occasion, to depart from the usual
homeliness of his habit, and to appear behind the scenes, and in the
side boxes, with the decoration of a gold-laced hat and waistcoat. He
observed, that he found himself unable to behave with the same ease in
his finery, as when dressed in his plain clothes. In the winter of this
year, he established a weekly club, at the King's Head, in Ivy Lane,
near St. Paul's, of which the other members were Dr. Salter, a Cambridge
divine; Hawkesworth; Mr. Ryland, a merchant; Mr. John Payne, the
bookseller; Mr. John Dyer, a man of considerable erudition, and a friend
of Burke's; Doctors Macghie, Baker, and Bathurst, three physicians; and
Sir John Hawkins.

He next became a candidate for public favour, as the writer of a
periodical work, in the manner of the Spectator; and, in March, 1750,
published the first number of the Rambler, which was continued for
nearly two years; but, wanting variety of matter, and familiarity of
style, failed to attract many readers, so that the largest number of
copies that were sold of any one paper did not exceed five hundred. The
topics were selected without sufficient regard to the popular taste. The
grievances and distresses of authors particularly were dwelt on to
satiety; and the tone of eloquence was more swelling and stately than he
had hitherto adopted. The papers allotted to criticism are marked by his
usual acumen; but the justice of his opinions is often questionable. In
the humourous pieces, when our laughter is excited, I doubt the author
himself, who is always discoverable under the masque of whatever
character he assumes, is as much the object as the cause of our
merriment; and, however moral and devout his more serious views of life,
they are often defective in that most engaging feature of sound
religion, a cheerful spirit. The only assistance he received was from
Richardson, Mrs. Chapone, Miss Talbot, and Mrs. Carter, the first of
whom contributed the 97th number; the second, four billets in the 10th;
the next, the 30th; and the last, the 44th and 100th numbers.

Three days after the completion of the Rambler (March 17, 1752), he was
deprived of his wife, whom, notwithstanding the disparity in their age,
and some occasional bickerings, he had tenderly loved. Those who are
disposed to scrutinize narrowly and severely into the human heart, may
question the sincerity of his sorrow, because he was collected enough to
write her funeral sermon. But the shapes which grief puts on in
different minds are as dissimilar as the constitution of those minds.
Milton, in whom the power of imagination was predominant, soothed his
anguish for the loss of his youthful friend, in an irregular, but most
beautiful assemblage of those poetic objects which presented themselves
to his thoughts, and consecrated them to the memory of the deceased; and
Johnson, who loved to act the moralizer and the rhetorician, alleviated
his sufferings by declaiming on the instability of human happiness.

During this interval he also wrote the Prologue to Comus, spoken by
Garrick, for the benefit of Mrs. Elizabeth Foster, grand-daughter to
Milton; the Prologue and Postscript to Lander's impudent forgeries
concerning that poet, by which Johnson was imposed on, as well as the
rest of the world; a letter to Dr. Douglas, for the same impostor, after
he had been detected, acknowledging and expressing contrition for the
fraud; and the Life of Cheynel, in the Student.

Soon after his wife's death, he became intimate with Beauclerk and
Langton, two young men of family and distinction, who were fellow
collegians at Oxford, and much attached to each other; and the latter of
whom admiration of the Rambler had brought to London with the express
view of being introduced to the author. Their society was very agreeable
to him; and he was, perhaps, glad to forget himself by joining at times
in their sallies of juvenile gaiety. One night, when he had lodgings in
the Temple, he was roused by their knocking at his door; and appearing
in his shirt and nightcap, he found they had come together from the
tavern where they had supped, to prevail on him to accompany them in a
nocturnal ramble. He readily entered into their proposal; and, having
indulged themselves till morning in such frolics as came in their way,
Johnson and Beauclerk were so well pleased with their diversion, that
they continued it through the rest of the day; while their less
sprightly companion left them, to keep an engagement with some ladies at
breakfast, not without reproaches from Johnson for deserting his friends
"for a set of unidea'd girls."

In 1753, he gave to Dr. Bathurst, the physician, whom he regarded with
much affection, and whose practice was very limited, several essays for
the Adventurer, which Hawkesworth was then publishing; and wrote for
Mrs. Lenox a Dedication to the Earl of Orrery, of her Shakspeare
illustrated; and, in the following year, inserted in the Gentleman's
Magazine a Life of Cave, its former editor.

Previously to the publication of his Dictionary, it was thought
advisable by his friends that the degree of Master of Arts should be
obtained for him, in order that his name might appear in the title page
with that addition; and it was accordingly, through their intercession,
conferred on him by the University of Oxford. The work was presented by
the Earl of Orrery, one of his friends then at Florence, to the Delia
Crusca Academy, who, in return, sent their Dictionary to the author. The
French Academy paid him the same compliment. But these honours were not
accompanied by that indispensable requisite, "provision for the day that
was passing over him." He was arrested for debt, and liberated by the
kindness of Richardson, the writer of Clarissa, who became his surety.
To prevent such humiliation, the efforts of his own industry were not
wanting. In 1756, he published an Abridgement of his Dictionary, and an
Edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Christian Morals, to which he prefixed a
Life of that writer; he contributed to a periodical miscellany, called
the Universal Visitor, by Christopher Smart,[9] and yet more largely to
another work of the same kind, entitled, the Literary Magazine; and
wrote a dedication and preface for Payne's Introduction to the Game of
Draughts, and an Introduction to the newspaper called the London
Chronicle, for the last of which he received a single guinea. Yet either
conscientious scruples, or his unwillingness to relinquish a London
life, induced him to decline the offer of a valuable benefice in
Lincolnshire, which was made him by the father of his friend, Langton,
provided he could prevail on himself to take holy orders, a measure that
would have delivered him from literary toil for the remainder of his
days. But literary toil was the occupation for which nature had designed
him. In the April of 1758, he commenced the Idler, and continued to
publish it for two years in