'While he was bearing his burdens with dull patience, and beating the track of the alphabet with sluggish resolution ',' he undertook a second task. As if the Dictionary were not enough to exhaust his strength, he began a periodical paper. Twice a week, every Tuesday and Saturday, for two years, he published a series of essays under the name of The Rambler. Their style did not much please the men of his time, and is generally displeasing to the modern reader. They contain nevertheless much acute criticism, reflections full of wisdom, but too often full of sadness, not a few humorous touches, and many eloquent and even noble passages. The death of his wife followed close on the last number. For forty days he seems to have given himself wholly up to grief; at their close he used, he records, a service of prayer, 'as preparatory to my return to life to-morrow 2 He cherished her memory to his last day. Before long he again found time for essay-writing, and contributed many papers to a publication started by his friend, Dr. Hawkesworth, under the name of The Adventurer. When his Dictionary was on the eve of publication the University of Oxford made some atonement for the neglect it had formerly shown him, and conferred on him the degree of Master of Arts. With this distinction he was highly gratified. He kept back the title-page so that he might grace it with his new honour, and in his frequent visits to Oxford he wore his gown almost ostentatiously 3. Later on he received the degree of Doctor of Laws both from his own university and from Dublin.

An Abridgment of his Dictionary next engaged his attention, but he found time as usual for minor pieces of writing. He resumed his project of editing Shakespeare, but so dilatory had he become, perhaps owing to a long strain of excessive labour, that its publication was delayed longer even

1 Johnson's Works, ed. 1825, v. I.

2 Prayers and Meditations, p. 15.

3 Boswell's Life of Johnson, i. 347, n. 2.

than that of the Dictionary. During the interval he wrote a fresh series of essays, to which he gave the name of The Idler. To the death of his mother, which happened at this time, we owe his admirable story of Rasselas. Few tales have been more widely read. It reached its fifth edition in less than three years. Johnson lived to see versions in Italian, French, German, and Dutch. It has since been translated into Bengalee, Hungarian, Polish, Modern Greek, Spanish, and Russian1. A few years later on, a great and most happy change was made in his life. Under George II. he had had no hope of Court favour, for he had openly avowed his dislike of the House of Hanover. In his heart he always sided with the Jacobites, though in his reason he was convinced that the deposition of James II. had been needful. 'I have heard him declare,' writes Boswell, 'that if holding up his right hand would have secured victory at Culloden to Prince Charles's army, he was not sure he would have held it up 2. The accession of George III. was soon followed by the return to power of the Tory party, to which Johnson was strongly attached. He did nothing however to seek royal favour, and probably no man was more surprised than he was himself on learning that the king had been advised by his minister to confer on him a pension of £300 a year. He was now no longer forced to write for money, and for fifteen years he wrote very little. He completed his edition of Shakespeare, revised his Dictionary, wrote four political pamphlets which did not raise his reputation, and his Journey to the Western Islands, in which he describes with force a state of society which was rapidly passing away. His chief work during all these years was his talk. He was one of the most accessible of men. He knew all kinds of people, and was ready to discuss all kinds of subjects. He seemed to me,' as one of his friends said, 'to be considered as a kind of public oracle, whom everybody thought they had a right to visit and consult; and doubtless 1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, ii. 208; vi. lxiv. 2 Ib. i. 430.

they were well rewarded'. It was, as Boswell says, 'in the art of thinking, the art of using his mind,' that his superiority chiefly consisted; 'a certain continual power of seizing the useful substance of all that he knew, and exhibiting it in a clear and forcible manner; so that knowledge, which we often see to be no better than lumber in men of dull understanding, was in him true, evident, and actual wisdom '.' His voice was strong, his utterance slow and deliberate, and his words as accurate as they were vigorous. He delighted in club-life. A tavern-chair,' he said, ' was the throne of human felicity.' Of the clubs to which he belonged one is likely to be immortal in fame. There he met in most friendly intercourse Joshua Reynolds, the greatest painter that England had seen, Edmund Burke, her greatest orator, David Garrick, her greatest actor, James Boswell, her greatest biographer, and Oliver Goldsmith, 'qui nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit, nullum quod tetigit non ornavit1? There were other famous men besides who'relished the manly conversation and the society of the brown table 5' of the Literary Club-Edward Gibbon, of the Decline and Fall, and Adam Smith, of the Wealth of Nations, Charles James Fox, the orator and statesman, R. B. Sheridan, who was as yet famous only for his comedies, Bishop Percy, who saved for us the reliques that were left of the old ballads, and Sir William Jones, the great Orientalist. Among other clubable men of less fame, but still of great merit, were Johnson's two friends, Bennet Langton, and Topham Beauclerk-Langton, one of the best Greek scholars of his day, as he was one of the worthiest of men; Beauclerk, who inherited from his ancestors Charles II. and Nell Gwynne not only wit, liveliness, and an admirable skill as a teller of good stories, but unhappily looseness of morals.

From this brilliant society Johnson returned to a home which he shared with Miss Williams, the orphan daughter of a man of learning, on whose blindness and poverty he 1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, ii. 118. 2 Ib. iv. 427. 3 lb. ii. 452, n. I. 4 Ib. iii. 82.

5 Ib. iii. 128, n. 4.

took compassion, and with Mr. Levett, 'an obscure practiser in physic, of a strange grotesque appearance, stiff and formal in his manner, who seldom said a word while any company was present'.' In their society he found, however, pleasure, though Miss Williams, in the long illness which ended in her death, tried, but never exhausted, his patience. Levett's memory he has celebrated in lines which have touched many a heart. Thackeray said that he never could read them without tears. Johnson, towards the close of his life, sheltered moreover in his house some poor ladies who had only one recommendation-their distress. Goldsmith, hearing Boswell wonder that Johnson was very kind to a man of a very bad character, replied: 'He is now become miserable, and that insures the protection of Johnson2' His charity was no sudden impulse, and no sudden effort. Day after day, and month after month, he patiently endured the discord caused by these peevish inmates. Happily, for some fifteen or sixteen years, he had a second and a far more splendid home. Henry Thrale, a wealthy brewer, 'a good scholar and a man of a sound understanding3, had a great relish for his conversation. His wife, who is perhaps better known by her second husband's name, Piozzi, a woman of some reading, of great vivacity and quickness of mind, admired the rough philosopher as much as did her husband. They appropriated to him a room in their town house and in their villa at Streatham. He visited them whenever he liked, and stayed as long as he pleased. 'Her kindness soothed,' to use Johnson's grateful words, 'twenty years of a life radically wretched.' He amply repaid what he received by the constancy and the strength of his friendship, by the charm of his talk, by the brilliant friends whom he gathered about him at their table, and by the fame which he has given them. Since his day brewers have been raised to the peerage, but no patent of nobility conferred by 2 Ib. i. 417.

1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, i. 243.

3 Ib. i. 494.

B

4 Ib. i. 520.

a monarch is likely to outlast that which Johnson gave to this Southwark trader.

If the friendship of James Boswell did not add so much to his comfort as did that of the Thrales, it has added far more to his fame. No hero was ever equally happy in his biographer, and no biographer was ever equally happy in his hero. Like the two halves of some wide-spreading arch each supports the other. The flood of time which sweeps so much away has swept all round it, but it stands stronger than ever.

This was by far the happiest part of Johnson's life. He was able to gratify his curiosity and to indulge in the pleasure of travelling. 'Life,' he once said, as he was driven rapidly along in a post-chaise, 'has not many better things than this'.' With Reynolds he visited the West of England, with the Thrales he spent some weeks in Wales and some in France, and with Boswell he made his famous tour to the Hebrides. A trip which he projected to Italy was stopped at the last moment by the sudden death of Mr. Thrale's son. When he had almost reached his seventieth year, he showed that 'there was nothing of the old man about him 2' by writing what is only the second, if indeed it is the second, of his works. The Dictionary was the greater achievement, but, unlike it, the Lives of the Poets can never be superseded. 'The enthusiasm with which the Dictionary was hailed 3 › can scarcely be understood now, though still by the student 'a leisure hour may always be very agreeably spent in turning over its pages. The delight which was enjoyed by the first readers of the Lives can happily still be felt by their descendants. In their own way they remain unequalled.

The gloom which had covered so much of Johnson's life had been greatly dispersed. His circumstances were easy, his health was better than it had been since his youth, his

1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, ii. 453.

2 Ib. iii. 336.

9 Macaulay's Misc. Writings, ed. 1871, p. 382.

▲ Ib.