JOHNSON

333 time in a garret in Exeter Street, Strand. He did other hack-work for people like Osborn the bookseller, of his quarrel with whom he afterwards gave Mrs. Thrale a succinct account-"Dearest lady, he was insolent, and I beat him; and he was a blockhead, and told of it." In 1743 that strange adventurer Richard Savage died, and in the following year Johnson published his Life. He was still, and for a long time to come, so miserably poor that he often could not show himself in public because of the shabbiness of his clothes. In 1747 he issued his Plan of a Dictionary, which he dedicated to Chesterfield, but with scant encouragement. In 1748 he wrote at Hampstead, and in 1749 published, The Vanity of Human Wishes, a very fine work, which oddly enough failed to please the poetic taste of the day. At length, in February of the same year, the old tragedy of Irene was produced by Garrick at Drury Lane, and for the first time in his life Johnson tasted success; he received nearly £300. From

1750 to 1752 he was busily engaged in writing a bi-weekly periodical, The Rambler, which appears to have been faintly lucrative; it expired abruptly, probably because Johnson was unable to continue it owing to the condition of his wife, who, after years of "perpetual illness and perpetual opium," died a few days after the last Rambler appeared. A blind Welsh lady, Mrs. Williams, became the inmate of his house, and continued to live with him till her death thirty years later. The huge task of the Dictionary was completed in 1754, and Johnson received a little money, much reputation, and the degree of M.A. from the University of Oxford. His noble letter to Chesterfield, a masterpiece of manly irony, (though not published until 1790) belongs to 1755. But Johnson was now tired; he allowed his small resources soon to become exhausted, and he fell again into extreme indigence. We know little of his life until 1758, when we find him starting a new and more interesting periodical, The Idler; it appeared weekly for two years. Johnson's mother died, at the age of ninety, early in 1759, and he wrote his novel of Rasselas to pay for her funeral. He had now been living for some years in Gough Square, but he moved over to Staple Inn in March 1759. He made various changes of residence before settling, in 1761, in the