Lives of the English Poets | Page 6

Reynolds, when it came into his hand, found his attention so powerfully arrested, that he read it through without changing his posture, as he perceived by the torpidness of one of his arms that had rested on a chimney-piece by which he was standing. For the Life of Savage [5], he received fifteen guineas from Cave. About this time he fell into the company of Collins, with whom, as he tells us in his life of that poet, he delighted to converse.
His next publication (in 1745) was a pamphlet, called "Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth, with Remarks on Sir T.H. (Sir Thomas Hanmer's) Edition of Shakspeare," to which were subjoined, proposals for a new edition of his plays. These observations were favourably mentioned by Warburton, in the preface to his edition; and Johnson's gratitude for praise bestowed at a time when praise was of value to him, was fervent and lasting. Yet Warburton, with his usual intolerance of any dissent from his opinions, afterwards complained in a private letter [6] to Hurd, that Johnson's remarks on his commentaries were 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