We shall in vain endeavour to know with exact precision every production of Johnson’s pen.  He owned to me, that he had written about forty sermons; but as I understood that he had given or sold them to different persons, who were to preach them as their own, he did not consider himself at liberty to acknowledge them.  Would those who were thus aided by him, who are still alive, and the friends of those who are dead, fairly inform the world, it would be obligingly gratifying a reasonable curiosity, to which there should, I think, now be no objection.  Two volumes of them, published since his death, are sufficiently ascertained; see vol. iii. p. 181.  I have before me, in his hand-writing, a fragment of twenty quarto leaves, of a translation into English of Sallust, De Bella Catilinario.  When it was done I have no notion; but it seems to have no very superior merit to mark it as his.  Beside the publications heretofore mentioned, I am satisfied, from internal evidence, to admit also as genuine the following, which, notwithstanding all my chronological care, escaped me in the course of this work: 

‘Considerations on the Case of Dr. Trapp’s Sermons,’ + published in 1739, in the Gentleman’s Magazine. [These Considerations were published, not in 1739, but in 1787. Ante, i. 140, note 5.] It is a very ingenious defence of the right of abridging an authour’s work, without being held as infringing his property.  This is one of the nicest questions in the Law of Literature; and I cannot help thinking, that the indulgence of abridging is often exceedingly injurious to authours and booksellers, and should in very few cases be permitted.  At any rate, to prevent difficult and uncertain discussion, and give an absolute security to authours in the property of their labours, no abridgement whatever should be permitted, till after the expiration of such a number of years as the Legislature may be pleased to fix.

But, though it has been confidently ascribed to him, I cannot allow that he wrote a Dedication to both Houses of Parliament of a book entitled The Evangelical History Harmonized.  He was no croaker; no declaimer against the times. [See ante, ii. 357.] He would not have written, ’That we are fallen upon an age in which corruption is not barely universal, is universally confessed.’  Nor ’Rapine preys on the publick without opposition, and perjury betrays it without inquiry.’  Nor would he, to excite a speedy reformation, have conjured up such phantoms of terrour as these:  ’A few years longer, and perhaps all endeavours will be in vain.  We may be swallowed by an earthquake:  we may be delivered to our enemies.’  This is not Johnsonian.