Patriotic enthusiasm, however, as no one knew better than Johnson, is a poor substitute for bed and supper.  Johnson suffered acutely and made some attempts to escape from his misery.  To the end of his life, he was grateful to those who had lent him a helping hand.  “Harry Hervey,” he said of one of them shortly before his death, “was a vicious man, but very kind to me.  If you call a dog Hervey, I shall love him.”  Pope was impressed by the excellence of his first poem, London, and induced Lord Gower to write to a friend to beg Swift to obtain a degree for Johnson from the University of Dublin.  The terms of this circuitous application, curious, as bringing into connexion three of the most eminent men of letters of the day, prove that the youngest of them was at the time (1739) in deep distress.  The object of the degree was to qualify Johnson for a mastership of L60 a year, which would make him happy for life.  He would rather, said Lord Gower, die upon the road to Dublin if an examination were necessary, “than be starved to death in translating for booksellers, which has been his only subsistence for some time past.”  The application failed, however, and the want of a degree was equally fatal to another application to be admitted to practise at Doctor’s Commons.

Literature was thus perforce Johnson’s sole support; and by literature was meant, for the most part, drudgery of the kind indicated by the phrase, “translating for booksellers.”  While still in Lichfield, Johnson had, as I have said, written to Cave, proposing to become a contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine.  The letter was one of those which a modern editor receives by the dozen, and answers as perfunctorily as his conscience will allow.  It seems, however, to have made some impression upon Cave, and possibly led to Johnson’s employment by him on his first arrival in London.  From 1738 he was employed both on the Magazine and in some jobs of translation.

Edward Cave, to whom we are thus introduced, was a man of some mark in the history of literature.  Johnson always spoke of him with affection and afterwards wrote his life in complimentary terms.  Cave, though a clumsy, phlegmatic person of little cultivation, seems to have been one of those men who, whilst destitute of real critical powers, have a certain instinct for recognizing the commercial value of literary wares.  He had become by this time well-known as the publisher of a magazine which survives to this day.  Journals containing summaries of passing events had already been started.  Boyer’s Political State of Great Britain began in 1711. The Historical Register, which added to a chronicle some literary notices, was started in 1716. The Grub Street Journal was another journal with fuller critical notices, which first appeared in 1730; and these two seem to have been superseded by the Gentleman’s Magazine, started by Cave in the next year.  Johnson saw in it an opening for the employment of his literary