The last explanation was that which really commended itself to Johnson.  Nobody had better reason to know that obscurity might conceal a misery as bitter as any that fell to the lot of the most eminent.  The gloom due to his constitutional temperament was intensified by the sense that he and his wife were dependent upon the goodwill of a narrow and ignorant tradesman for the scantiest maintenance.  How was he to reach some solid standing-ground above the hopeless mire of Grub Street?  As a journeyman author he could make both ends meet, but only on condition of incessant labour.  Illness and misfortune would mean constant dependence upon charity or bondage to creditors.  To get ahead of the world it was necessary to distinguish himself in some way from the herd of needy competitors.  He had come up from Lichfield with a play in his pocket, but the play did not seem at present to have much chance of emerging.  Meanwhile he published a poem which did something to give him a general reputation.

London—­an imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal—­was published in May, 1738.  The plan was doubtless suggested by Pope’s imitations of Horace, which had recently appeared.  Though necessarily following the lines of Juvenal’s poem, and conforming to the conventional fashion of the time, both in sentiment and versification, the poem has a biographical significance.  It is indeed odd to find Johnson, who afterwards thought of London as a lover of his mistress, and who despised nothing more heartily than the cant of Rousseau and the sentimentalists, adopting in this poem the ordinary denunciations of the corruption of towns, and singing the praises of an innocent country life.  Doubtless, the young writer was like other young men, taking up a strain still imitative and artificial.  He has a quiet smile at Savage in the life, because in his retreat to Wales, that enthusiast declared that he “could not debar himself from the happiness which was to be found in the calm of a cottage, or lose the opportunity of listening without intermission to the melody of the nightingale, which he believed was to be heard from every bramble, and which he did not fail to mention as a very important part of the happiness of a country life.”  In London, this insincere cockney adopts Savage’s view.  Thales, who is generally supposed to represent Savage (and this coincidence seems to confirm the opinion), is to retire “from the dungeons of the Strand,” and to end a healthy life in pruning walks and twining bowers in his garden.

  There every bush with nature’s music rings,
  There every breeze bears health upon its wings.

Johnson had not yet learnt the value of perfect sincerity even in poetry.  But it must also be admitted that London, as seen by the poor drudge from a Grub Street garret, probably presented a prospect gloomy enough to make even Johnson long at times for rural solitude.  The poem reflects, too, the ordinary talk of the heterogeneous band of patriots, Jacobites, and disappointed Whigs, who were beginning to gather enough strength to threaten Walpole’s long tenure of power.  Many references to contemporary politics illustrate Johnson’s sympathy with the inhabitants of the contemporary Cave of Adullam.