This poem, as already stated, attracted Pope’s notice, who made a curious note on a scrap of paper sent with it to a friend.  Johnson is described as “a man afflicted with an infirmity of the convulsive kind, that attacks him sometimes so as to make him a sad spectacle.”  This seems to have been the chief information obtained by Pope about the anonymous author, of whom he had said, on first reading the poem, this man will soon be deterre. London made a certain noise; it reached a second edition in a week, and attracted various patrons, among others, General Oglethorpe, celebrated by Pope, and through a long life the warm friend of Johnson.  One line, however, in the poem printed in capital letters, gives the moral which was doubtless most deeply felt by the author, and which did not lose its meaning in the years to come.  This mournful truth, he says,—­

              Is everywhere confess’d,
  Slow rises worth by poverty depress’d.

Ten years later (in January, 1749) appeared the Vanity of Human Wishes, an imitation of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal.  The difference in tone shows how deeply this and similar truths had been impressed upon its author in the interval.  Though still an imitation, it is as significant as the most original work could be of Johnson’s settled views of life.  It was written at a white heat, as indeed Johnson wrote all his best work.  Its strong Stoical morality, its profound and melancholy illustrations of the old and ever new sentiment, Vanitas Vanitatum, make it perhaps the most impressive poem of the kind in the language.  The lines on the scholar’s fate show that the iron had entered his soul in the interval.  Should the scholar succeed beyond expectation in his labours and escape melancholy and disease, yet, he says,—­

  Yet hope not life from grief and danger free,
  Nor think the doom of man reversed on thee;
  Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes
  And pause awhile from letters, to be wise;
  There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail,
  Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail;
  See nations, slowly wise and meanly just,
  To buried merit raise the tardy bust. 
  If dreams yet flatter, once again attend. 
  Hear Lydiat’s life and Galileo’s end.

For the “patron,” Johnson had originally written the “garret.”  The change was made after an experience of patronage to be presently described in connexion with the Dictionary.

For London Johnson received ten guineas, and for the Vanity of Human Wishes fifteen.  Though indirectly valuable, as increasing his reputation, such work was not very profitable.  The most promising career in a pecuniary sense was still to be found on the stage.  Novelists were not yet the rivals of dramatists, and many authors had made enough by a successful play to float them through a year or two.  Johnson had probably been determined by