his knowledge of this fact to write the tragedy of Irene.  No other excuse at least can be given for the composition of one of the heaviest and most unreadable of dramatic performances, interesting now, if interesting at all, solely as a curious example of the result of bestowing great powers upon a totally uncongenial task.  Young men, however, may be pardoned for such blunders if they are not repeated, and Johnson, though he seems to have retained a fondness for his unlucky performance, never indulged in play writing after leaving Lichfield.  The best thing connected with the play was Johnson’s retort to his friend Walmsley, the Lichfield registrar.  “How,” asked Walmsley, “can you contrive to plunge your heroine into deeper calamity?” “Sir,” said Johnson, “I can put her into the spiritual court.”  Even Boswell can only say for Irene that it is “entitled to the praise of superior excellence,” and admits its entire absence of dramatic power.  Garrick, who had become manager of Drury Lane, produced his friend’s work in 1749.  The play was carried through nine nights by Garrick’s friendly zeal, so that the author had his three nights’ profits.  For this he received L195 17_s_. and for the copy he had L100.  People probably attended, as they attend modern representations of legitimate drama, rather from a sense of duty, than in the hope of pleasure.  The heroine originally had to speak two lines with a bowstring round her neck.  The situation produced cries of murder, and she had to go off the stage alive.  The objectionable passage was removed, but Irene was on the whole a failure, and has never, I imagine, made another appearance.  When asked how he felt upon his ill-success, he replied “like the monument,” and indeed he made it a principle throughout life to accept the decision of the public like a sensible man without murmurs.

Meanwhile, Johnson was already embarked upon an undertaking of a very different kind.  In 1747 he had put forth a plan for an English Dictionary, addressed at the suggestion of Dodsley, to Lord Chesterfield, then Secretary of State, and the great contemporary Maecenas.  Johnson had apparently been maturing the scheme for some time.  “I know,” he says in the “plan,” that “the work in which I engaged is generally considered as drudgery for the blind, as the proper toil of artless industry, a book that requires neither the light of learning nor the activity of genius, but may be successfully performed without any higher quality than that of bearing burdens with dull patience, and beating the track of the alphabet with sluggish resolution.”  He adds in a sub-sarcastic tone, that although princes and statesmen had once thought it honourable to patronize dictionaries, he had considered such benevolent acts to be “prodigies, recorded rather to raise wonder than expectation,” and he was accordingly pleased and surprised to find that Chesterfield took an interest in his undertaking.  He proceeds to lay down the