Boswell had to bear some jokes against himself and his countrymen from the pair; but he had triumphed, and rejoiced greatly when he went home with Johnson, and heard the great man speak of his pleasant dinner to Mrs. Williams.  Johnson seems to have been permanently reconciled to his foe.  “Did we not hear so much said of Jack Wilkes,” he remarked next year, “we should think more highly of his conversation.  Jack has a great variety of talk, Jack is a scholar, and Jack has the manners of a gentleman.  But, after hearing his name sounded from pole to pole as the phoenix of convivial felicity, we are disappointed in his company.  He has always been at me, but I would do Jack a kindness rather than not.  The contest is now over.”

In fact, Wilkes had ceased to play any part in public life.  When Johnson met him next (in 1781) they joked about such dangerous topics as some of Wilkes’s political performances.  Johnson sent him a copy of the Lives, and they were seen conversing tete-a-tete in confidential whispers about George II. and the King of Prussia.  To Boswell’s mind it suggested the happy days when the lion should lie down with the kid, or, as Dr. Barnard suggested, the goat.

In the year 1777 Johnson began the Lives of the Poets, in compliance with a request from the booksellers, who wished for prefaces to a large collection of English poetry.  Johnson asked for this work the extremely modest sum of 200 guineas, when he might easily, according to Malone, have received 1000 or 1500.  He did not meet Boswell till September, when they spent ten days together at Dr. Taylor’s.  The subject which specially interested Boswell at this time was the fate of the unlucky Dr. Dodd, hanged for forgery in the previous June.  Dodd seems to have been a worthless charlatan of the popular preacher variety.  His crime would not in our days have been thought worthy of so severe a punishment; but his contemporaries were less shocked by the fact of death being inflicted for such a fault, than by the fact of its being inflicted on a clergyman.  Johnson exerted himself to procure a remission of the sentence by writing various letters and petitions on Dodd’s behalf.  He seems to have been deeply moved by the man’s appeal, and could “not bear the thought” that any negligence of his should lead to the death of a fellow-creature; but he said that if he had himself been in authority he would have signed the death-warrant, and for the man himself, he had as little respect as might be.  He said, indeed, that Dodd was right in not joining in the “cant” about leaving a wretched world.  “No, no,” said the poor rogue, “it has been a very agreeable world to me.”  Dodd had allowed to pass for his own one of the papers composed for him by Johnson, and the Doctor was not quite pleased.  When, however, Seward expressed a doubt as to Dodd’s power of writing so forcibly, Johnson felt bound not to expose him.  “Why should you think so?  Depend