Richard Savage, and with him spent too many of his private hours.  Both were poor, both proud, both patriotic, both at that time lovers of pleasure, and they became for a season inseparable; often perambulating the streets all night, engaged now, we fear, in low revels, and now in high talk, and sometimes determined to stand by their country when they could stand by nothing else.  Yet, if Savage for a season corrupted Johnson, he also communicated to him much information, and at last left himself in legacy, as one of the best subjects to one of the greatest masters of moral anatomy.  In 1744, Johnson rolled off from his powerful pen, with as much ease as a thick oak a thunder-shower, the sounding sentences which compose the “Life of Savage,” and which shall for ever perpetuate the memory and the tale of that “unlucky rascal.”  It is a wasp preserved in the richest amber.  The whole reads like one sentence, and is generally read at one sitting.  Sir Joshua Reynolds, meeting it in a country inn, began to read it while standing with his arm leaning on a chimney-piece, and was not able to lay it aside till he had finished it, when he found his arm totally benumbed.  In 1745, Johnson issued proposals for a new edition of Shakspeare, but laid them aside for a time, owing to the great expectations entertained of the edition then promised by Warburton.

For several years, except a few trifles in the Gentleman’s Magazine, and his famous “Prologue delivered at the Opening of Drury Lane Theatre,” he seems to have written nothing.  But in 1745 appeared the prospectus of his most laborious undertaking, the “English Dictionary.”  This continued his principal occupation for some years, and, as Boswell truly observes, “served to relieve his constitutional melancholy by the steady, yet not oppressive, employment it secured him.”  In its unity, too, and gigantic size, the task seemed fitted for the powers of so strong a man; and although he says he dismissed it at last with “frigid tranquillity,” he had no doubt felt its influence during the time to be at once that of a protecting guardian and of an inspiring genius.  In 1749, he published his “Vanity of Human Wishes,” for which he received the sum of fifteen guineas,—­a miserable recompense for a poem which Byron pronounces “sublime,” and which is as true as it is magnificent in thought, and terse in language.  In the same year, Garrick had “Irene” acted, but it was “damned” the first night, although it dragged on heavily for eight nights more.  When the author was asked how he felt at its ill-success, he replied, “Like the Monument!” How different from Addison, walking restlessly, and perspiring with anxiety behind the scenes, while the fate of “Cato” was hanging in the balance!