In 1750 he began his “Rambler,” and carried it on with only tolerable success till 1752.  The world has long ago made up its mind on the merits and defects of this periodical, its masculine thought and energetic diction, alternating with disguised common-place and (as he would have said himself) “turgescent tameness”—­its critical and fictitious papers, often so rich in fancy, and felicitous in expression, mixed with others which exhibit “bulk without spirit vast,” and are chiefly remarkable for their bold, bad innovations on that English tongue of which the author was piling up the standard Dictionary.  Many have dwelt severely on Johnson’s inequalities, without attending to their cause; that was unquestionably the “body of death” which hung so heavily upon his system, and rendered writing at times a positive torment.  Let his fastidious critics remember that he never spent a single day, of which he could say that he was entirely well, and free from pain, and that his spirits were often so depressed, that he was more than once seen on his knees, praying God to preserve his understanding.

A great calamity now visited his household.  This was the death of his wife.  She expired on the 17th of March 1752.  She had been married to him sixteen years; and notwithstanding the difference of age, and other causes of disagreement, he seems to have loved her with sincerity, and to have lamented her death with deep and long-continued sorrow.  He relaxed not, however, an instant in his literary labours, continued the preparation of his Dictionary, and contributed a few lively and vigorous papers to the “Adventurer”—­a paper, edited by Dr Hawkesworth, a writer of some talent, who did his best to tower up to the measure and stature of the “Rambler.”

During this time Johnson was filling his house with a colony of poor dependants,—­such as Mrs Anna Williams, a soured female poetaster; and Levet, a tenth-rate medical peripatetic, who, as well as Hodge, the great lexicographer’s cat, and Francis Barber, his black servant, now share in his immortality,—­besides becoming acquainted with such men of eminence as Reynolds, the inimitable painter; Bennet Langton, the amiable and excellent country-gentleman; and Beauclerk, the smart and witty “man about town.”  In 1755 (exactly a hundred years ago), Johnson chastised Lord Chesterfield for his mean, finessing conduct to him about his Dictionary, in a letter unparalleled, unless in “Junius,” for its noble and condensed scorn,—­a scorn which “burns frore,” cold performing the effect of fire—­and which reached that callous Lord, under the sevenfold shield of his conceit and conventionalism; visited Oxford, and was presented by acclamation with that degree of M.A. which he had left twenty-four years before without receiving; and, in fine, issued his Dictionary, the work of eight years, and which, undoubtedly, is the truest monument of his talent, industry, and general capacity, if not of the richness of his invention,