In the autumn Dr. Johnson went to Ashbourne to stop with his friend, the Rev. Dr. Taylor, and I joined him there.  I was somewhat disappointed in finding that the edition of the “English Poets” for which he was to write prefaces and lives was not an undertaking directed by him, but that he was to furnish a preface and life to any poet the booksellers pleased.  I asked him if he would do this to any dunce’s works if they should ask him.  Johnson:  “Yes, sir, and say he was a dunce.”  My friend seemed now not much to relish talking of this edition; it had been arranged by the forty chief booksellers of London, and Johnson had named his own terms for the “Lives,” namely, two hundred guineas.

During this visit he put into my hands the whole series of his writings in behalf of the Rev. Dr. William Dodd, who, having been chaplain-in-ordinary to his majesty, and celebrated as a very popular preacher, was this year convicted and executed for forging a bond on his former pupil, the young Earl of Chesterfield.  Johnson certainly made extraordinary exertions to save Dodd.  He wrote several petitions and letters on the subject, and composed for the unhappy man not only his “Speech to the Recorder of London,” at the Old Bailey, when sentence of death was about to be pronounced upon him, and “The Convict’s Address to his Unhappy Brethren,” a sermon delivered by Dr. Dodd in the chapel of Newgate, but also “Dr. Dodd’s Last Solemn Declaration,” which he left with the sheriff at the place of execution.

In 1778, I arrived in London on March 18, and next day met Dr. Johnson at his old friend’s, in Dean’s Yard, for Dr. Taylor was a prebendary of Westminster.  On Friday, March 2d, I found him at his own house, sitting with Mrs. Williams, and was informed that the room allotted to me three years previously was now appropriated to a charitable purpose, Mrs. Desmoulins, daughter of Johnson’s godfather Dr. Swinfen, and, I think, her daughter, and a Miss Carmichael, being all lodged in it.  Such was his humanity, and such his generosity, that Mrs. Desmoulins herself told me he allowed her half-a-guinea a week.

Unfortunately his “Seraglio,” as he sometimes suffered me to call his group of females, were perpetually jarring with one another.  He thus mentions them, together with honest Levett, in one of his letters to Mrs. Thrale:  “Williams hates everybody; Levett hates Desmoulins, and does not love Williams—­Desmoulins hates them both; Poll (Miss Carmichael) loves none of them.”

On January 20, 1779, Johnson lost his old friend Garrick, and this same year he gave the world a luminous proof that the vigour of his mind in all its faculties, whether memory, judgement, and imagination, was not in the least abated, by publishing the first four volumes of his “Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Most Eminent of the English Poets.”  The remaining volumes came out in 1781.

In 1780 the world was kept in impatience for the completion of his “Lives of the Poets,” upon which he was employed so far as his indolence allowed him to labour.