In 1749 he published his Vanity of Human Wishes, an imitation of the tenth Satire of Juvenal, which was as heartily welcomed as London had been.  It is Juvenal applied to English and European history.  It contains many lines familiar to us all; among them are the following: 

    Let observation with extended view
    Survey mankind from China to Peru.

In speaking of Charles XII., he says: 

    His fall was destined to a barren strand,
    A petty fortress and a dubious hand;
    He left a name at which the world grew pale,
    To point a moral or adorn a tale.

    From Marlborough’s eyes the streams of dotage flow,
    And Swift expires a driveller and a show.

In the same year he published his tragedy of Irene, which, notwithstanding the friendly efforts of Garrick, who was now manager of Drury Lane Theatre, was not successful.  As a poet, Johnson was the perfection of the artificial school; and this very technical perfection was one of the causes of the reaction which was already beginning to sweep it away.

RAMBLER AND IDLER.—­In 1750 he commenced The Rambler, a periodical like The Spectator, of which he wrote nearly all the articles, and which lived for two years.  Solemn, didactic, and sonorous, it lacked the variety and genial humor which had characterized Addison and Steele.  In 1758 he started The Idler, in the same vein, which also ran its respectable course for two years.  In 1759 his mother died, and, in order to defray the expenses of her funeral, he wrote his story of Rasselas in the evenings of one week, for two editions of which he received L125.  Full of moral aphorisms and instruction, this “Abyssinian tale” is entirely English in philosophy and fancy, and has not even the slight illusion of other Eastern tales in French and English, which were written about the same time, and which are very similar in form and matter.  Of Rasselas, Hazlitt says:  “It is the most melancholy and debilitating moral speculation that was ever put forth.”

THE DICTIONARY.—­As early as 1747 he had begun to write his English Dictionary, which, after eight years of incessant and unassisted labor, appeared in 1755.  It was a noble thought, and produced a noble work—­a work which filled an original vacancy.  In France, a National Academy had undertaken a similar work; but this English giant had accomplished his labors alone.  The amount of reading necessary to fix and illustrate his definitions was enormous, and the book is especially valuable from the apt and varied quotations from English authors.  He established the language, as he found it, on a firm basis in signification and orthography.  He laid the foundation upon which future lexicographers were to build; but he was ignorant of the Teutonic languages, from which so much of the structure and words of the English are taken, and thus is signally wanting in the scientific treatment of his subject.  This is not to his discredit, for the science of language has had its origin in a later and modern time.