Perhaps nothing displays more fully the proud, sturdy, and self-reliant character of the man, than the eight years of incessant and unassisted labor upon this work.

His letter to Lord Chesterfield, declining his tardy patronage, after experiencing his earlier neglect, is a model of severe and yet respectful rebuke, and is to be regarded as one of the most significant events in his history.  In it he says:  “The notice you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it.  I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligation when no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a patron which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.”  Living as he did in an age when the patronage of the great was wearing out, and public appreciation beginning to reward an author’s toils, this manly letter gave another stab to the former, and hastened the progress of the latter.

OTHER WORKS.—­The fame of Johnson was now fully established, and his labors were rewarded, in 1762, by the receipt of a pension of L300 from the government, which made him quite independent.  It was then, in the very heyday of his reputation, that, in 1763, he became acquainted with James Boswell, to whom he at once became a Grand Lama; who took down the words as they dropped from his lips, and embalmed his fame.

In 1764 he issued his edition of Shakspeare, in eight octavo volumes, of which the best that can be said is, that it is not valuable as a commentary.  A commentator must have something in common with his author; there was nothing congenial between Shakspeare and Johnson.

It was in 1773, that, urged by Boswell, he made his famous Journey to the Hebrides, or Western Islands of Scotland, of which he gave delightful descriptions in a series of letters to his friend Mrs. Thrale, which he afterwards wrote out in more pompous style for publication.  The letters are current, witty, and simple; the published work is stilted and grandiloquent.

It is well known that he had no sympathy with the American colonies in their struggle against British oppression.  When, in 1775, the Congress published their Resolutions and Address, he answered them in a prejudiced and illogical paper entitled Taxation no Tyranny.  Notwithstanding its want of argument, it had the weight of his name and of a large party; but history has construed it by the animus of the writer, who had not long before declared of the colonists that they were “a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.”

As early as 1744 he had published a Life of the gifted but unhappy Savage, whom in his days of penury he had known, and with whom he had sympathized; but in 1781 appeared his Lives of the English Poets, with Critical Observations on their Works, and Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons.