’As you have now been long away, I suppose your curiosity may pant for some news of your old friends.  Miss Williams and I live much as we did.  Miss Cotterel still continues to cling to Mrs. Porter, and Charlotte is now big of the fourth child.  Mr. Reynolds gets six thousands a year.  Levet is lately married, not without much suspicion that he has been wretchedly cheated in his match.  Mr. Chambers is gone this day, for the first time, the circuit with the Judges.  Mr. Richardson is dead of an apoplexy, and his second daughter has married a merchant.

’My vanity, or my kindness, makes me flatter myself, that you would rather hear of me than of those whom I have mentioned; but of myself I have very little which I care to tell.  Last winter I went down to my native town, where I found the streets much narrower and shorter than I thought I had left them, inhabited by a new race of people, to whom I was very little known.  My play-fellows were grown old, and forced me to suspect that I was no longer young.  My only remaining friend has changed his principles, and was become the tool of the predominant faction.  My daughter-in-law, from whom I expected most, and whom I met with sincere benevolence, has lost the beauty and gaiety of youth, without having gained much of the wisdom of age.  I wandered about for five days, and took the first convenient opportunity of returning to a place, where, if there is not much happiness, there is, at least, such a diversity of good and evil, that slight vexations do not fix upon the heart. . . .

’May you, my Baretti, be very happy at Milan, or some other place nearer to, Sir, your most affectionate humble servant,

‘Sam.  Johnson.’

The accession of George the Third to the throne of these kingdoms, opened a new and brighter prospect to men of literary merit, who had been honoured with no mark of royal favour in the preceding reign.  His present Majesty’s education in this country, as well as his taste and beneficence, prompted him to be the patron of science and the arts; and early this year Johnson, having been represented to him as a very learned and good man, without any certain provision, his Majesty was pleased to grant him a pension of three hundred pounds a year.  The Earl of Bute, who was then Prime Minister, had the honour to announce this instance of his Sovereign’s bounty, concerning which, many and various stories, all equally erroneous, have been propagated:  maliciously representing it as a political bribe to Johnson, to desert his avowed principles, and become the tool of a government which he held to be founded in usurpation.  I have taken care to have it in my power to refute them from the most authentick information.  Lord Bute told me, that Mr. Wedderburne, now Lord Loughborough, was the person who first mentioned this subject to him.  Lord Loughborough told me, that the pension was granted to Johnson solely as the reward of his literary merit, without any stipulation whatever, or even tacit understanding that he should write for administration.  His Lordship added, that he was confident the political tracts which Johnson afterwards did write, as they were entirely consonant with his own opinions, would have been written by him though no pension had been granted to him.