The years went on, and Johnson saw nothing of his patron.  When, however, the dictionary was nearly done, Lord Chesterfield let it be known that he would be pleased to have it dedicated to him.  But Johnson would have none of it.  He wrote a letter which was the “Blast of Doom, proclaiming into the ear of Lord Chesterfield, and, through him, of the listening world, that patronage would be no more!"*

Carlyle.

“Seven years, my Lord, have now passed,” wrote Johnson, “since I waited in your outward rooms and was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it at last to the verge of publication without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, and one smile of favour.  Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a patron before. . . .

“Is not a patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached the ground cumbers him with help?  The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, 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.”

There was an end of patronage so far as Johnson was concerned, and it was the beginning of the end of it with others.  Great Sam had roared, he had asserted himself, and with the publication of his dictionary he became “The Great Cham* of literature."**

A Tartar word for prince or chief. *Smollett.

He had by this time founded a club of literary men which met at “a famous beef-steak house,” and here he lorded it over his fellows as his bulky namesake had done more than a hundred years before.  In many ways there was a great likeness between these two.  They were both big and stout (for Sam was now stout).  They were loud-voiced and dictatorial.  They both drank a great deal, but Ben, alas, drank wine overmuch, as was common in his day, while Sam drank endless cups of tea, seventeen or eighteen it might be at a sitting, indeed he called himself a hardened and shameless tea-drinker.  But, above all, their likeness lies in the fact that they both dominated the literary men of their period; they were kings and rulers.  They laid down the law and settled who was great and who little among the writers of the day.  And it was not merely the friends around Johnson who heard him talk, who listened to his judgments about books and writers.  The world outside listened, too, to what he had to say, and you will remember that it was he who utterly condemned Macpherson’s pretended poems of Ossian, “that pious three-quarters fraud"* of which you have already read in chapter IV.

A.  Lang.