Johnson had always spent much of his time in taverns, and was now more than ever free to do so.  For while he was still working at his dictionary he suffered a great grief in the death of his wife.  He had loved her truly and never ceased to mourn her loss.  But though he had lost his wife, he did not remain solitary in his home, for he opened his doors to a queer collection of waifs and strays—­three women and a man, upon whom he took pity because no one else would.  They were ungrateful and undeserving, and quarreled constantly among themselves, so that his home could have been no peaceful spot.  “Williams hates everybody,” he writes; “Levett hates Desmoulins and does not love Williams; Desmoulins hates them both; Poll loves none of them.”  It does not sound peaceful or happy.

Some years after the death of Johnson’s wife his mother died at the age of ninety, and although he had not been with her for many years, that too was a grief.  The poor lady had had very little to live on, and she left some debts.  Johnson himself was still struggling with poverty.  He had no money, so to pay his mother’s few debts, and also the expenses of her funeral, he sat down to write a story.  In a week he had finished Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.

The story of Rasselas is that of a prince who is shut up in the Happy Valley until the time shall come for him to ascent the throne of his father.  Everything was done to make life in the Happy Valley peaceful and joyful, but Rasselas grew weary of it; to him it became but a prison of pleasure, and at last, with his favorite sister, he escaped out into the world.  The story tells then of their search for happiness.  But perfect happiness they cannot find, and discovering this, they decide to return to the Happy Valley.

There is a vein of sadness throughout the book.  It ends as it were with a big question mark, with a “conclusion in which nothing is concluded.”  For the position of the prince and his sister was unchanged, and they had not found what they sought.  Is it to be found at all?  The story is a revelation of Johnson himself.  He never saw life joyously, and at times he had fits of deep melancholy which he fought against as against a madness.  “I inherited,” he said, “a vile melancholy from my father, which has made me mad all my life, at least not sober,” and his long struggle with poverty helped to deepen this melancholy.

But a year or two after Rasselas was written, a great change came in Johnson’s life, which gave him comfort and security for the rest of his days.  George III had come to the throne.  He thought that he would like to do something for literature, and offered Johnson a pension of three hundred pounds a year.

Johnson was now a man of fifty-four.  He was acknowledged as the greatest man of letters of his day, yet he was still poor.  Three hundred pounds seemed to him wealth, but he hesitated to accept it.  He was an ardent Tory and hated the House of Hanover.  In his dictionary he had called a pension “an allowance made to any one without an equivalent.  In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.”  A pensioner he had said was “A slave of state hired by a stipend to obey his master.”  Was he then to become a traitor to his country and a slave of state?