curious at this stage to hear him extol with fervour the innocence and rapture of a country life. Alas, the young author had only seen London from a Grub Street garret. A generation after this when he became the great literary dictator, how differently he speaks. "Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."

His poem at once gave him a name and a standing in the literary world. He had now no need of printer Cave, but to the end of his life he ever spoke of him with the greatest kindness. JOHNSON had now set his foot firmly on the first step of the ladder of fame. About this time a club of prominent London booksellers proposed that he should write a Dictionary of the English Language, and offered him a fee of fifteen hundred guineas. The offer was accepted. Out of this sum he had to pay a staff of amanuenses. Criticising the Dictionary, Lord Macaulay says that JOHNSON seems not to be conversant with certain dramatists, which he names, of the Eliza

bethan age, as he has not quoted from them in his great Dictionary.

May there not be another reason than that which is alleged by Macaulay? May England's greatest moralist not have abstained from doing so on high principles? We are informed by Mrs. Thrale that he rejected every authority for a word in his Dictionary, that could only be gleaned from writers dangerous to religion or morality. "I would not," he said to her," send people to look for words in a book that, by such a casual seizure of the mind, might chance to mislead it for ever." No wonder that the learned Mrs. Montague said, "That were an angel to give the imprimatur, Dr. JOHNSON'S works were among the very few which would not be lessened by a line." JOHNSON commenced this great work in the year 1747, and ended it in 1755. When the messenger who had carried the last sheet to Miller the bookseller returned, JOHNSON asked him, “Well, what did he say?" "Sir," answered the messenger, "he said, 'Thank God, I am done with him."" "I am glad,” replied JOHN

SON with a smile, "that he thanks God for any

thing."

How nobly he did his work, the two huge folio volumes will testify to the latest ages, volumes over which the scholar can often linger for an hour or two, with rapturous pleasure. Carlyle says: "Had JOHNSON left nothing but his Dictionary, one might have traced there a great intellect, a genuine man. Looking to its clearness of definition and general solidity, honesty, insight, and successful method, it may be called the best of all dictionaries." Garrick's famous epigram was, that one Englishman had beaten forty Frenchmen in the contest for philological honours, forty being the number in the French Academy appointed to settle the language. It was looked upon as a national triumph, and still stands as the "Mount Atlas" of English literature.

In the preface, JOHNSON makes a touching and memorable allusion to the difficulties with which he had to contend. "Though no book," he says, was ever spared out of tenderness to the author, and the world is little solicitous to know whence

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proceeded the faults of that which it condemns ; yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it that the English Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academic bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow; and it may repress the triumph of malignant criticism to observe, that, if our language is not here fully displayed, I have only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto completed." Says Macaulay: "Horne Tooke, the ablest and most implacable enemy to JOHNSON'S fame, could never read these words without shedding tears."

During the progress of his gigantic work the first great sorrow of his life befell him. Mrs. Johnson, who had inspired him in his arduous undertaking with the thought that she would enjoy with him the profits and honours of his Dictionary, died. Her death seems to have put an end to the "Rambler." He erected a

tombstone, on which he placed a Latin inscription commemorating her worth and beauty. From his diary it is evident that he remembered her with peculiar affection. The world is thoroughly conversant with his peculiar prayers for her, from the day of her death until that of his own. In his diary we find this strange entry: "Easter-day, 22nd April, 1764: Thought on Tetty, poor dear Tetty, with my eyes full. Went to church."

He makes a pathetic allusion to her death at the close of his preface. "I may surely," he says, "be contented without the praise of perfection, which, if I could obtain in this gloom of solitude, what would it avail me? I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are alike empty sounds."

"It pleased God," says Boswell, "to grant him almost thirty years of life after this time; and once when he was in a placid frame of mind he was obliged to own to me that he had enjoyed happier days and had had more friends since that gloomv hour than before."