Norfolciense, the fiction of which was that an old inscription "in monkish rhyme," inveighing against Sir Robert Walpole, had been found in Norfolk. The two works attracted the attention of Pope. He declared that their author must be deterré, and wrote to Richardson concerning him. "This is imitated by one Johnson who put in for a Public-school in Shropshire, but was disappointed. He has an infirmity of the convulsive Kind, that attacks him sometimes, so as to make Him a sad Spectacle. Mr. P. from the Merit of This Work which was all the knowledge he had of Him endeavour'd to serve Him without his own application, & wrote to my Ld. gore, but he did not succeed. Mr. Johnson published afterwards another Poem in Latin with Notes the whole very Humerous call'd the Norfolk Prophecy. "P." During the early years of the 1740's Johnson had accepted from Cave the task of reporting the Parliamentary Debates for the Gentleman's Magazine. There was not of course at that date any regular reporters' gallery nor were reports permitted. All that Johnson could do was to glean from Cave and others, who had spoken, on which side, and the gist of their arguments, and then himself compose appropriate speeches. The secret of the authorship did not come out until, some years afterwards at Foote's house, Francis, the father of Hastings's enemy, happened to praise a certain speech of Pitt, as he then still was, saying that it was "the best he had ever read." "There was nothing in Demosthenes," he added, " to equal it." A conversation sprang up about the speech, during which Johnson remained silent, until at last he interrupted. "That speech," he said, "I wrote in a garret in Exeter Street." Francis asked how that could be. Sir," said Johnson, "I wrote it in Exeter Street. I never had been in the gallery of the House of Commons but once. Cave had interest with the doorkeepers. He and the persons employed under him gained admittance; they brought away the subject of discussion, the names of the speakers, the side they took, and the order in which they rose, together with notes of the arguments advanced in the course of the debate. The whole was afterwards communicated to me, and I composed the speeches in the form which they now have in the Parliamentary Debates." The company praised the impartiality of the reports. "That is not quite true," said Johnson. "I saved appearances tolerably well, but I took care that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it." Having discovered that they really had deceived, Johnson had afterwards great remorse for having written these reports. Certainly they are excellent reading wherever the subject is one that can at all retain our interest at this distance of time. Doubtless Hawkins's criticism of them is just. He complains that "the language of them is too good and the style such as none of the persons to whom the speeches are assigned were able to discourse in." The Whig dogs were neither the first nor the last of politicians to owe to a reporter's kindness the untangling of their metaphors and the completion of their 66 sentences. At a later date Johnson returned again to a theme similar to that of London. He wrote, in imitation this time of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal, The Vanity of Human Wishes. Juvenal's Tenth Satire is hardly a satire at all in the fierce sense which the word may bear when applied to the Third. Old age had brought serenity. Between Johnson's two works there was a similar contrast, even if there had not been a similar passage of time. His mind is still afflicted with his old problem of the necessary insufficiency of pleasure. No longer, however, is he content to put himself off with the glib assumption that human nature ceases to be human nature at the boundary of the City of London. Neither in town nor in country, he now sees, is it possible for pleasure to lead to happiness. It is the nature of appetite, if it be uncontrolled by reason, always to outrun satisfaction; and, to illustrate this, Johnson selects from history appropriate examples of the Vanity of Human Wishes. The solution to the problem, he has now learnt, is to be found, not in an imaginary rural Utopia, but in the reason. A thing tasted is a thing whose taste has the next moment perished; a thing known is a thing known for ever-" a joy," as Keats would have said, "for ever." Therefore Grub Street and the Tories have brought Johnson back to the old Aristotelian conclusion. True happiness is to be found only in the knowledge and contemplation of reality-or, if you prefer, in the love of God (there can be no difference, since God alone is reality). A healthful mind, Obedient passions, and a will resigned, are the goods for which we should pray. With these celestial Wisdom calms the mind, CHAPTER III THE "RAMBLER," CHESTERFIELD, In the same year in which he wrote The Vanity of Human Wishes appeared also Johnson's tragedy, Irene. It is a fantastic performance, a tale of Greek and Turkish war. Blank verse to Johnson was merely appropriately choppedup prose. To his unmusical ear it meant nothing. He attempted it only out of a puzzled desire to conform to an unintelligible convention. It must be some of the worst that the world has ever seen. Of it the less said the better. Yet of Irene one might write, as Johnson himself wrote of Prior's Carmen Seculare, " I cannot but suspect that I might praise or censure it by caprice without danger of detection; for who can be supposed to have laboured through it?" Yet I have laboured through it, nor is there any more to be said of it than that it is as bad as a play can be. It was a failure, and I have not heard that many, either then or since, have denied that it was deservedly a failure. Johnson himself—“ the anomalous Mr. Johnson," as Aaron Hill called him after seeing a performance of Irene-with his characteristic humour and sense, did not waste time in complaining of the verdict of the public. He had no sympathy with those authors who pay themselves in pomposity for what they lack in circulation. "To a thousand evils one answer is sufficient," he wrote of Pope's Iliad. "The purpose of a writer is to be read." He accepted the test both when it favoured him and when it did not. He wrote for money, and he always realised that, if one sought to sell a certain commodity to the public, then the public had the right to decide whether it wanted to buy or not. The public was his employer, " If an architect says, 'I will build five stories,' and the man who employs him says, 'I will have only three,' the employer," he says, "is to decide." Later, when a Mr. Pot was introduced to him as one who admired Irene as " the finest tragedy of modern times," Johnson was content to answer, "If Pot says so, Pot lies." When it was re-read to him in his old age, his only comment on it was, "Sir, I thought it had been better." He had meanwhile turned his attention to a very different task. Encouraged by the promised patronage of Lord Chesterfield, he, in 1747, began to collect materials for a dictionary of the English language. It was his illusion that a language could be " fixed," and he proposed to give to the world a work in which once and for all the meaning of every English word would be authoritatively fixed. The task was one which, before it was finished, was to teach him many lessons, both about the nature of language and the nature of patrons. Meanwhile the preparation of a dictionary may be an absorbing, but it is hardly a lucrative, employment. A married man had therefore to combine it with some other work which might be the provider of his daily bread. Johnson cast about in his mind to discover a form of writing which would be popular and yet would not require study or research. The answer-it is a curious commentary on mid-eighteenth-century taste-was the Rambler. The Rambler appeared twice every week from March 20th, 1750, to March 17th, 1752. For it Johnson received two guineas a copy-not at all bad pay. It belonged to a family of which Addison's Spectator was the founder, and comparison of the two is perhaps inevitable. Yet though there is between them a similarity of form and |