32 JOHNSON. 



matters perfectly level to his companion's, and quite as 

 much as he could bear. 



Johnson was now in his fifty-fourth year, and had 

 attained a very high, if not the highest station among 

 the literary men of his age and country. Goldsmith had 

 not yet reached the eminence which he afterwards at- 

 tained. Burke as a man of letters was but little known. 

 Gibbon had not appeared. Hume and Robertson be- 

 longed to another part of the island ; and Johnson had 

 not only distinguished himself both as a poet and a prose 

 writer, but he had conferred upon English literature the 

 important benefit of the first even tolerably good diction- 

 ary of the language, and one the general merit of which 

 may be inferred from the fact, that after a lapse of nearly 

 a century, filled with the monuments of literary labour 

 incalculably multiplied in all directions, no similar work 

 has superseded it. The struggle for subsistence in which 

 he had lived so long, and which he had so long nobly 

 maintained without stooping to any degrading acts, very 

 little even to the resource now so invariably resorted to 

 by literary men, the occupations of party, either in 

 Church or State, had continued during five-and-twenty 

 years with but little intermission, and when long past 

 the middle age, and beginning to feel the effects of time 

 upon his powers of exertion, a proposal was made without 

 his solicitation, or even knowledge, by Mr. Wedderburn, 

 then a rising man at the bar, (afterwards Lord Lough- 

 borough,) to the Prime Minister, Lord Bute, who received 

 it favourably, and acted upon it promptly. A pension 

 of three hundred a year was granted to him, and it was 

 granted without the least reference to political considera- 

 tions the Minister declaring deliberately, that no ser- 



