[874] That praise was slow in coming is shown by his letter to Mr. Burney, written two years and eight months after the publication of the Dictionary. 'Your praise,' he wrote, 'was welcome, not only because I believe it was sincere, but because praise has been very scarce…. Yours is the only letter of good-will that I have received; though, indeed, I am promised something of that sort from Sweden.' Post, Dec. 24, 1757.
[875] In the Edinburgh Review (No. 1, 1755)—a periodical which only lasted two years—there is a review by Adam Smith of Johnson's Dictionary. Smith admits the 'very extraordinary merit' of the author. 'The plan,' however, 'is not sufficiently grammatical.' To explain what he intends, he inserts 'an article or two from Mr. Johnson, and opposes to them the same articles, digested in the manner which we would have wished him to have followed.' He takes the words but and humour. One part of his definition of humour is curious—'something which comes upon a man by fits, which he can neither command nor restrain, and which is not perfectly consistent with true politeness.' This essay has not, I believe, been reprinted.
[876] She died in March 1752; the Dictionary was published in April 1755.
[877] In the Preface he writes (Works, v. 49):—'Much of my life has been lost under the pressures of disease; much has been trifled away; and much has always been spent in provision for the day that was passing over me.' In his fine Latin poem [Greek: Inothi seauton] 'he has left,' says Mr. Murphy (Life, p. 82), 'a picture of himself drawn with as much truth, and as firm a hand, as can be seen in the portraits of Hogarth or Sir Joshua Reynolds.' He wrote it after revising and enlarging his Dictionary, and he sadly asks himself what is left for him to do.
Me, pensi immunis cum jam mihi reddor, inertis
Desidiae sors dura manet, graviorque labore
Tristis et atra quies, et tardae taedia vitae.
Nascuntur curis curae, vexatque dolorum
Importuna cohors, vacuae mala somnia mentis.
Nunc clamosa juvant nocturnae gaudia mensae,
Nunc loca sola placent; frustra te, somne, recumbens,
Alme voco, impatiens noctis, metuensque diei.
Omnia percurro trepidus, circum omnia lustro,
Si qua usquam pateat melioris semita vitae,
Nec quid agam invenio….
Quid faciam? tenebrisne pigram damnare senectam
Restat? an accingar studiis gravioribus audax?
Aut, hoc si nimium est, tandem nova lexica poscam?
Johnson's Works, i. 164.
[878] A few weeks before his wife's death he wrote in The Rambler (No. 196):—'The miseries of life would be increased beyond all human power of endurance, if we were to enter the world with the same opinions as we carry from it.' He would, I think, scarcely have expressed himself so strongly towards his end. Though, as Dr. Maxwell records, in his Collectanea (post, 1770), 'he often used to quote with great pathos those fine lines of Virgil:—
'Optima quaeque dies miseris mortalibus aevi
Prima fugit, &c.'
yet he owned, and the pages of Boswell amply testify, that it was in the latter period of his life that he had his happiest days.
[879] Macbeth, Act ii. sc. 3.