Will no kind patron Johnson own?
Shall Johnson friendless range the town?
And every publisher refuse
The offspring of his happy Muse?
However, the "worthy, modest, and ingenious Mr Robert Dodsley had taste enough to perceive its uncommon merit, and thought it creditable to have a share in it."
Now this poem may not attract us very much to-day. Boswell, of course, thought it "one of the noblest productions in our language," but to understand it properly we need to know something of the politics of the time, especially of the Tory feeling against Sir Robert Walpole, the prime minister who said that "every man had his price"; we need to know something, too, of the poem by Juvenal, of which it is an imitation.
But a few lines are quoted here, because they bring out very clearly the state of Johnson's mind at the time.
He is a bitter opponent of the corrupt government of the day and its weak concessions to Spain:
Grant me, kind heaven, to find some happier place,
Where honesty and sense are no disgrace ...
Here let those reign, whom pensions can incite
To vote a patriot black, a courtier white;
Explain their country's dear-bought rights away,
And plead for pirates in the face of day.[3]
Title-page of The Gentleman's Magazine, March, 1738