"The English language does not afford me terms adequate to my feelings on this occasion. I must have recourse to the French. I am pénétré with his Majesty's goodness."
Twenty years later his gratitude was still fresh:
"Sir, I have never complained of the world; nor do I think that I have reason to complain. It is rather to be wondered at that I have so much. My pension is more out of the usual course of things than any instance that I have known. Here, Sir, was a man avowedly no friend to Government at the time, who got a pension without asking for it."
A few years after the publication of the Dictionary Tobias Smollett, the novelist, had referred to Johnson as "the great Cham of literature." The title was adapted from that of the fierce chiefs of the Tartars, and it suits Johnson well enough. He held the foremost place in the literary society of his day and in taverns and great men's halls alike could proclaim his opinions on literature and art, history and politics, morality and religion to men who, though "eminent in their departments," regarded it as an honour to be allowed to listen to him.
Lord Chesterfield, half in jest and half in earnest, had conferred on him the powers of a literary "dictator." The king's pension enabled Johnson to use his powers in a way of which Chesterfield had not dreamed.
Henceforward we know him not as a poet or essayist or even as "the great Lexicographer," but simply as "Doctor Johnson[10]," the talker, the traveller, the true-born Englishman.
With the exception of some political pamphlets, an account of his Scottish tour, and a series of Lives of the Poets, he wrote little of importance after 1762, comparing himself to a soldier who has fought a good many campaigns and is not to be blamed for retiring to ease and tranquillity.
Boswell. 'But I wonder, Sir, you have not more pleasure in writing than in not writing.'
Johnson. 'Sir, you may wonder.'