trade, but not in such a way as to increase his own dignity or that of
his employment; Gray was slowly writing a few lines of exquisite verse
in his retirement at Cambridge; two young Irish adventurers, Burke and
Goldsmith, were just coming to London to try their fortune; Adam Smith
made his first experiment as an author by reviewing the _Dictionary_ in
the _Edinburgh Review_; Robertson had not yet appeared as a historian;
Gibbon was at Lausanne repenting of his old brief lapse into Catholicism
as an act of undergraduate's folly; and Cowper, after three years of
"giggling and making giggle" with Thurlow in an attorney's office, was
now entered at the Temple and amusing himself at times with literature
in company with such small men of letters as Colman, Bonnell Thornton,
and Lloyd. It was a slack tide of literature; the generation of Pope had
passed away and left no successors, and no writer of the time could be
put in competition with the giant now known as "Dictionary Johnson."

When the last sheet of the _Dictionary_ had been carried to the
publisher, Millar, Johnson asked the messenger, "What did he say?"
"Sir," said the messenger, "he said, 'Thank God I have done with him.'"
"I am glad," replied Johnson, "that he thanks God for anything."
Thankfulness for relief from seven years' toil seems to have been
Johnson's predominant feeling: and he was not anxious for a time to take
any new labours upon his shoulders. Some years passed which have left
few traces either upon his personal or his literary history. He
contributed a good many reviews in 1756-7 to the _Literary Magazine_,
one of which, a review of Soame Jenyns, is amongst his best
performances. To a weekly paper he contributed for two years, from
April, 1758, to April, 1760, a set of essays called the _Idler_, on the
old _Rambler_ plan. He did some small literary cobbler's work,
receiving a guinea for a prospectus to a newspaper and ten pounds for
correcting a volume of poetry. He had advertised in 1756 a new edition