adventurer. He set out with a few guineas, three acts of the
tragedy of Irene in manuscript, and two or three letters of
introduction from his friend Walmesley.

Never, since literature became a calling in England, had it been
a less gainful calling than at the time when Johnson took up his
residence in London. In the preceding generation a writer of
eminent merit was sure to be munificently rewarded by the
government. The least that he could expect was a pension or a
sinecure place; and, if he showed any aptitude for politics, he
might hope to be a member of parliament, a lord of the treasury,
an ambassador, a secretary of state. It would be easy, on the
other hand, to name several writers of the nineteenth century of
whom the least successful has received forty thousand pounds from
the booksellers. But Johnson entered on his vocation in the most
dreary part of the dreary interval which separated two ages of
prosperity. Literature had ceased to flourish under the
patronage of the great, and had not begun to flourish under the
patronage of the public. One man of letters, indeed, Pope, had
acquired by his pen what was then considered as a handsome
fortune, and lived on a footing of equality with nobles and
ministers of state. But this was a solitary exception. Even an
author whose reputation was established, and whose works were
popular, such an author as Thomson, whose Seasons were in every
library, such an author as Fielding, whose Pasquin had had a
greater run than any drama since The Beggar's Opera, was
sometimes glad to obtain, by pawning his best coat, the means of
dining on tripe at a cookshop underground, where he could wipe
his hands, after his greasy meal, on the back of a Newfoundland
dog. It is easy, therefore, to imagine what humiliations and