without ever being seen, he introduced the flirtations and
jealousies of our ball-rooms. In a land where there is boundless
liberty of divorce, wedlock is described as the indissoluble
compact. "A youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought
together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities,
go home, and dream of each other. Such," says Rasselas, "is the
common process of marriage." Such it may have been, and may
still be, in London, but assuredly not at Cairo. A writer who
was guilty of such improprieties had little right to blame the
poet who made Hector quote Aristotle, and represented Julio
Romano as flourishing in the days of the oracle of Delphi.

By such exertions as have been described, Johnson supported
himself till the year 1762. In that year a great change in his
circumstances took place. He had from a child been an enemy of
the reigning dynasty. His Jacobite prejudices had been exhibited
with little disguise both in his works and in his conversation.
Even in his massy and elaborate Dictionary, he had, with a
strange want of taste and judgment, inserted bitter and
contumelious reflections on the Whig party. The excise, which
was a favourite resource of Whig financiers, he had designated as
a hateful tax. He had railed against the commissioners of excise
in language so coarse that they had seriously thought of
prosecuting him. He had with difficulty been prevented from
holding up the Lord Privy Seal by name as an example of the
meaning of the word "renegade." A pension he had defined as pay
given to a state hireling to betray his country; a pensioner as a
slave of state hired by a stipend to obey a master. It seemed
unlikely that the author of these definitions would himself be
pensioned. But that was a time of wonders. George the Third had