io6 Extracts from
��refreshment. Such signs of effeminacy as these, suited but ill with the appearance of a man, who, for his bodily strength and stature, has been compared to Polyphemus. (Page 355.)
All this while, the booksellers, who by his own confession were his best friends 1 , had their eyes upon Johnson, and re flected with some concern on what seemed to them a mis application of his talents. The furnishing magazines, reviews, and even news-papers, with literary intelligence, and the authors of books, who could not write them for themselves, with dedica tions and prefaces, they looked on as employments beneath him, who had attained to such eminence as a writer ; they, therefore, in the year 1756, found out for him such a one as seemed to afford a prospect both of amusement and profit : this was an edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works, which, by a concur rence of circumstances, was now become necessary, to answer the increasing demand of the public for the writings of that
A stranger to Johnson's character and temper would have thought, that the study of an author, whose skill in the science of human life was so deep, and whose perfections were so many and various as to be above the reach of all praise, must have been the most pleasing employment that his imagination could suggest, but it was not so : in a visit that he one rnorning made to me, I congratulated him on his being now engaged in a work that suited his genius, and that, requiring none of that severe application which his Dictionary had condemned him to, I
all the ladies ask me such imperti- Dictionary? His answer was, " I
nent questions. It is to save your- am sorry too. But it was very well,
selves trouble, Madam, and not me." The booksellers are generous liberal-
The lady was silent and went on with minded men." ' Life, i. 304.
her task.' 2 Ante, i. 415. ' The seventeenth
Boswell tells nothing of this ; it century had been satisfied with four
is probable that the number of the editions of his collected plays. In the
cups and the roughness of the answer first hundred years after his death
were increased by tradition. Ante, there were but six ; in the next fifty
ii. 76. years there were three and twenty.'
1 ' I once said to him, " I am sorry, Writers and Readers, by George
Sir, you did not get more for your Birkbeck Hill, p. 64.
doubted
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