loyalty so long as life was left to him. Miserably poor himself, he
always had about him people more miserable and more poor, who looked to
him for the very bread and water of their affliction, dependents whom
he tended not merely generously, but, what was better still,
cheerfully. Under conditions of existence that would have seemed
crushing to men of letters with a tithe of Johnson's greatness of soul,
Johnson fought his way inch by inch in the terrible career of the man
who lived by his pen, and by his pen alone. He wrote anything and
everything so long as it was honorable to write and promised to make
the world better. But it was not what Johnson wrote so much as what
Johnson did that commanded his age and commands posterity. In the
truest sense of the word, he lived beautifully. "Rasselas" and "The
Idler," "London" and "The Vanity of Human Wishes," "The Rambler" and
the "Sessions of Lilliput," and the "Lives of the Poets," and even the
famous "Dictionary," only claim remembrance because they were done by a
man who would be as interesting a study and as ennobling an example if
he had never written a line of the works that bear his signature in
every sentence of their solemn, even their portentous majesty. Johnson
had the kindest heart wrapped in a rugged hide. One of the noblest of
the many noble stories about him relates how he and a friend, whose
name of Burke was not then famous, found a poor woman of the streets
houseless, hungry, and exhausted in the streets. Burke had a room
which he could {44} offer the poor creature for a night's shelter; but
Burke could not get the woman there. Johnson had no room--his
dependents swarmed over every available space at his command--but he
had the strength of a giant, and he used it as a giant should, in
carrying the poor wretch in his arms to the roof that Burke could offer
her. Long years later, another man of letters, hungry, homeless, and
friendless, sick almost unto death, found a kind friend and gentle
nurse in a woman of the streets. In succoring De Quincey we may well
think that Anne was repaying something of the debt owed by one of her
unhappy class to two of the glories of literature and of humanity.

Slowly and surely Johnson's fame spread. The "Dictionary," massive
fruit of many vigils, reward of many supplications, made him
illustrious. It might have been dedicated to Chesterfield, if
Chesterfield had shown to the struggling author the courtesy he was