he course of a few months,
disgusted many of the old friends and conciliated many of the old
enemies of his house. The city was becoming mutinous. Oxford was
becoming loyal. Cavendishes and Bentincks were murmuring. Somersets and
Wyndhams were hastening to kiss hands. The head of the treasury was
now Lord Bute, who was a Tory, and could have no objection to Johnson's
Toryism. Bute wished to be thought a patron of men of letters; and
Johnson was one of the most eminent and one of the most needy men of
letters in Europe. A pension of three hundred a year was graciously
offered, and with very little hesitation accepted.

This event produced a change in Johnson's whole way of life. For the
first time since his boyhood he no longer felt the daily goad urging him
to the daily toil. He was at liberty, after thirty years of anxiety and
drudgery, to indulge his constitutional indolence, to lie in bed till
two in the afternoon, and to sit up talking till four in the morning,
without fearing either the printer's devil or the sheriff's officer.

One laborious task indeed he had bound himself to perform. He had
received large subscriptions for his promised edition of Shakspeare;
he had lived on those subscriptions during some years: and he could not
without disgrace omit to perform his part of the contract. His friends
repeatedly exhorted him to make an effort; and he repeatedly resolved
to do so. But, notwithstanding their exhortations and his resolutions,
month followed month, year followed year, and nothing was done. He
prayed fervently against his idleness; he determined, as often as he
received the sacrament, that he would no longer doze away and trifle
away his time; but the spell under which he lay resisted prayer
and sacrament. His private notes at this time are made up of
self-reproaches. "My indolence," he wrote on Easter Eve in 1764,
"has sunk into grosser sluggishness. A kind of strange oblivion has
overspread me, so that I know not what has become of the last year."
Easter 1765 came, and found him still in the same state. "My time," he
wrote, "has been unprofitably spent, and seems as a dream that has left
nothing behind. My memory grows confused, and I know not how the days
pass over me." Happily for his honour, the charm which held him captive
was at length broken by no gentle or friendly hand. He had been weak
enough to pay serious attention to a story about a ghost which haunted
a house in Cock Lane, and had actual