in the streets and squares without the
price of a night's lodging between them. Johnson's account of {97} his
friend did not fill his pocket, but must have contributed something to
his fame as it was very favourably criticized. It was the occasion of
Reynolds first becoming acquainted with his name. He was so interested
by the book that, having taken it up while standing with his arm
leaning upon a chimney-piece, he read the whole without sitting down
and found his arm quite benumbed when he got to the end.

"Slow rises worth by poverty depressed." Johnson had now been seven
years in London, but had not yet found the way to do anything worthy of
his powers. If he had died then, only the curious and the learned
would have known his name to-day. A single satire in verse would
never, by itself, have had the force to push its way through the
ever-increasing crowd of applicants that besiege the attention of
posterity. But the next year, 1745, is the literary turning-point of
his life. Before it was over he had begun to deal with two subjects
with which much of his remaining life was occupied, and on which much
of his fame depends. He had published a pamphlet upon Shakespeare's
_Macbeth_ which won the praise of Warburton, for which Johnson always
felt and showed his gratitude ("He praised me at a time when praise was
of value to me"); and, if Boswell is right, he had begun to occupy {98}
himself with the idea of making an English Dictionary. Thus, poor and
obscure as he was in those years, sick with deferred hope as he must
have been, he had in fact laid the foundation-stones of the authority
and fame he was soon to enjoy as the Editor of Shakespeare and above
all as "Dictionary Johnson." Now at last he began to do work worthier
of his powers. The "_Plan for a Dictionary of the English Language_"
was published in 1747 and in the same year he wrote the admirable
_Prologue_ for the opening of Drury Lane Theatre, of which his pupil,
David Garrick, more fortunate than the master with whom he had come to
London, was now become manager.

Two years later Garrick produced the long-delayed tragedy of _Irene_.
It is not a great drama, as Johnson well knew, at least in his later
years. There is a story of his being told that a certain Mr. Pot
called it "the finest tragedy of modern times," to which his only reply
was, "If Pot says so, Pot lies." But this hardly has the genuine ring
about it. Even Garrick's talent and fri