endship could not make _Irene_
a success, but the performance brought Johnson a little welcome profit
and enabled him to sell the book to Dodsley for a hundred pounds. In
the same year, 1749, a more lasting evidence of his poetic powers was
given {99} by the appearance of _The Vanity of Human Wishes_, another
Juvenalian imitation, but freer and bolder than the first. From 1750
to 1752 he was writing _The Rambler_, a sort of newspaper essay which
appeared every Tuesday and Friday. He wrote it almost entirely
himself, and almost always at the last moment, when the printer was
calling for it. No one will now wonder that it never had a large
circulation as a periodical, for it usually exhibits him at his
gravest, and many of the essays are scarcely distinguishable from
sermons. But that age had grave tastes and few temptations to
intellectual frivolity. We have seen that the idlest sort of reading
Johnson could think of for a boy was "voyages and travels"; novels he
does not mention, indeed there were then very few of them; plays he
rather strangely ignores: newspapers, as we now know them and suffer by
them, he of course could not so much as conceive. _The Rambler_ had no
sixpenny magazines of triviality, no sensational halfpenny papers, to
compete with it, and it pursued an even course of modest success for
its two years of life. The greatest pleasure it brought Johnson was
the praise of his wife, who said to him, "I thought very well of you
before; but I did not imagine you could have written anything equal to
this." That was just the discovery a good {100} many people beside his
wife were making about Johnson in those years: with the result that
when _The Rambler_ appeared as a book, it sold well and had gone
through twelve editions by the time Boswell wrote its author's life.

Three years after the cessation of _The Rambler_ and, unhappily, also
three years after the death of his wife, with whom it would have been
his chief happiness to share his success, the great Dictionary
appeared. It may safely be said that no single Englishman has ever
accomplished a literary task of such vast extent. The mere labour, one
might say the mere dull drudgery, of collecting and arranging the
materials of such a work is enormous. Nor could any literary labour
bring with it greater temptations. Johnson's success is not more due
to his learning and powers of mind than to the good sense which never
failed him and the strong w