again obscure and was soon to be famous. Within a year after
the appearance of the Dictionary he had issued his _Proposals for an
Edition of Shakespeare_, the second in time and perhaps in importance
of his three great works. His new position secured him a good number
of subscribers and he intended to publish it the next year, 1757; but
the interruptions of indolence, business and pleasure, as he himself
says of Pope, usually disappoint the sanguine expectations of authors,
and the book did not in fact appear till 1765.

Neither Shakespeare nor idleness had {103} occupied the whole of the
intervening years. From 1758 to 1760 he produced a weekly paper called
_The Idler_, of the same character as _The Rambler_. In 1759 he wrote
his once famous story _Rasselas_ to pay the expenses of his mother's
funeral. It was written in the evenings of a single week. Good judges
thought that, if he had known how to make a bargain, he ought to have
received as much as four hundred pounds for this book, which was
translated into most of the European languages; but he did not in fact
receive more than a hundred pounds for the first and twenty-five for
the second edition. By this time he could visit Oxford, from which
University he had received the degree of M.A. when his Dictionary was
on the eve of publication: and another sign of the position he was
beginning to occupy is that we find Smollet writing of him in 1759 as
the "great Cham of literature." More substantial evidences followed in
1762 when George III was advised by Bute to grant him a pension of 300
pounds a year, an income which must have seemed boundless affluence to
a man who had never known a time when five pounds was not an important
sum to him.

Next year came the event which was even more important to his fame than
the receipt of the pension was to his comfort. In 1763 {104} he met
Boswell for the first time. Fortune now began to smile upon him in
good earnest and evidences of his established position and prosperity
follow each other in rapid succession. "The Club" (its proper and
still existing name, though Boswell occasionally calls it The Literary
Club) was founded in 1764 and provided him for the rest of his life
with an ideal theatre for the display of his amazing powers of talk,
though it appears that he was not in his later years a very regular
attendant. The next year, 1765, was probably the year in which he
first met Thrale, the great brewer, and his