might he write to
Mrs. Thrale as he did in October 1777: "I cannot but think on your
kindness and my master's. Life has upon the whole fallen short, very
short, of my early expectation; but the acquisition of such a
friendship, at an age when new friendships are seldom acquired, is
something better than the general course of things gives man a right to
expect. I think on it with great delight. I am not very apt to be
delighted."

Johnson had now become a comparatively prosperous man, and the lives of
the prosperous have a way of producing little to record. He received
many honours and compliments of different sorts. Dublin University
made him LL.D. in 1765, he had his well-known interview with George III
in 1767, the Royal Academy appointed him their Professor in Ancient
Literature in 1769, and in 1775 he received the honorary degree of
D.C.L. from the University of Oxford. But the only events {107} of any
special importance in the last twenty years of his life were the
publication of his _Shakespeare_ in 1765, his journey in Scotland with
Boswell in 1773, and the writing of his last and most popular book,
_The Lives of the Poets_. This he undertook in 1777 and completed in
1781. Its easier style, pleasant digressions, and occasional bits of
autobiography, represent the change that had come over Johnson's life.
He was now a man at ease and wrote like one. For the note of
disappointed youthful ambition which is only half concealed in the
earlier works it substitutes an old man's kindliness of retrospect.
Matters of less importance in these years were the publication of his
_Journey to the Western Islands_, of the _Prologue_ to Goldsmith's
_Good-Natured Man_ and of his political pamphlets, _The False Alarm_,
_Falkland's Islands_, _The Patriot_, and _Taxation no Tyranny_. But
none of these things except the _Lives of the Poets_ occupied much of
his time, and his principal occupation in his old age was talking to
his friends. He travelled a good deal, often visiting Oxford, his old
home at Lichfield, and his friend Taylor's house in Derbyshire. In
1775 he went to France with the Thrales, and even in his last year was
planning a tour to Italy. But by that time the motive was rather
health than pleasure. He had a {108} paralytic stroke in 1783 and lost
his powers of speech for some days. One of the doctors who attended
him was Dr. Heberden, who had cured Cowper of a still graver illness
twenty years earlier.