sperated at his neglect, Johnson addressed to him a
very cutting, but, it must be owned, an intemperate letter, renouncing
his protection, though, when the Dictionary was completed, Chesterfield
had ushered its appearance before the public in two complimentary papers
in the World; but the homage of the client was not to be recalled, or
even his resentment to be appeased. His great work is thus spoken of at
its first appearance, in a letter from Thomas Warton to his brother [8].
"The Dictionary is arrived; the preface is noble. There is a grammar
prefixed, and the history of the language is pretty full; but you may
plainly perceive strokes of laxity and indolence. They are two most
unwieldy volumes. I have written to him an invitation. I fear his
preface will disgust, by the expressions of his consciousness of
superiority, and of his contempt of patronage." In 1773, when he gave a
second edition, with additions and corrections, he announced in a few
prefatory lines that he had expunged some superfluities, and corrected
some faults, and here and there had scattered a remark; but that the
main fabric continued the same. "I have looked into it," he observes, in
a letter to Boswell, "very little since I wrote it, and, I think, I
found it full as often better as worse than I expected."

To trace in order of time the various changes in Johnson's place of
residence in the metropolis, if it were worth the trouble, would not be
possible. A list of them, which he gave to Boswell, amounting to
seventeen, but without the correspondent dates, is preserved by that
writer. For the sake of being near his printer, while the Dictionary was
on the anvil, he took a convenient house in Gough Square, near
Fleet-street, and fitted up one room in it as an office, where six
amanuenses were employed in transcribing for him, of whom Boswell
recounts in triumph that five were Scotchmen. In 1748, he wrote, for
Dodsley's Preceptor, the Preface, and the Vision of Theodore the Hermit,
to which Johnson has been heard to give the preference over all his other
writings. In the January of the ensuing year, appeared the Vanity of
Human Wishes, being the Tenth Satire of Juvenal imitated, which he sold
for fifteen guineas; and, in the next month, his Irene was brought on
the stage, not without a previous altercation between the poet and his
former pupil, concerning some changes which Garrick's superior knowledge
of the stage made him consider to be necessary,