y of that law of gravitation which
Newton discovered, and which was not fully received even at Cambridge
till the eighteenth century. What a real company of Abyssinians would
have been may be learned from Bruce's Travels. But Johnson, not content
with turning filthy savages, ignorant of their letters, and gorged
with raw steaks cut from living cows, into philosophers as eloquent and
enlightened as himself or his friend Burke, and into ladies as highly
accomplished as Mrs Lennox or Mrs Sheridan, transferred the whole
domestic system of England to Egypt. Into a land of harems, a land of
polygamy, a land where women are married without ever being seen, he
introduced the flirtations and jealousies of our ball-rooms. In a land
where there is boundless liberty of divorce, wedlock is described as the
indissoluble compact. "A youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought
together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home,
and dream of each other. Such," says Rasselas, "is the common process
of marriage." Such it may have been, and may still be, in London, but
assuredly not at Cairo. A writer who was guilty of such improprieties
had little right to blame the poet who made Hector quote Aristotle, and
represented Julio Romano as flourishing in the days of the oracle of
Delphi.

By such exertions as have been described, Johnson supported himself till
the year 1762. In that year a great change in his circumstances took
place. He had from a child been an enemy of the reigning dynasty. His
Jacobite prejudices had been exhibited with little disguise both in
his works and in his conversation. Even in his massy and elaborate
Dictionary, he had, with a strange want of taste and judgment, inserted
bitter and contumelious reflections on the Whig party. The excise, which
was a favourite resource of Whig financiers, he had designated as
a hateful tax. He had railed against the commissioners of excise in
language so coarse that they had seriously thought of prosecuting him.
He had with difficulty been prevented from holding up the Lord Privy
Seal by name as an example of the meaning of the word "renegade." A
pension he had defined as pay given to a state hireling to betray his
country; a pensioner as a slave of state hired by a stipend to obey a
master. It seemed unlikely that the author of these definitions would
himself be pensioned. But that was a time of wonders. George the
Third had ascended the throne; and had, in t