ill which he could generally exert when he
chose. He pleased himself at first, as he tells us in his Preface,
"with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of
literature"; but that, of course, was where the danger lay. A man of
an equally strong love of literature and a weaker will would have
allowed himself to be swept away by the indulgence of curiosity, and
the luxury of desultory reading; but Johnson soon saw {101} that these
visions of intellectual pleasure were "the dreams of a poet doomed at
last to wake a lexicographer"; and that, if he was to do the thing he
had undertaken to do, he must set stern limits, not only to the
pleasures of study, but also to the delusive quest of unattainable
perfection, which is the constant parent of futility. He realized, as
so many men of letters have failed to realize, that "to deliberate
whenever I doubted, to inquire whenever I was ignorant, would have
protracted the undertaking without end and perhaps without much
improvement"; and instead of attempting the impossible and achieving
nothing, he was wise enough and modest enough, by attempting only the
attainable, to place himself in a position to achieve all that he
attempted.

The praise he deserved was somewhat slow in coming, as is commonly the
case with the greatest literary achievements. But though, as he sadly
says in the last words of his great Preface, most of those whom he
wished to please had sunk into the grave, and he had therefore little
to hope or fear from praise or censure, yet he was always and before
all things a human being, and only a creature above or below humanity
could have been insensible to the pleasure of the new fame, the new
authority and the new friends which his {102} Dictionary gradually
brought him. Before many years had passed the "harmless drudge," as he
himself had defined a lexicographer, had become the acknowledged
law-giver and dictator of English letters; he had gathered round him a
society of the finest minds of that generation, he had received a
public pension which secured his independence, he had begun the long
friendship which gave him a second home for more than fifteen years.
These things did not all come at once--he did not know the Thrales till
1764 or 1765--but the true turning-point in his career is the
publication of his Dictionary. He was still poor for some years after
that, and still much occupied in the production of hack-work: but he
was never