e's works if they
should ask him. Johnson: "Yes, sir, and _say_ he was a dunce." My friend
seemed now not much to relish talking of this edition; it had been
arranged by the forty chief booksellers of London, and Johnson had named
his own terms for the "Lives," namely, two hundred guineas.

During this visit he put into my hands the whole series of his writings
in behalf of the Rev. Dr. William Dodd, who, having been
chaplain-in-ordinary to his majesty, and celebrated as a very popular
preacher, was this year convicted and executed for forging a bond on his
former pupil, the young Earl of Chesterfield. Johnson certainly made
extraordinary exertions to save Dodd. He wrote several petitions and
letters on the subject, and composed for the unhappy man not only his
"Speech to the Recorder of London," at the Old Bailey, when sentence of
death was about to be pronounced upon him, and "The Convict's Address to
his Unhappy Brethren," a sermon delivered by Dr. Dodd in the chapel of
Newgate, but also "Dr. Dodd's Last Solemn Declaration," which he left
with the sheriff at the place of execution.

In 1778, I arrived in London on March 18, and next day met Dr. Johnson
at his old friend's, in Dean's Yard, for Dr. Taylor was a prebendary of
Westminster. On Friday, March 2d, I found him at his own house, sitting
with Mrs. Williams, and was informed that the room allotted to me three
years previously was now appropriated to a charitable purpose, Mrs.
Desmoulins, daughter of Johnson's godfather Dr. Swinfen, and, I think,
her daughter, and a Miss Carmichael, being all lodged in it. Such was
his humanity, and such his generosity, that Mrs. Desmoulins herself told
me he allowed her half-a-guinea a week.

Unfortunately his "Seraglio," as he sometimes suffered me to call his
group of females, were perpetually jarring with one another. He thus
mentions them, together with honest Levett, in one of his letters to
Mrs. Thrale: "Williams hates everybody; Levett hates Desmoulins, and
does not love Williams--Desmoulins hates them both; Poll (Miss
Carmichael) loves none of them."

On January 20, 1779, Johnson lost his old friend Garrick, and this same
year he gave the world a luminous proof that the vigour of his mind in
all its faculties, whether memory, judgement, and imagination, was not
in the least abated, by publishing the first four volumes of his
"Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Most Eminent of the English
Poets." The remainin