is tender feelings even to the latest period of
his life. I have been told that he regretted much his not having gone
to visit his mother for several years, previous to her death. But he was
constantly engaged in literary labours which confined him to London; and
though he had not the comfort of seeing his aged parent, he contributed
liberally to her support.

Soon after this event, he wrote his Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia;
concerning the publication of which Sir John Hawkins guesses vaguely
and idly, instead of having taken the trouble to inform himself with
authentick precision. Not to trouble my readers with a repetition of
the Knight's reveries, I have to mention, that the late Mr. Strahan the
printer told me, that Johnson wrote it, that with the profits he might
defray the expence of his mother's funeral, and pay some little debts
which she had left. He told Sir Joshua Reynolds that he composed it in
the evenings of one week, sent it to the press in portions as it was
written, and had never since read it over. Mr. Strahan, Mr. Johnston,
and Mr. Dodsley purchased it for a hundred pounds, but afterwards paid
him twenty-five pounds more, when it came to a second edition.

Voltaire's Candide, written to refute the system of Optimism, which it
has accomplished with brilliant success, is wonderfully similar in its
plan and conduct to Johnson's Rasselas; insomuch, that I have heard
Johnson say, that if they had not been published so closely one after
the other that there was not time for imitation, it would have been in
vain to deny that the scheme of that which came latest was taken from
the other. Though the proposition illustrated by both these works was
the same, namely, that in our present state there is more evil than
good, the intention of the writers was very different. Voltaire, I am
afraid, meant only by wanton profaneness to obtain a sportive victory
over religion, and to discredit the belief of a superintending
Providence; Johnson meant, by shewing the unsatisfactory nature of
things temporal, to direct the hopes of man to things eternal. Rasselas,
as was observed to me by a very accomplished lady, may be considered as
a more enlarged and more deeply philosophical discourse in prose, upon
the interesting truth, which in his Vanity of Human Wishes he had so
successfully enforced in verse.

I would ascribe to this year the following letter to a son of one of his
early friends at Lichfield, Mr. Joseph Simpson