Johnson has frequently blamed Shakspeare for neglecting the proprieties of time and place, and for ascribing to one age or nation the manners and opinions of another.Yet Shakspeare has not sinned in this way more grievously than Johnson.Rasselas and Imlac, Nekayah and Pekuah, are evidently meant to be Abyssinians of the eighteenth century: for the Europe which Imlac describes is the Europe of the eighteenth century; and the inmates of the Happy Valley talk familiarly 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 the course of a few months, disgusted many of the old friends and conciliated many of the old enemies of his house.The city was becoming mutinous.Oxford was becoming loyal.Cavendishes and Bentincks were murmuring.
Somersets and Wyndhams were hastening to kiss hands.The head of the treasury was now Lord Bute, who was a Tory, and could have no objection to Johnson's Toryism.Bute wished to be thought a patron of men of letters; and Johnson was one of the most eminent and one of the most needy men of letters in Europe.A pension of three hundred a year was graciously offered, and with very little hesitation accepted.
This event produced a change in Johnson's whole way of life.For the first time since his boyhood he no longer felt the daily goad urging him to the daily toil.He was at liberty, after thirty years of anxiety and drudgery, to indulge his constitutional indolence, to lie in bed till two in the afternoon, and to sit up talking till four in the morning, without fearing either the printer's devil or the sheriff's officer.
