Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/491

480 when he was thirty-five. The Rambler, a series of more than two hundred essays, belongs to the years 1750–2. But after the appearance of the Dictionary, he wrote little. He had no longer the stimulus of necessity. In 1760, on George the Third's accession, Johnson was offered, and accepted, a pension of £300 a year. When Johnson called on Lord Bute to express his acknowledgments for this mark of royal favour, the Minister said, "It is not given to you for what you are to do, but for what you have done";—a sly glance, possibly, at Johnson's own definition of a pension in his Dictionary as "generally understood to mean pay given to a State hireling for treason to his country." The pension placed Johnson in easy circumstances. Then he was constitutionally indolent. It was only because he happened to need a small sum for an urgent purpose, that he wrote, in 1759, the most successful of his minor works, the story of Rasselas, that young prince who, with his sister, and the sage Imlac, sets forth from the happy valley in Abyssinia to survey the world, and returns to his valley, convinced that, outside of it, all is vanity. The evenings of a single week sufficed for the composition of Rasselas, which has been translated, as Mr Birkbeck Hill tells us, into ten languages. After Rasselas, his chief productions were the edition of Shakespeare in 1765 (which does not seem to have cost severe labour); the Tour in the Hebrides, published ten years later; and the Lives of the Poets, in 1779–81. The last-named work is far