This great work at once became popular.There was, indeed, much just and much unjust censure: but even those who were loudest in blame were attracted by the book in spite of themselves.Malone computed the gains of the publishers at five or six thousand pounds.But the writer was very poorly remunerated.Intending at first to write very short prefaces, he had stipulated for only two hundred guineas.The booksellers, when they saw how far his performance had surpassed his promise, added only another hundred.Indeed, Johnson, though he did not despise, or affect to despise, money, and though his strong sense and long experience ought to have qualified him to protect his own interests, seems to have been singularly unskilful and unlucky in his literary bargains.He was generally reputed the first English writer of his time.Yet several writers of his time sold their copyrights for sums such as he never ventured to ask.To give a single instance, Robertson received four thousand five hundred pounds for the History of Charles V.; and it is no disrespect to the memory of Robertson to say that the History of Charles V.is both a less valuable and a less amusing book than the Lives of the Poets.
Johnson was now in his seventy-second year.The infirmities of age were coming fast upon him.That inevitable event of which he never thought without horror was brought near to him; and his whole life was darkened by the shadow of death.He had often to pay the cruel price of longevity.Every year he lost what could never be replaced.The strange dependents to whom he had given shelter, and to whom, in spite of their faults, he was strongly attached by habit, dropped off one by one; and, in the silence of his home, he regretted even the noise of their scolding matches.
The kind and generous Thrale was no more; and it would have been well if his wife had been laid beside him.But she survived to be the laughing-stock of those who had envied her, and to draw from the eyes of the old man who had loved her beyond anything in the world tears far more bitter than he would have shed over her grave.With some estimable and many agreeable qualities, she was not made to be independent.The control of a mind more steadfast than her own was necessary to her respectability.While she was restrained by her husband, a man of sense and firmness, indulgent to her taste in trifles, but always the undisputed master of his house, her worst offences had been impertinent jokes, white lies, and short fits of pettishness ending in sunny good humour.But he was gone; and she was left an opulent widow of forty, with strong sensibility, volatile fancy, and slender judgment.She soon fell in love with a music-master from Brescia, in whom nobody but herself could discover anything to admire.Her pride, and perhaps some better feelings, struggled hard against this degrading passion.But the struggle irritated her nerves, soured her temper, and at length endangered her health.Conscious that her choice was one which Johnson could not approve, she became desirous to escape from his inspection.Her manner towards him changed.She was sometimes cold and sometimes petulant.She did not conceal her joy when he left Streatham; she never pressed him to return; and, if he came unbidden, she received him in a manner which convinced him that he was no longer a welcome guest.He took the very intelligible hints which she gave.He read, for the last time, a chapter of the Greek testament in the library which had been formed by himself.In a solemn and tender prayer he commended the house and its inmates to the Divine protection, and, with emotions which choked his voice and convulsed his powerful frame, left for ever that beloved home for the gloomy and desolate house behind Fleet Street, where the few and evil days which still remained to him were to run out.Here, in June 1783, he had a paralytic stroke, from which, however, he recovered, and which does not appear to have at all impaired his intellectual faculties.But other maladies came thick upon him.