L500 a year upon Johnson.  Johnson replied that if the first peer of the realm made such an offer, he would show him the way downstairs.  Hawkins is startled at this insolence, and at Johnson’s uniform assertion that an offer of money was an insult.  We cannot tell what was the history of the L10; but Johnson, in spite of Hawkins’s righteous indignation, was in fact too proud to be a beggar, and owed to his pride his escape from the fate of Savage.

The appearance of the Dictionary placed Johnson in the position described soon afterwards by Smollett.  He was henceforth “the great Cham of Literature”—­a monarch sitting in the chair previously occupied by his namesake, Ben, by Dryden, and by Pope; but which has since that time been vacant.  The world of literature has become too large for such authority.  Complaints were not seldom uttered at the time.  Goldsmith has urged that Boswell wished to make a monarchy of what ought to be a republic.  Goldsmith, who would have been the last man to find serious fault with the dictator, thought the dictatorship objectionable.  Some time indeed was still to elapse before we can say that Johnson was firmly seated on the throne; but the Dictionary and the Rambler had given him a position not altogether easy to appreciate, now that the Dictionary has been superseded and the Rambler gone out of fashion.  His name was the highest at this time (1755) in the ranks of pure literature.  The fame of Warburton possibly bulked larger for the moment, and one of his flatterers was comparing him to the Colossus which bestrides the petty world of contemporaries.  But Warburton had subsided into episcopal repose, and literature had been for him a stepping-stone rather than an ultimate aim.  Hume had written works of far more enduring influence than Johnson; but they were little read though generally abused, and scarcely belong to the purely literary history.  The first volume of his History of England had appeared (1754), but had not succeeded.  The second was just coming out.  Richardson was still giving laws to his little seraglio of adoring women; Fielding had died (1754), worn out by labour and dissipation; Smollett was active in the literary trade, but not in such a way as to increase his own dignity or that of his employment; Gray was slowly writing a few lines of exquisite verse in his retirement at Cambridge; two young Irish adventurers, Burke and Goldsmith, were just coming to London to try their fortune; Adam Smith made his first experiment as an author by reviewing the Dictionary in the Edinburgh Review; Robertson had not yet appeared as a historian; Gibbon was at Lausanne repenting of his old brief lapse into Catholicism as an act of undergraduate’s folly; and Cowper, after three years of “giggling and making giggle” with Thurlow in an attorney’s office, was now entered at the Temple and amusing himself at times with literature in company with such small men of letters as Colman, Bonnell Thornton, and Lloyd.  It was a slack tide of literature; the generation of Pope had passed away and left no successors, and no writer of the time could be put in competition with the giant now known as “Dictionary Johnson.”