But after a little persuasion Johnson yielded, as the pension would be given to him, he was told, not for anything that he would do, but for what he had done.  “It is true,” he said afterwards, with a smile, “that I cannot now curse the House of Hanover; nor would it be decent for me to drink King James’s health in the wine that King George gives me money to pay for.  But, sir, I think that the pleasure of cursing the House of Hanover, and drinking King James’s health, are amply overbalanced by three hundred pounds a year.”

Johnson had always been indolent.  It was perhaps only poverty that had forced him to write, and now that he was comfortably provided for he became more indolent still.  He reproached himself, made good resolutions, and prayed over this fault, but still he remained slothful and idle.  He would lie abed till two o’clock, and sit up half the night talking, and an edition of Shakespeare which he had promised years before got no further on.  An edition of another man’s works often means a great deal of labor in making notes and comments.  This is especially so if hundreds of years have passed since the book was first written and the language has had time to change, and Johnson felt little inclined for this labor.  But at length he was goaded into working upon his Shakespeare by some spiteful verses on his idleness, written by a political enemy, and after long delay it appeared.

Just a little before this a young Scotsman named James Boswell got to know the great man.  He worshiped Johnson and spent as much time with him as he could.  It was a strange friendship which grew up between these two.  The great man bullied and insulted yet loved the little man, and the little man accepted all the insults gladly, happy to be allowed to be near his hero on any conditions whatever.  He treasured every word that Johnson spoke and noted his every action.  Nothing was too small or trivial for his loving observation.  He asked Johnson questions and made remarks, foolish or otherwise, in order to draw him out and make him talk, and afterwards he set down everything in a notebook.

And when Johnson was dead Boswell wrote his life.  It is one of the most wonderful lives ever written—­perhaps the most wonderful.  And when we have read it we seem to know Johnson as well as if we had lived with him.  We see and know him in all his greatness and all his littleness, in all his weakness and all his might.

It was with Boswell that Johnson made his most famous journey, his tour to Scotland.  For, like his namesake, Ben, he too visited Scotland.  But he traveled in a more comfortable manner, and his journey was a much longer one, for he went as far as the Hebrides.  It was a wonderful expedition for a man of sixty-four, especially in those days when there were no trains and little ease in the way of traveling, and when much of it had to be done on rough ponies or in open boats.

On his return Johnson wrote an account of this journey which did not altogether please some of the Scots.  But indeed, although Johnson did not love the Scots, there is little in his book at which to take offense.