Two years later Garrick produced the long-delayed tragedy of _Irene_. It is not a great drama, as Johnson well knew, at least in his later years. There is a story of his being told that a certain Mr. Pot called it "the finest tragedy of modern times," to which his only reply was, "If Pot says so, Pot lies." But this hardly has the genuine ring about it. Even Garrick's talent and friendship could not make _Irene_ a success, but the performance brought Johnson a little welcome profit and enabled him to sell the book to Dodsley for a hundred pounds. In the same year, 1749, a more lasting evidence of his poetic powers was given { 99} by the appearance of _The Vanity of Human Wishes_, another Juvenalian imitation, but freer and bolder than the first. From 1750 to 1752 he was writing _The Rambler_, a sort of newspaper essay which appeared every Tuesday and Friday. He wrote it almost entirely himself, and almost always at the last moment, when the printer was calling for it. No one will now wonder that it never had a large circulation as a periodical, for it usually exhibits him at his gravest, and many of the essays are scarcely distinguishable from sermons. But that age had grave tastes and few temptations to intellectual frivolity. We have seen that the idlest sort of reading Johnson could think of for a boy was "voyages and travels"; novels he does not mention, indeed there were then very few of them; plays he rather strangely ignores: newspapers, as we now know them and suffer by them, he of course could not so much as conceive. _The Rambler_ had no sixpenny magazines of triviality, no sensational halfpenny papers, to compete with it, and it pursued an even course of modest success for its two years of life. The greatest pleasure it brought Johnson was the praise of his wife, who said to him, "I thought very well of you before; but I did not imagine you could have written anything equal to this." That was just the discovery a good { 100} many people beside his wife were making about Johnson in those years: with the result that when _The Rambler_ appeared as a book, it sold well and had gone through twelve editions by the time Boswell wrote its author's life.
Three years after the cessation of _The Rambler_ and, unhappily, also three years after the death of his wife, with whom it would have been his chief happiness to share his success, the great Dictionary appeared. It may safely be said that no single Englishman has ever accomplished a literary task of such vast extent. The mere labour, one might say the mere dull drudgery, of collecting and arranging the materials of such a work is enormous. Nor could any literary labour bring with it greater temptations. Johnson's success is not more due to his learning and powers of mind than to the good sense which never failed him and the strong will which he could generally exert when he chose. He pleased himself at first, as he tells us in his Preface, "with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature"; but that, of course, was where the danger lay. A man of an equally strong love of literature and a weaker will would have allowed himself to be swept away by the indulgence of curiosity, and the luxury of desultory reading; but Johnson soon saw { 101} that these visions of intellectual pleasure were "the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer"; and that, if he was to do the thing he had undertaken to do, he must set stern limits, not only to the pleasures of study, but also to the delusive quest of unattainable perfection, which is the constant parent of futility. He realized, as so many men of letters have failed to realize, that "to deliberate whenever I doubted, to inquire whenever I was ignorant, would have protracted the undertaking without end and perhaps without much improvement"; and instead of attempting the impossible and achieving nothing, he was wise enough and modest enough, by attempting only the attainable, to place himself in a position to achieve all that he attempted.