year[1]. Mrs. Johnson, for the sake of country air, had lodgings at Hampstead, to which lie resorted occasionally, and there the greatest part, if not the whole, of this Imitation was written[2]. The fervid rapidity with which it was produced, is scarcely credible. I have heard him say, that he composed seventy lines of it in one day, without putting one of them upon paper till they were finished[3]. I remember when I once regretted to him that he had not given us more of Juvenal's Satires, he said he probably should give more, for he had them all in his head; by which I understood that he had the originals and correspondent allusions floating in his mind, which he could, when he pleased, embody and render permanent without much labour. Some of them, however, he observed were too gross for imitation.
The profits of a single poem, however excellent, appear to have been very small in the last reign, compared with what a publication of the same size has since been known to yield. I have mentioned, upon Johnson's own authority, that for his London he had only ten guineas; and now, after his fame was established, he got for his Vanity of Human Wishes but
- ↑ Sir John Hawkins, with solemn inaccuracy, represents this poem as a consequence of the indifferent reception of his tragedy. But the fact is, that the poem was published on the 9th of January and the tragedy was not acted till the 6th of the February following. Boswell. Hawkins perhaps implies what Boswell says that he represents; but if so, he implies it by denying it. Hawkins's Johnson, p. 201.
- ↑ 'I wrote,' he said, 'the first seventy lines in The Vanity of Human Wishes in the course of one morning in that small house beyond the church at Hampstead.' Works (1787), xi. 212.
- ↑ See Post under Feb. 15, 1766. That Johnson did not think that in hasty composition there is any great merit, is shewn by The Rambler, No. 169, entitled Labour necessary to excellence. There he describes 'pride and indigence as the two great hasteners of modern poems.' He continues:—'that no other method of attaining lasting praise [than multa dies et multa litura] has been yet discovered may be conjectured from the blotted manuscripts of Milton now remaining, and from the tardy emission of Pope's compositions.' He made many corrections for the later editions of his poem.
