pension offered by Lord Bute, after the bitter definitions of the words "pension" and "pensioner" which he had given in the first edition of his Dictionary. The promotion did not come until, as he says, he "had one foot already in Charon's boat," for he must have been above seventy years old when he received it: but the emoluments were fairly good; he was allowed to perform the office by deputy, so that it did not interfere with his busy literary leisure at Athens, and he lived many years to enjoy it. He is said to have been a hundred years old when he died, but nothing certain is known of the date or manner of his death. It has been conjectured with much probability that in his later years he was troubled with the gout, a disorder to which he more than once makes allusion in his writings, very much in the tone of one who spoke from painful experience; and he has left two humorous mock-tragic dramatic scenes in which Gout is personified as the principal character. The torments of which she is the author to mankind are amusingly exaggerated. Philoctetes is made out to have been a sufferer, not from the bite of the snake or from the poisoned arrow, but simply from gout in his foot—enough to account for any amount of howls and lamentations, such as are put in his mouth by Sophocles; and Ulysses must have died by the same enemy, and not, as was fabled, by the poisonous spine of a sea-urchin.
It has been impossible, in the compass of this volume, even to notice all the works of this active and
