He thought himself happy in the character of the men with whom he had to deal. Speaking of the booksellers of Dryden’s time he says: ‘To the mercantile ruggedness of that race the delicacy of the poet was sometimes exposed.’
No discovery of importance emerges from this ancient controversy. It is very creditable to publishers that almost all the talking on the question has been done by authors. The hardship is not all on one side. Some authors are grasping and skilled in negotiation; some publishers are superstitious, and pay for a name more than a name is worth. Authors on the whole have this advantage, that they are in the habit of enjoying life, and so have a less eager anxiety for the future. Johnson could live on his pension; and the idea of writing the Lives pleased him. The two-hundred guineas may well have seemed to him an addition of luxury to his competence. An author will often take very little money for doing what he likes. A publisher must be more careful; he needs all the money he can get in order that he may do what he likes at some future day. His children may wish to be authors. The balance seems not unfair; and the relations between the two were more humane in Johnson’s time than they can ever be when authors combine in a league of mutual defence and common aggression.
Johnson made his covenant with the booksellers on Easter Eve, 1777. The Lives were finished four years later, in March, 1781. ‘I wrote them,’ he says, ‘in my usual way, dilatorily and hastily, unwilling to work, and working with vigour and haste.’ They were written, no doubt, partly at No. 8, Bolt Court, and partly in the room which was always kept for him at Mrs. Thrale’s house at
