once on the edition. He originally promised that it should be published in December, 1757. When December came, he mentioned March, 1758, as the date of publication. In March he said that he should publish before summer. On June 27 of the same year Dr. Grainger wrote to Percy, ‘I have several times called on Johnson to pay him part of your subscription. I say, part, because he never thinks of working, if he has a couple of guineas in his pocket; but if you notwithstanding order me, the whole shall be given him at once.’ Perhaps it was after one of these calls that Johnson, stimulated to unusual effort, wrote to Thomas Warton, on June 1, 1758, ‘Have you any more notes on Shakespeare? I shall be glad of them.’ Five years later a young bookseller waited on him with a subscription, and modestly asked that the subscriber’s name should be inserted in the printed list. ‘I shall print no list of subscribers;’ said Johnson, with great abruptness: then, more complacently, ‘Sir, I have two very cogent reasons for not printing any list of subscribers;—one, that I have lost all the names,—the other, that I have spent all the money.’ This magnanimous confession almost bears out the charge brought against him by Churchill in his satire, The Ghost, published in the spring of 1762:—
He for subscribers baits his hook,
And takes their cash; but where’s the book?
No matter where; wise fear, we know,
Forbids the robbing of a foe;
But what, to serve our private ends,
Forbids the cheating of our friends?
There was no evidence that Johnson was in any way perturbed by Churchill’s attack, yet it was the means
