his Dictionary Johnson had contemptuously defined a pension thus: 'An
allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England, it is
generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to
his country.' This was embarrassing, but Johnson's friends rightly
persuaded him to accept the pension, which he, at least, had certainly
earned by services to society very far from treasonable. However, with the
removal of financial pressure his natural indolence, increased by the
strain of hardships and long-continued over-exertion, asserted itself in
spite of his self-reproaches and frequent vows of amendment. Henceforth he
wrote comparatively little but gave expression to his ideas in
conversation, where his genius always showed most brilliantly. At the
tavern meetings of 'The Club' (commonly referred to as 'The Literary
Club'), of which Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Goldsmith, Gibbon, and others,
were members, he reigned unquestioned conversational monarch. Here or in
other taverns with fewer friends he spent most of his nights, talking and
drinking incredible quantities of tea, and going home in the small hours to
lie abed until noon.

But occasionally even yet he aroused himself to effort. In 1765 appeared
his long-promised edition of Shakspere. It displays in places much of the
sound sense which is one of Johnson's most distinguishing merits, as in the
terse exposure of the fallacies of the pseudo-classic theory of the three
dramatic unities, and it made some interpretative contributions; but as a
whole it was carelessly and slightly done. Johnson's last important
production, his most important really literary work, was a series of 'Lives
of the English Poets' from the middle of the seventeenth century, which he
wrote for a publishers' collection of their works. The selection of poets
was badly made by the publishers, so that many of the lives deal with very
minor versifiers. Further, Johnson's indolence and prejudices are here
again evident; often when he did not know the facts he did not take the