"I
inherited," he said, "a vile melancholy from my father, which has
made me mad all my life, at least not sober," and his long
struggle with poverty helped to deepen this melancholy.
But a year or two after Rasselas was written, a great change came
in Johnson's life, which gave him comfort and security for the
rest of his days. George III had come to the throne. He thought
that he would like to do something for literature, and offered
Johnson a pension of three hundred pounds a year.
Johnson was now a man of fifty-four. He was acknowledged as the
greatest man of letters of his day, yet he was still poor. Three
hundred pounds seemed to him wealth, but he hesitated to accept
it. He was an ardent Tory and hated the House of Hanover. In
his dictionary he had called a pension "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." A pensioner he had said was "A slave of state hired by
a stipend to obey his master.
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