(2 of 3)
State or Seat? To find the best illustrations for each word, he combed his own library, plowed through stacks of borrowed books. But he soon realized that to be a judge of correctness was no easy job. "So commonly," he noted, "but not always, we exhort to good actions, we instigate to ill we animate incite and encourage indifferently to good or bad. So we usually ascribe good but impute evil, yet neither the use of these words nor perhaps of any other in our licentious language is so established as not to be often reversed by the correctest writers." Even pronunciation sometimes stumped him. "Lord Chesterfield told me that the word great should be pronounced so as to rhyme to state; and Sir William Yonge sent me word that it should be pronounced so as to rhyme to seat . . . Now here were two men of the highest rank, the one, the best speaker in the House of Lords, the other, the best speaker in the House of Commons, differing entirely."
There were also troubles of another sort. His band of scribes were a loyal but tragic crew: one was often drunk, another eventually died of consumption, still another came close to starving to death. Meanwhile, Johnson's wife Tetty died, a semi-alcoholic, and Johnson himself was forever in need of money (he was once arrested for a £5 debt).
Furthermore, Johnson had hoped to have Lord Chesterfield as his patron, but found himself merely cooling his heels in the great man's anteroom. "Seven years, my Lord, have now passed since I waited in your outward rooms or was repulsed from your door, during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain . . . without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favor." A patron, Johnson bitterly declared in the Dictionary, is "one who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery."
Convulsions & Hottentots. Even after the Dictionary came out, his worries continued. A critic named Thomas Edwards denounced the work as "a vehicle for Jacobite and High-flying tenets" and Johnson for "crouding" it with such "monstrous words" as "adespotick, amnicolist, androtomy." "Nearly one-third of this Dictionary," added Philologist John Home Tooke, "is as much the language of the Hottentots as of the English." Years later the smug and able Noah Webster observed that confidence in the Dictionary "is the greatest injury to philology that now exists."