Boswell mentions Johnson’s revisions for the poet Mary Masters, and Johnson also gave John Hawkesworth a couplet for his tragedy, Edgar and Emmeline (1761). Young and frustrated, he was understandably eager enough to view the current political situation as the direct cause of adverse personal as well as national conditions. They stopped abruptly when Johnson discovered that a poor author was engaged in the same work, for he did not want to diminish the other translator’s profits. Had he gone on to imitate another satire, it would have been hard as Hebrew.” Modern critics who compare the two poems have drawn exactly the opposite conclusion, universally praising The Vanity of Human Wishes as Johnson’s greatest poem. When Cave needed a revision of Geoffrey Walmesley’s Latin translation of John Byrom’s “Colin and Phebe” in February 1745, Johnson and Stephen Barrett alternated distiches, rapidly passing a sheet of paper between them “like a shuttlecock” across the table.
Bate has called Johnson’s characteristic procedure in many of his great writings “satire manqué,” or “satire foiled,” a process in which satiric potential dissipates through understanding and compassion. After decades of hardship, life seemed finally to be offering Johnson stability and even some comfort. In addition to the more serious and substantial “Ode on Friendship,” there are the complimentary verses “To a Young Lady on Her Birthday” and “To Miss Hickman Playing on the Spinet,” along with “On a Lady leaving her place of Abode” and “On a Lady’s Presenting a Sprig of Myrtle to a Gentleman,” the latter composed hastily to help a friend. Johnson, in contrast, uses no dialogue in his poem, for he is concerned with general human feelings on a broader scale. A natural choice was the “imitation,” a popular contemporary poetic form. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). Acutely aware of the gulf between the demands of the topic and the limits of human comprehension and ability, as a critic, particularly in the Lives of the Poets, he was generally negative about religious verse and prospects for success in it. Credited with producing the first definitive English language dictionary, a feat which took him nine years, he was also a prolific essayist and poet.

Johnson was finally more comfortable as a moralist than as a satirist. provided at no charge for educational purposes, Drury-lane Prologue Spoken by Mr. Garrick. With Mrs. Thrale, Johnson always felt free to indulge the playful side of his nature, and she especially brought out the talent that he had shown throughout his life in making impromptu verses. Finally, an epilogue written for a play acted by some young women at Lichfield presages his later theatrical pieces, while “The Young Author” prepares for the future treatment of a similar theme in one of his great verse satires.