Abstract
Samuel Johnson wrote what he called a little story book-i.e., The History of Rasselas-while his mother lay dying; and it is easy to read the author's life into the work.' Near the end of the tale, an old man says that praise is an empty sound to him: I have neither mother to be delighted with the reputation of her son, nor wife to partake the honours of her husband (45, 195).2 And we remember that Johnson's wife died seven years before the composition of Rasselas, even as we hear in our minds the last sentences of the preface to Johnson's Dictionary:
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