When Boswell first met him at the age of twenty-two, Johnson was fifty-four.

His long period of poverty and struggle was past.

His _Dictionary_ and all his works except the _Lives of the Poets_ were behind him; a pension from the Crown had established him in security for his remaining years; his position was universally acknowledged.

So that though the portrait in the _Life_ is a full-length study of Johnson the conversationalist and literary dictator, the proportion it preserves is faulty and its study of the early years--the years of poverty, of the _Vanity of Human Wishes_ and _London_, of _Rasselas_, which he wrote to pay the expenses of his mother's funeral, is slight.
It was, however, out of the bitterness and struggle of these early years that the strength and sincerity of character which carried Johnson surely and tranquilly through the time of his triumph were derived.

From the beginning he made no compromise with the world and no concession to fashion.