...amore, Johnson's answer was : " It is all work, and my inducement to it is not love or desire of fame, but the want of money, which is the only motive to writing that I know of,"1 and Johnson was thinking of himself when he wrote of Dryden : " If the excellence of his works...

...Lives of the poets for much the same reason as he compiled his Dictionary and edited Shakespeare (' the want of money, which is the only motive to writing that I know of)?2 It may have been Milton's intention in writing Paradise lost either devoutly 'to justify the...

...as I did upon the Dictionary: it is all work, and my inducement to it is not love or desire of fame, but the want of money, which is the only motive to writing that I know of" (quoted in Boswell 1: 318n.5). The question of what induced Johnson to edit Shakespeare shades into...

...as I did upon the Dictionary: it is all work, and my inducement to it is not love or desire of fame, but the want of money, which is the only motive to writing that I know of.'"49 In that case the subscribers had made a bad mistake by paying him in advance. But his lack...

...as I did upon the Dictionary, it is all work, and my inducement to it is not love or desire of fame, but the want of money, which is the only motive to writing that I know of.' This gruff denial of interest in the prestige of the subject was almost certainly untrue. Want of money,...