In February 1788 we hear of his having yet seven years of the life to write. By January 1789 he had finished the introduction and the dedication to Sir Joshua Reynolds, both of which had appeared difficult, but he was confident they had been well done. To excite the interest in his coming book, or as Mr Leslie Stephen thinks, to secure copyright, he published in 1790 two quarto parts at half a guinea each--the letter to Chesterfield and the conversation of Johnson with the king. By December he has had additional matter sent him from Warren Hastings, and he hoped to be out on 8th March, but the January of the new year found him with still two hundred pages of copy, and the death not yet written. Yet many a time, as he writes Temple, had he thought of giving it up. To add to his troubles, he had indulged in landed speculations, paying L2500 for the estate of a younger branch; he had been lending money to a cousin, and if he could but raise a thousand pounds on the strength of his book, he should be inclined to hold on, or 'game with it,' as Sir Joshua said. Neither Reynolds nor Malone, however, took the hint; and at the latter's door he cast longing looks as he passed. He tells him he had been in the chair at the club, with Fox 'quoting Homer and Fielding to the astonishment of Jo. Warton.' He had bought a lottery ticket with the hopes of the prize of L5000, but--blank! The advance he needed was got elsewhere, and the property in his book saved. April finds him correcting the last sheet. He feared the result: 'I may get no profit, the public may be disappointed, I may make enemies, even have quarrels. But the very reverse of all this may happen.' Then on the 19th he writes to Dempster: 'my _magnum opus_, in two volumes quarto, is to be published on Monday, 16th May'--by a lucky chance it was the anniversary of the red day in Boswell's calendar, his meeting with Johnson eight and twenty years before! 'When it is fairly launched, I mean to stick close to Westminster Hall, and it will be truly kind if you recommend me appeals or causes of any sort.'