In the meantime his uncle had died; and he found himself, on his arrival in London, so destitute even of a friend to whom he could refer for a recommendation, that he with difficulty obtained first the place of an usher to a school, and afterwards that of assistant in the laboratory of a chemist. At last, meeting with Doctor Sleigh, formerly his fellow-student at Edinburgh, he was enabled, by the kindness of this worthy physician, who appears in so amiable a light as the patron of Barry, in the Memoirs of that painter, to avail himself more effectually of his knowledge in medicine, and to earn a subsistence, however scanty, by the practice of that art. The Bankside in Southwark, and the Temple, or its vicinity, were successively the places where he fixed his residence. To his professional gains he soon added the emoluments arising from his exertions as an author. In 1758, he took a share in the conduct of the literary journal called the Monthly Review: and for the space of seven or eight months, while the employment lasted, lodged in the house of Mr. Griffiths, the proprietor of it. The next year he contributed several papers to the Lady's Magazine, and to the Bee, a collection of essays, and published his Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning, in which he speaks of the Monthly Review in terms not very respectful. There is, I doubt, in this little essay more display than reality of erudition. It would not be easy to say where he had discovered "that Dante was persecuted by the critics as long as he lived." The complaints he made of the hard fate of authors, and his censure of odes and of blank verse, were well calculated to conciliate the good will, and to excite the sympathy of Johnson, with whom he soon became intimate.