Other Jacobites were taken into favour, for which loyal service was rendered. One of the first gracious acts of George III. was to confer a pension on Dr. Johnson, of 300_l._ a year, equal now to twice that sum. Johnson had well earned it, and he was expressly told that it was conferred on him for what he had done, not for anything he was expected to do. He felt that he was not expected to be an apologist of the Stuarts, and the first act of the ex-Jacobite, after becoming a pensioner, was to write for the Rev. Dr. Kennedy’s ‘Complete System of Astronomical Chronology, unfolding the Scriptures,’ a dedication to the king who had pensioned him (and whom he had looked upon as the successor of two usurpers), which dedication is truly described as being in a strain of very courtly elegance. As to the granting of the pension by the king, Dr. Johnson, the once adherent to the Stuart, remarked, ‘The English language does not afford me terms adequate to my feelings on this occasion. I must have recourse to the French. I am _pénétré_ with his Majesty’s goodness.’ Johnson was quite sensible that it would be right to do something more for his reward. The something was done in another dedication to the Queen, of Hoole’s translation of Tasso, ‘which is so happily conceived,’ says Boswell, ‘and elegantly expressed, that I cannot but point it out to the peculiar notice of my readers.’ Johnson soon became a partisan of the Hanoverian family. Speaking of some one who with more than ordinary boldness attacked public measures and the royal family, he said, ‘I think he is safe from the law, but he is an abusive scoundrel; and instead of applying to my Lord Chief Justice to punish him, I would send half-a-dozen footmen and have him well ducked.’ A semi-noyade was now thought fitting recompense for a Stuart apologist. [Sidenote: _JOHNSON’S VIEW OF IT._] At a later period, when Johnson reviewed, in ‘The Gentleman’s Magazine,’ Tyler’s Vindication of Mary Queen of Scots, the Jacobitism quite as much as the generosity of his principles led him to say, ‘It has now been fashionable for near half a century to defame and vilify the House of Stuart.... The Stuarts have found few apologists, for the dead cannot pay for praise, and who will without reward oppose the tide of popularity?’