find him generously allowing the young couple 200 pounds a year, which no doubt went some way towards maintaining them. Burke, who was now in his twenty-eighth year, seems to have given up all notion of the law. In 1758 he wrote for Dodsley the first volume of the _Annual Register_, a melancholy series which continues to this day. For doing this he got 100 pounds. Burke was by this time a well-known figure in London literary society, and was busy making for himself a huge private reputation. The Christmas Day of 1758 witnessed a singular scene at the dinner table of David Garrick. Dr. Johnson, then in full vigour of his mind, and with the all-dreaded weapons of his dialectics kept burnished by daily use, was flatly contradicted by a fellow-guest some twenty years his junior, and, what is more, submitted to it without a murmur. One of the diners, Arthur Murphy, was so struck by this occurrence, unique in his long experience of the Doctor, that on returning home he recorded the fact in his journal, but ventured no explanation of it. It can only be accounted for--so at least I venture to think--by the combined effect of four wholly independent circumstances: _First_, the day was Christmas Day, a day of peace and goodwill, and our beloved Doctor was amongst the sincerest, though most argumentative, of Christians, and a great observer of days. _Second_, the house was David Garrick's, and consequently we may be certain that the dinner had been a superlatively good one; and has not Boswell placed on record Johnson's opinion of the man who professed to be indifferent about his dinner? _Third_, the subject under discussion was India, about which Johnson knew he knew next to nothing. And _fourth_, the offender was Edmund Burke, whom Johnson loved from the first day he set eyes upon him to their last sad parting by the waters of death. In 1761 that shrewd old gossip, Horace Walpole, met Burke for the first time at dinner, and remarks of him in a letter to George Montague: 'I dined at Hamilton's yesterday; there were Garrick, and young Mr. Burke, who wrote a book in the style of Lord Bolingbroke, that was much admired. He is a sensible man, but has not worn off his authorism yet, and thinks there is nothing so charming as writers, and to be one. He will know better one of these days.' But great as were Burke's literary powers, and passionate as was his fondness for letters and for literary society, he never seems to have felt that the main burden of his life lay in that direction. He looked to the public service, and this though he always believed that the pen of a great writer was a more powerful and glorious weapon than any to be found in the armoury of politics. This faith of his comes out sometimes queerly enough. For example, when Dr. Robertson in 1777 sent Burke his cheerful _History of America_, in quarto volumes, Burke, in the most perfect good faith, closes a long letter of thanks thus:--