Johnson, being an honest man, had some qualms. In the two previous reigns he had been bitterly opposed to the government and had not hesitated to say so. Moreover, he had defined _Pension_ in his Dictionary as "pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country[8]"! Could he honestly take the money? He went off at once to consult Sir Joshua Reynolds: "Sir Joshua answered that ... there could be no objection to his receiving from the King a reward for literary merit; and that certainly the definitions in his _Dictionary_ were not applicable to him. Johnson, it should seem, was satisfied, for he did not call again till he had accepted the pension, and had waited on Lord Bute[9] to thank him. He then told Sir Joshua that Lord Bute said to him expressly, 'It is not given you for anything you are to do, but for what you have done.' His Lordship, he said, behaved in the handsomest manner. He repeated the words twice, that he might be sure Johnson heard them, and thus set his mind perfectly at ease." No one was ever more fervently grateful than Johnson, who at the age of 53, had never known a day's good health or a year's steady income. He, who had compiled the Dictionary, declared: "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." Twenty years later his gratitude was still fresh: "Sir, I have never complained of the world; nor do I think that I have reason to complain. It is rather to be wondered at that I have so much. My pension is more out of the usual course of things than any instance that I have known. Here, Sir, was a man avowedly no friend to Government at the time, who got a pension without asking for it." A few years after the publication of the Dictionary Tobias Smollett, the novelist, had referred to Johnson as "the great Cham of literature." The title was adapted from that of the fierce chiefs of the Tartars, and it suits Johnson well enough. He held the foremost place in the literary society of his day and in taverns and great men's halls alike could proclaim his opinions on literature and art, history and politics, morality and religion to men who, though "eminent in their departments," regarded it as an honour to be allowed to listen to him. Lord Chesterfield, half in jest and half in earnest, had conferred on him the powers of a literary "dictator." The king's pension enabled Johnson to use his powers in a way of which Chesterfield had not dreamed. Henceforward we know him not as a poet or essayist or even as "the great Lexicographer," but simply as "Doctor Johnson[10]," the talker, the traveller, the true-born Englishman.