Born in 1709, died in 1784; son of a bookseller; educated at
Oxford, where he made a translation into Latin of Pope's
"Messiah"; established a school near Lichfield in 1736,
which soon failed; among its pupils David Garrick, with whom
he went to London in 1737; issued the plan of his
"Dictionary" in 1747, and published it in two volumes in
1755; published "The Vanity of Human Wishes" in 1749;
started _The Rambler_, a periodical, in 1750; writing nearly
the whole of it; wrote "Rasselas" in 1759; went to Scotland
with Boswell in 1773; published an edition of Shakespeare in
1765.
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