We'll do a round to see if people can make a short verbal case for their recommendations on the Forum, and adjourn when we're done so that people can read them at length. If, as seems likely from what's there at 2:15, you haven't found something and posted on it, you're invited to do that this afternoon; if you posted but didn't have a scholarly/critical reference for what you posted, you can find one and post that. Do it by 6:00, so that others can read and respond to it.

To prepare for some decisions on Monday, everyone should respond -- with questions, expansions, agreements, references to the work of others -- to at least three of the recommendations on the forum. And do this by the end of the weekend (Sunday night), so that we have time to read the responses by class time Monday.

Reading in Johnson and the Dictionary

So many of the first postings on the exploration of Johnson forum mentioned the Dictionary that it seems to me clear that we should not miss it. Let me suggest, too, that some of the reasons it's been fascinating to students of Johnson have had to do with its context -- and especially with the way it applied a sort of final whack to the institution of patronage.

With that in mind, here are three fairly short things to read for next week:

• The beginning and end of The Plan of an English Dictionary  (read the first, skim the middle, read the end)
• The account of the relationship with Chesterfield, at the beginning of AETAT.45 of Boswell
• The Preface to the Dictionary