Note 481 — THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D. (continued 3)

'He had settled on his eldest son,' says Dr. Rogers (Boswelliana, p. 129), 'the ancestral estate, with an unencumbered rental of £l,600 a year.' That the rental, whatever it was, was not unencumbered is shewn by the passage from Johnson's letter, post, p. 155, note 4. Boswell wrote to Malone in 1791 (Croker's Boswell, p. 828):—'The clear money on which I can reckon out of my estate is scarcely £900 a year.'