… Image Edward Matthew Ward, ‘Doctor Johnson in the Ante-Room of the Lord Chesterfield Waiting for an Audience’, 1748, Tate, N00430. Abstract In the absence … of the writers and critics who, for many of his contemporaries, came to exemplify the antagonism against patronage was Samuel Johnson . The most famous illustration of the decline of the system of patronage was surely Johnson’s interchange … it, ‘the Magna Carta of the modern author’. 8 Johnson writes: 8 . Alvin Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 105. Is not a patron my lord, one who looks with …