The Idler was a series of 103 essays, all but twelve of them by Samuel Johnson, published in the London weekly the Universal Chronicle between 1758 and 1760. It is likely that the Chronicle was published for the sole purpose of including The Idler, since it had produced only one issue before the series began, and ceased publication when it finished. The authors besides Johnson were Thomas Warton, Bennet Langton, and Joshua Reynolds. Johnson's biographer, James Boswell, recalled that Johnson wrote some of the essays in The Idler "as hastily as an ordinary letter". He said that once while visiting Oxford, Johnson composed an essay due for publication the next day in the half-hour before the last post was collected. The essays were so popular that other publications began reprinting them without permission, prompting Johnson to insert a notice in the Chronicle threatening to do the same to his competitors' material and give the profits to London's prostitutes. When The Idler appeared in book form, one of Johnson's essays, The Vulture, was omitted, apparently because its anti-war satire was felt to be seditious. Johnson replaced it with an essay on the imprisonment of debtors. Source: Wikipedia (en)