st engaging feature of sound
religion, a cheerful spirit. The only assistance he received was from
Richardson, Mrs. Chapone, Miss Talbot, and Mrs. Carter, the first of
whom contributed the 97th number; the second, four billets in the 10th;
the next, the 30th; and the last, the 44th and 100th numbers.

Three days after the completion of the Rambler (March 17, 1752), he was
deprived of his wife, whom, notwithstanding the disparity in their age,
and some occasional bickerings, he had tenderly loved. Those who are
disposed to scrutinize narrowly and severely into the human heart, may
question the sincerity of his sorrow, because he was collected enough to
write her funeral sermon. But the shapes which grief puts on in
different minds are as dissimilar as the constitution of those minds.
Milton, in whom the power of imagination was predominant, soothed his
anguish for the loss of his youthful friend, in an irregular, but most
beautiful assemblage of those poetic objects which presented themselves
to his thoughts, and consecrated them to the memory of the deceased; and
Johnson, who loved to act the moralizer and the rhetorician, alleviated
his sufferings by declaiming on the instability of human happiness.

During this interval he also wrote the Prologue to Comus, spoken by
Garrick, for the benefit of Mrs. Elizabeth Foster, grand-daughter to
Milton; the Prologue and Postscript to Lander's impudent forgeries
concerning that poet, by which Johnson was imposed on, as well as the
rest of the world; a letter to Dr. Douglas, for the same impostor, after
he had been detected, acknowledging and expressing contrition for the
fraud; and the Life of Cheynel, in the Student.

Soon after his wife's death, he became intimate with Beauclerk and
Langton, two young men of family and distinction, who were fellow
collegians at Oxford, and much attached to each other; and the latter of
whom admiration of the Rambler had brought to London with the express
view of being introduced to the author. Their society was very agreeable
to him; and he was, perhaps, glad to forget himself by joining at times
in their sallies of juvenile gaiety. One night, when he had lodgings in
the Temple, he was roused by their knocking at his door; and appearing
in his shirt and nightcap, he found they had come together from the
tavern where they had supped, to prevail on him to accompany them in a
nocturnal ramble. He readily entered into their proposal; and, having
i