fruitfully.

[Sidenote: 1737--Johnson and his work]

He was ready to do anything, to turn to anything, to write, to
translate, to teach. He fell in love with an amazing woman more than
twenty years his senior, monstrously fat, monstrously painted,
monstrously affected and absurd; he fell in love with her, and he
married her. She had a little money, and Johnson set up an academy for
the instruction of youth. But youth would not come to be instructed.
One youth came, one of the very few, a soldier's son and a grandson of
a Huguenot refugee, named David Garrick. The master and the pupil
became friends, and the friendship lasted with life. Master and pupil
resolved to make the adventure of the town together. The eyes of
aspiring provincials turned always to the great city, every ambitious
provincial heart beat with desire for the conquest of London. The
priest of letters and the player of parts, the real man and the shadow
of all men, packed up bag and baggage and came to London to very
different fame and very different fortune. The great city had one kind
of welcome to give to the man who desired to speak truth and another to
the man who proposed to give pleasure. The chances for men of letters
and for players were very unlike just then. The two strands of life
ran across the web of London, the strand of Johnson iron-gray, the
strand of Garrick gleaming gold. Through long years Johnson hid in
dingy courts and alleys, ill-clothed, ill-fed, an uncouth Apollo in the
service of Admetus Cave and his kind, while the marvellous actor was
climbing daily higher and higher on the ladder of an actor's fame, the
friend of the wealthy, the favored of the great, the admired, the
applauded, the well-beloved. Garrick deserved his fame and his
fortune, his splendid successes and {43} his shining rewards; but the
grand, rough writer of books did not deserve his buffets and mishaps,
his ferocious hungers, his acquaintanceship with sponging-houses, and
all the catalogue of his London agonies. His struggle for life was a
Titan's struggle, and it was never either selfish or ignoble. He
wanted to live and be heard because he knew that he had something to
say that was worth hearing. He needed to live for the sake of his
ardent squalid affections, for the sake of the people who were always
dependent upon his meagre bounty, for the sake of the wife he loved so
deeply, mourned so truly when she died, and remembered with such tender