tolling the charms of her person and of her
manners; and when, long after her decease, he had occasion to mention
her, he exclaimed, with a tenderness half ludicrous, half pathetic,
"Pretty creature!"

His marriage made it necessary for him to exert himself more strenuously
than he had hitherto done. He took a house in the neighbourhood of his
native town, and advertised for pupils. But eighteen months passed away;
and only three pupils came to his academy. Indeed, his appearance was
so strange, and his temper so violent, that his schoolroom must have
resembled an ogre's den. Nor was the tawdry painted grandmother whom
he called his Titty well qualified to make provision for the comfort of
young gentlemen. David Garrick, who was one of the pupils, used, many
years later, to throw the best company of London into convulsions of
laughter by mimicking the endearments of this extraordinary pair.

At length Johnson, in the twenty-eighth year of his age, determined to
seek his fortune in the capital as a literary adventurer. He set out
with a few guineas, three acts of the tragedy of Irene in manuscript,
and two or three letters of introduction from his friend Walmesley.

Never, since literature became a calling in England, had it been a less
gainful calling than at the time when Johnson took up his residence in
London. In the preceding generation a writer of eminent merit was sure
to be munificently rewarded by the government. The least that he could
expect was a pension or a sinecure place; and, if he showed any aptitude
for politics, he might hope to be a member of parliament, a lord of the
treasury, an ambassador, a secretary of state. It would be easy, on the
other hand, to name several writers of the nineteenth century of
whom the least successful has received forty thousand pounds from the
booksellers. But Johnson entered on his vocation in the most dreary
part of the dreary interval which separated two ages of prosperity.
Literature had ceased to flourish under the patronage of the great, and
had not begun to flourish under the patronage of the public. One man of
letters, indeed, Pope, had acquired by his pen what was then considered
as a handsome fortune, and lived on a footing of equality with nobles
and ministers of state. But this was a solitary exception. Even an
author whose reputation was established, and whose works were popular,
such an author as Thomson, whose Seasons were in every library, such an
author a