Those first few weeks in London were given to staring into shop-windows and wandering, open-mouthed, up and down.  No one wanted the tragedy—­the managers all sniffed at it.  Little then did Davy dream, as they made their way from the office of one theater-manager to that of another, that he himself would some day own a theater and give the discarded play its first setting.  And little did he think that he would yet be the foremost actor of his time, and his awkward mate the literary dictator of London.  Oh! this game of life is a great play!  The blissful uncertainty of it all!  The ambitions, plans, strivings, heartaches, mad desires and vain reaching out of empty arms!  The tears, the bitter disappointments, the sleepless nights, the echoes of prayers unheard, and the hollow hopelessness of love turned to hate!

And then mayhap we do as Emerson did—­go out into the woods, and all the trees say, “Why so hot, my little man?”

Garrick, disappointed and undone at the thought of defeat in his chosen profession, turned to commercial life and then to the theater.  At his first stage appearance he trembled with diffidence and all but fled in fright.  He persevered, for he could do nothing else.  He arose step by step, and honors, wealth and fame were his.  Love came to him:  he wedded the woman of his choice.  And after his death she survived for forty-three years.  She lived one hundred years, lacking two.  Garrick was born in Seventeen Hundred Sixteen; and his wife died in Eighteen Hundred Twenty-two, which seems to bring the times of Johnson pretty close home to us.  Throughout her long life, she lived in the memory of the love that had been hers; cherishing and protecting, idolizing, as did Mary Shelley, the one name and that alone.

Johnson and Garrick thoroughly respected and admired each other, yet they often quarreled—­they quarreled to the last.  But when Davy had lain him down in his last sleep, aged sixty-three, it was Johnson, aged seventy, who wrote his epitaph, introducing into it the deathless sentence * * * “by that stroke of death which has eclipsed the gaiety of nations, and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure.”

* * * * *

Three months in London and Johnson succeeded in getting a place on the editorial staff of “The Gentleman’s Magazine.”  Prosperity smiled, not exactly a broad grin; but the expression was something better than a stony, forbidding stare.

He made haste to go back to Lichfield after his “Letty,” which name, by the way, is an improvement on Betty, Betsy or Tetsy—­being baby-talk for Elizabeth.

They took modest lodgings in a third floor back, off Fleet Street, and Johnson began that life of struggle against debt, ridicule and unkind condition that was to continue for forty-seven years; never out of debt, never free from attacks of enemies; a life of wordy warfare and inky broadsides against cant, affectation and untruth—­with the weapons of his dialectics always kept well burnished by constant use; hated and loved; jeered and praised; feared and idolized.