elation between Johnson and his
elderly wife, but it was natural and indeed inevitable that the world,
the little world of their acquaintances, should have been chiefly alive
to the humorous external aspect of the marriage, and one does not
wonder that Beauclerk, whose married life was a scandal following on a
divorce, should have enjoyed relating that Johnson had said to him,
"Sir, it was a love marriage on both sides!" Johnson's own account of
the actual wedding is singular enough. "Sir, she had read the old
romances, and had got into her head the fantastical notion that a woman
of spirit should use her lover like a dog. So, sir, at first she told
me that I rode too fast, and she could not keep up with me; and, when I
rode a little slower, she passed me, and complained that I lagged
behind. I was not to be made the slave of caprice; and I resolved to
begin as I meant to end. I therefore pushed on briskly, till I was
fairly out of her sight. The road lay between two hedges, so I was
sure she could not miss it; and I contrived that she should {94} soon
come up with me. When she did, I observed her to be in tears."

Mrs. Johnson was the widow of a Birmingham draper, and brought her
husband several hundred pounds, part of which was at once spent in
hiring and furnishing a large house at Edial near Lichfield where
Johnson proposed to take pupils. But no pupils came except David
Garrick and his brother, the sons of an old Lichfield friend, and the
"academy" was abandoned after a year and a half. The lack of pupils,
however, was perhaps a blessing in disguise, for it enabled Johnson to
write most of his tragedy _Irene_, with which he went to London in
March 1737. His pupil, David Garrick, went with him to study law, and
when Garrick was a rich, famous and rather vain man, Johnson, who liked
to curb the "insolence of wealth" once referred to 1737 as the year
"when I came to London with twopence half-penny in my pocket; and thou,
Davy, with three-halfpence in thine." Nothing came of this first visit
to the capital. He lived as best he could, dining for eightpence, and
seeing a few friends, one of whom was Henry Hervey, son of the Earl of
Bristol, of whose kindness he always retained an affectionate memory,
so that he once said to Boswell, "If you call a dog Hervey, I shall
love him." In the summer he returned to Lichfield, and finished his
{95} tragedy, after which he brought his wife back with him to London
which