three pupils were secured, and but one of these received any benefit
from the tutor; and this benefit came, according to the scholar, from the
master's supplying an excellent object for ridicule.

This pupil's name was David Garrick.

The meeting with David Garrick was a pivotal point in the life of Johnson.
Johnson's mental and spiritual existence flowed on, separate and apart
from that of his wife. There was no meeting of the waters. His affection
for her was most tender and constant, but in quality it seemed to differ
but slightly from the sentiment he entertained toward "Hodge," his cat.

Hodge was fed on oysters that his owner could ill afford; and after
Johnson had spent the little fortune that belonged to his wife, the lady
was regaled on the best and choicest that his income, or credit, could
secure. But if one of those lightning-flashes of wit ever escaped him in
her direction, we do not know it. Garrick evidently was the first flint
that tried his steel. The distinctions of teacher and scholar were soon
lost between these two, and the lessons took the turn of a fusillade of
wit. They made comments on the authors they read, and comments on the
people they met, and criticized each other with encaustic remarks that
tested friendship to its extremest limit. And this continual skirmish that
would have made sworn foes of common men in a day revealed to each that
the other had the element of unexpectedness in his nature and was worth
loving.

Humor and melancholy go hand in hand; both are born of an extreme
sensitiveness, and the man who smiles at the trivial misfits of life
realizes also that all men who tread the earth are living under a sentence
of death, and that Fate has merely allowed them an indefinite, but
limited, reprieve.

At the outset of Johnson's career, one can not but see that the
companionship and nimble wit of Garrick saved his ponderous and melancholy
mind from going into bankruptcy.

And now we find them: one twenty-eight, big, nearsighted, theoretical,
blundering; and the other twenty-one, slight, active, graceful, practical.
They were alike in this: they both loved books and were possessed of the
eager, earnest, receptive mind. To possess the hospitable mind! For what
greater blessing can one pray?

And then they were alike in other respects--they were desperately poor;
neither had an income; neither had a profession; both were ambitious.
Johnson had written a tragedy--"Irene"--and he ha