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."

* * * * *