ceruse from natural bloom, and who had seldom or never been in
the same room with a woman of real fashion, his Titty, as he
called her, was the most beautiful, graceful, and accomplished of
her sex. That his admiration was unfeigned cannot be doubted;
for she was as poor as himself. She accepted, with a readiness
which did her little honour, the addresses of a suitor who might
have been her son. The marriage, however, in spite of occasional
wranglings, proved happier than might have been expected. The
lover continued to be under the illusions of the wedding-day till
the lady died in her sixty-fourth year. On her monument he
placed an inscription extolling 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