The bride is represented as not over-comely, and as one--of good judgment in most matters--who resorted to some vulgar appliances for making the most of her "good looks." Lord Macaulay[21] uses a very rampant rhetoric in his encyclopædic {91} mention of the paint she put upon her cheeks. With the aid of her £800, Johnson determined to set up a boarding-school for young gentlemen; a gaunt country-house three miles out of Lichfield was rented and equipped and advertised; but the young gentlemen did not come. How could they be won that way? The mistress frowsy, simpering, ancient, painted, and becurled; and Mr. Johnson, gaunt, clumsy, squinting--one side of his face badly scarred with some early surgical cut; one eye involved and drooping, and a twitchy St. Vitus's dance making all uglier. What boy would not dread a possible whipping from such a master, and what mamma would not tremble for her boy? Yet I do not believe he ever whipped hard, when he had occasion; he was kind-hearted; but his scolds at a false syntax must have been terrific and have made the floors shiver. Among the boys who did venture to that Edial school was one David Garrick, whose father had been a friend of the elder Johnson; and when the school broke up--as it did presently--Johnson and David Garrick set out together for London, to {92} seek their fortune--carrying letters to some booksellers there; and Johnson carrying that half-written tragedy of _Irene_ in his pocket. Garrick's rise began early, and was brilliant, but of this we cannot speak now. Johnson knocked about those London streets--translating a little, jobbing at books a little, starving and scrimping a great deal. He fell in early with a certain Richard Savage,[22] a wild, clever, disorderly poet, as hard pinched as Johnson. According to his story, he was the son of the Countess Macclesfield, but disowned by her--he only coming to knowledge of his parentage through accident, when he was grown to manhood. Johnson tells the pathetic tale of how Savage paced up and down, at night, in sight of his mother's palatial windows, gazing grief-smitten at them, and yearning for the maternal recognition, which the heartless, dishonored woman refused. So, this castaway runs to drink and all deviltries; Johnson staying him much as {93} he can--walking with him up and down through London streets till midnight--talking poetry, philosophy, religion; hungry both of them, and many a time with only ten pence between them. Well, at last, Savage kills his man in a tavern broil; would have been hung--the mother countess (as the story runs) hoping it would be so; but he escapes, largely through the influence of that Queen Caroline, to whom Jeanie Deans makes her eloquent plea in Scott's ever-famous novel of _The Heart of Mid-Lothian_. Savage escapes, but 'tis only to go to other bad ways, and at last he died in a Bristol jail.