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 had read it to Garrick several times, and Garrick said it was good and should make a hit. But Garrick didn't know much about tragedies—law was his bent—he had read law for two years, off and on. They would go to London and seize fortune by the scalp-lock. In London good lawyers were needed, and London was the only place for a playwright. They scraped together their pennies, borrowed a few more, got a single letter of introduction between them to some person of unknown influence, and started away, with the lacrimose blessings of the elderly bride, and of Davy's mother. They must have been a queer sight when the stage let them down at the Strand—dusty, dirty, tired and scared by the babel of sounds and sights! And no doubt Johnson's enormous size saved them from sundry insults and divers taunts that otherwise might have come their way. Those first few weeks in London were given to staring into shop-windows and wandering, open-mouthed, up and down. No one wanted the tragedy—the managers all sniffed at it. Little then did Davy dream, as they made their way from the office of one theater-manager to that of another, that he himself would some day own a theater and give the discarded play its first setting. And little did he think that he would yet be the foremost actor of his time, and his awkward mate the literary dictator of London. Oh! 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?"