He next became a candidate for public favour, as the writer of a periodical work, in the manner of the Spectator; and, in March, 1750, published the first number of the Rambler, which was continued for nearly two years; but, wanting variety of matter, and familiarity of style, failed to attract many readers, so that the largest number of copies that were sold of any one paper did not exceed five hundred. The topics were selected without sufficient regard to the popular taste. The grievances and distresses of authors particularly were dwelt on to satiety; and the tone of eloquence was more swelling and stately than he had hitherto adopted. The papers allotted to criticism are marked by his usual acumen; but the justice of his opinions is often questionable. In the humourous pieces, when our laughter is excited, I doubt the author himself, who is always discoverable under the masque of whatever character he assumes, is as much the object as the cause of our merriment; and, however moral and devout his more serious views of life, they are often defective in that most engaging feature of sound religion, a cheerful spirit. The only assistance he received was from Richardson, Mrs. Chapone, Miss Talbot, and Mrs. Carter, the first of whom contributed the 97th number; the second, four billets in the 10th; the next, the 30th; and the last, the 44th and 100th numbers. Three days after the completion of the Rambler (March 17, 1752), he was deprived of his wife, whom, notwithstanding the disparity in their age, and some occasional bickerings, he had tenderly loved. Those who are disposed to scrutinize narrowly and severely into the human heart, may question the sincerity of his sorrow, because he was collected enough to write her funeral sermon. But the shapes which grief puts on in different minds are as dissimilar as the constitution of those minds. Milton, in whom the power of imagination was predominant, soothed his anguish for the loss of his youthful friend, in an irregular, but most beautiful assemblage of those poetic objects which presented themselves to his thoughts, and consecrated them to the memory of the deceased; and Johnson, who loved to act the moralizer and the rhetorician, alleviated his sufferings by declaiming on the instability of human happiness. During this interval he also wrote the Prologue to Comus, spoken by Garrick, for the benefit of Mrs. Elizabeth Foster, grand-daughter to Milton; the Prologue and Postscript to Lander's impudent forgeries concerning that poet, by which Johnson was imposed on, as well as the rest of the world; a letter to Dr. Douglas, for the same impostor, after he had been detected, acknowledging and expressing contrition for the fraud; and the Life of Cheynel, in the Student.