Such as were willing to subscribe, were referred to his brother, Nathaniel Johnson, who had succeeded to his father's business in Lichfield; but the design was dropped, for want of a sufficient number of names to encourage it, a deficiency not much to be wondered at, unless the inhabitants of provincial towns were more learned in those days than at present. In this year, he made another effort to obtain the means of subsistence by an offer of his pen to Cave, the editor of the Gentleman's Magazine; but the immediate result of the application is not known; nor in what manner he supported himself till July 1736, when he married Elizabeth Porter, the widow of a mercer at Birmingham, and daughter of William Jervis, Esq. of Great Peatling, in Leicestershire. This woman, who was twenty years older than himself, and to whose daughter he had been an unsuccessful suitor, brought him eight hundred pounds; but, according to Garrick's report of her, was neither amiable nor handsome, though that she was both in Johnson's estimation appears from the epithets "formosae, cultae, ingeniosae," which he inscribed on her tombstone. Their nuptials were celebrated at Derby, and to that town they went together on horseback from Birmingham; but the bride assuming some airs of caprice on the road, like another Petruchio he gave her such effectual proofs of resolution, as reduced her to the abjectness of shedding tears. His first project after his marriage was to set up a school; and, with this intention, he hired a very commodious house, at the distance of about two miles from Lichfield, called Edial Hall, which has lately been taken down, and of which a representation is to be seen in the History of Lichfield, by Mr. Harwood. One of my friends, who inhabited it for the same purpose, has told me that an old countryman who lived near it, and remembered Johnson and his pupil Garrick, said to him, "that Johnson was not much of a scholar to look at, but that master Garrick was a strange one for leaping over a stile." It is amusing to observe the impressions which such men make on common minds. Unfortunately the prejudice occasioned by Johnson's unsightly exterior was not confined to the vulgar, insomuch that it has been thought to be the reason why so few parents committed their children to his care, for he had only three pupils. This unscholarlike appearance it must have been that made the bookseller in the Strand, to whom he applied for literary employment, eye him archly, and recommend it to him rather to purchase a porter's knot. But, as an old philosopher has said, every thing has two handles. It was, perhaps, the contrast between the body and the mind, between the incultum corpus, and the ingenium, which afterwards was one cause of his being received so willingly in those circles of what is called high life, where any thing that is exceedingly strange and unusual is apt to carry its own recommendation with it.