CHAP. ii. j . DAVID GARRICK.

which informs Mm, that " At Edial, near Litehfield, in 1759.
" Staffordshire, young gentlemen are boarded, and taught .at. 31.
" the Latin and Greek languages, by SAMUEL JOHNSON."
Here he remains but a very few months; which nevertheless
suffice to break up the teacher's establishment, to dissipate
the scholar's hopes either of army-chaplaincy or country-
rectory, and to bring up both to London in. search of other
fortune. They separate on arriving there, in what altered
circumstances to meet again !

Another interval of some five years has seen little David
a student of Lincoln's Inn, a lounger about the theatres, a
mourner within the same year for the deaths of his father
and mother, and, on the receipt- of a legacy of a thousand
pounds from an uncle who had been in the wine trade in
Lisbon, a partner with his elder brother Peter as wine
merchant of London and Lichfield. Peter, born six years
before David, was an honest worthy man, who according to
Boswell strongly resembled David in countenance, though
of more sedate and placid manners, and of whom Johnson
believed that if he had cultivated all the arts of gaiety as much
as David, he might have been as brisk and lively; * but in
reality of very formal cut, anything but brisk or livery, not in
the least a cultivator of gaiety, on the contrary methodical and
precise in the extreme, and always objecting to his brother's
hankering for the stage, even from those youthful days when
the sprightly lad of fourteen underwent sharp lectures from
his grave senior of twenty, on the impropriety of getting up
theatrical squibs, or writing comic verses against the ladies
of Lichfield. Davies, Murphy, Gait, and Boaden, all tell
us that their altercations became at last so frequent, that in
1740, by the intercession of mutual friends, their partner-

* fiomeett, vi. 95.ore,