CHAPTER VI.

INTRODUCTIONS AT TOM DAVIES'S..

1762.

1762. THOMAS DAVIES, ex-performer of Drury Lane, and nowpub-
&&. 34. lisher and bookseller of Bussell-street, Covent Garden, had
now (with his " very pretty wife ") left the stage and taken
wholly to bookselling, which he had recently, and for the
second time, attempted to combine with acting. The Rosciad
put a final extinguisher on his theatrical existence.* He never
afterwards, mouthed a sentence in one of the kingly and
heavy parts he was in the habit of playing, that Churchill's
image of cur and bone did not confuse the sentence which
followed; his eye never fell upon any prominent figure
in the front row of the pit, that he did not tremble to
fancy it the brawny person of Churchill. What he thus lost
in self-possession, Grarrick meanwhile lost in temper; and
matters came to a breach, in which Johnson, being appealed
to, took part against Grarrick, as he was seldom disinclined
to do. Pretty Mrs. Davies may have helped his inclination
here; for when seized with his old moody abstraction, as was

* The rev. Mr. Granger mentions the most interesting fact in it. " In 1736,
" he acted at the-theatre in the Haymarket, where he was the first person who
"performed Young Vilmotin Lillo's tragedy of i\& Fatal Curiosity, under the
" management of the celebrated Henry Fielding." Letters, 69.k, and might afford to laugh at the outcry which followed.