And this queer genius fell in love with a widow lady more than
twenty years older than himself. She, we are told, was coarse,
fat, and unlovely, but she was not without brains, for she saw
beneath the strange outside of her young lover. "This is the
most sensible man that I ever saw in my life," she said, after
talking with him. So this strange couple married. "Sir," said
Johnson afterwards, "It was a love-marriage on both sides." And
there can be no doubt that Samuel loved his wife devotedly while
she lived, and treasured her memory tenderly after her death.
Mrs. Johnson had a little money, and so Samuel returned to his
native town and there opened a school. An advertisement appeared
in the papers, "At Edial, near Lichfield, in Staffordshire, young
gentlemen are boarded and taught the Latin and Greek languages,
by Samuel Johnson." But Johnson was quite unfitted to be a
teacher, and the school did not prosper. "His schoolroom," says
another writer, "must have resembled an ogre's den," and only two
or three boys came to it.
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