Sam and Dave

 Just realised that I missed a Johnsonian anniversary yesterday – blame it on Blue Monday. 
  It was on January 20th in 1779 that David Garrick, the most famous actor of his generation, died, predeceasing his friend, fellow Lichfieldian and one-time teacher, Samuel Johnson. 'I am disappointed,' wrote Johnson, 'by that stroke of death which has eclipsed the gaiety of nations, and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure.' Johnson, the older man, had known Garrick since the latter's Lichfield boyhood (both were alumni of Lichfield grammar school), and the young David Garrick had been one of the handful of pupils who attended the school that Johnson and his wife established at Edial, a few miles outside the city. When this doomed venture collapsed, Johnson and Garrick, sharing a horse, set out for London in search of fame and fortune – which both of them eventually found. They remained firm friends, though Garrick was not above giving wickedly accurate impersonations of the Great Cham, and Johnson took a somewhat condescending attitude to his young friend's theatrical career, stellar though it was. He would, however, never allow anyone else to say anything at all disobliging about Garrick. 
  David Garrick's funeral procession was one of the longest seen in London, stretching all the way from the Strand to Westminster Abbey, where he was interred in Poets' Corner. Fittingly, he also has a memorial in Lichfield Cathedral, in the form of a bust, with Johnson's epitaph ('I am disappointed...') inscribed below. 
  In one of my favourite Johnson quotations, the great man tells Garrick that he shan't be joining him behind the scenes at the theatre any more: 'I'll come no more behind your scenes, David; for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities.'