ABSTRACT
On 2 March 1737, two very different young men set out together from Lichfield in Staffordshire to travel the 116 miles to London seeking their fortunes. They had one horse between them, on which they rode turn and turn about. One was a heavy, ungainly and scrofulous 28-year-old, son of a poor bookseller who had managed to afford but four terms at Oxford. The other, eight years younger, was of small stature, handsome and lithe. He was the child of an army officer (originally of asylum-seeking French Protestant descent) with wine-importing connections but too poor to go to university at all. The elder of the pair, having failed to establish a grammar school, now had a plan to make his mark on the stage and carried with him his five-act tragedy, Irene, already written and ready to sell. The younger, a former pupil at the school, was on his way to continue his education in the cheapest fashion possible at another school in Rochester, Kent. Ultimately, he was bound for the law.
