occasion spoilt, a whole brew and left him without
means of properly supplying customers.
When his fortunes were in peril he took his
wife into his confidence, but in the earlier years
of marriage he was so reserved, that his enjoyment
of a contract yielding for three years an
annual fortune, only became known to her by
chance after his death.  And let us know a
little more about the early story of the Barclay-
Perkins brewery.  Mr. Thrale, the elder, had it
of a Mr. Halsey, Edmund Halsey, son to a
miller at St Albans, who quarrelled with his
father, ran away to London and engaged himself
as broomstick clerk, or yard-sweeper, &c., to
old Mr. Child, of the Anchor Brewhouse,
Southwark. Halsey behaved well, and became
house-clerk, was admitted to his master's
table, married his master's only daughter, and
succeeded to the business. Being thus a rich
man, and having married his own only child, a
daughter, to Lord Cobham, Halsey bethought
him of a sister Sukey who had married a hard-
working man named Thrale, at Offley, in
Hertfordshire, and had a larger family than she could
well support. He sent, therefore, for one of the
boys, and got Ralph, the one who was father
to Hester's husband, promising to make a man
of him. Ralph Thrale became the manager of
Halsey's business, and managed to get, as
manager only, a great deal of money for himself
as well as for his principal. Master and manager
were alike handsome men, they both courted
the same woman, who preferred the younger,
and this mortified the elder, so that Halsey
died leaving not a guinea to his nephew.
Nevertheless, Ralph Thrale had acquired already so
much, that he bought the brewery of Halsey's
son-in-law and daughter, Lord and Lady Cobam,
making, of course, a canny bargain.

In this gentleman's brewery Mr. Perkins
was head clerk. After Thrale's death, when
Dr. Johnson, running about with an ink-bottle
at his button like an exciseman, and revelling
in the glory of signing large cheques,
was one of the five executors and brewery
managers, the Doctor was asked what he supposed
the brewery was worth. "We are not here,"
he replied, "to sell a parcel of boilers and vats,
but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the
dreams of avarice." Of the sale the lady
herself tells. She had, when her husband was in
difficulty, personally canvassed the landlord of
the Blue Posts for one other trial of the beer;
she had attended at critical times in the counting-
house; the only son given to her among
many daughters was born dead after she had
been calming a riot among the brewery clerks.
And now, she says, "on Mr. Thrale's death I
kept the counting-house from nine o'clock every
morning till five o'clock every evening, till
June, when God Almighty sent us a knot of
rich Quakers, who bought the whole, and saved
me and my coadjutors from brewing ourselves
into another bankruptcy, which hardly could, I
think, have been avoided, being, as we were
five in number, all with equal power, yet all
incapable of using it without help from Mr.Perkins,
who wished to force himself into partnership,
though hating the whole lot of us, save
only me. Upon my promise, however, that if
he would find a purchaser I would present his
wife with my dwelling-house at the Borough
and all its furniture, he soon brought forward
these Quaker Barclays, from Pennsylvania I
believe they came—her own relations, I have
heard—and they obtained the brewhouse a
prodigious bargain; but Miss Thrale was of my
mind to part with it for one hundred and fifty
thousand pounds; and I am sure I never did
repent."  Everybody, she adds presently, was
glad to be rid of the burden, "except dear Dr.
Johnson, who found some odd delight in signing
drafts for hundreds and for thousands, to
him a new and, as it appeared, delightful
occupation."

Such then was the worldly position, such
were the antecedents and the followings, of the
man who transformed Hester Salusbury into
Mrs. Thrale. He required his wife to keep out
of her kitchen, to sit in her drawing-room and
grace his table when they were at Streatham
Park. The dinner-table at Streatham was not
more agreeable to Dr. Johnson than it was to
its master. Mr. Thrale had his weak gaieties
away from home; at home he loved his dinner
better than his wife, and eating more than drinking.
Gluttony hastened his death, and his last
words to an old friend were of the lamprey season.
He cared for nothing in his wife but her
social cleverness, and when in later years he
openly preferred Sophy Streatfield, a learned
and lovely coquette, also a pupil of Doctor
Collier's—who was catching and dragging even
bishops in her train—upon his wife's quoting
Pope's Homer, he said, "Sophy could have
quoted that in the Greek."

"Driven," says the poor woman, "on literature
as my sole resource, no wonder if I loved
my books and children." Of many children,
only four girls lived. That they were watched
over with secret tenderness we see from many
indications, but the mother owns and thinks it
a proud thing to say, that in her children, as
with her husband, she never interfered with the
natural formation of opinions. The girls seem
to have inherited their father's reserve, and to
have been influenced unfavourably by the
artificial life that prevailed in their father's house.
Baretti, clever, perverse, and passionate, was
for some years an inmate, teaching languages to
the eldest girl, another Hester, grossly bepraising
her abilities, while she was yet but a child,
as greater than her mother's, and openly habitually
disparaging her mother to her through
months and years, the mother sitting by and
bearing all with a sweet social smile. The
lively Mrs. Thrale was not a happy woman. In
her "expressive eyes," which the newspapers
celebrated, "sat a soul" capable of higher things
than the world gave her to do. A clever
woman, capable of shining in society, will like
society; but to be soaked and drenched in it as
she was; to be drawn daily from her children
to the dinner-table, and in her strained repartee