and apt quotation to find all the domesticity her
husband asked from her, was hard. At home
in the glare of company, compliment that was in
those days more fulsome than politeness now
allows; true as steel to the interests and the
pleasures of a man who did not love her, with
whom, after years of marriage, she could not
speak with familiar unrestraint; and out of
doors open to all the prying of the newspapers;
—surely it was a very hard life for the warm-
hearted little woman, who could afterwards shut
herself up in Wales with Piozzi, give up all
pleasures to nurse his gout, when, with the quiet,
fond musician paying her the best of compliments
in a true love, and humming his tunes in
one room, and with her litter of learned books,
out of which she was composing a great treatise,
in another room, she was blue stocking and
woman too. Johnson, who was a good man,
honoured her: he said she was  "good in the
last recesses of her mind."  A great deal that
was in those last recesses never was brought
out of them, and part of what had come out was
thrust back again. Thrale dead, and Piozzi
dead, she kept her eightieth birthday with a
ball, and herself led the dance. Both her
husbands had believed firmly that she would die
some sudden death, and after a manner the
presentiment was true, since her death, at the age
of eighty-one, was of the consequences of a
fall.

Enough of who she was, and what she was,
now let us finish with a string of anecdotes by
or about her.

Mrs. Thrale's relation to Dr. Johnson appears
to have originated in a desire to draw Johnson
out of painful depths of an hypochondriac
melancholy. He was first tempted to be more than a
passing guest at Streatham. A bedroom was made
his, for use whenever he chose to escape from his
close lodgings in the Fleet-street court, and there
was always ready for him a place of honour at
Thrale's table. Once, on her birthday morning,
Mrs. Thrale, recovered from serious illness, went
into the Doctor's room, and said, "Nobody
sends me any verses now, because I am five-and-
thirty years old." Johnson instantly burst out in
verse:

          "Oft in danger, yet alive,
          We are come to thirty-five;
          Long may better-years arrive,
          Better years than thirty-five.
          Could philosophers contrive
          Life to stop at thirty-five,
          Time his hours should never drive
          O'er the bounds of thirty-five," &c. &c.

"And now," he said, when he had got to w
for wife, " you may see what it is to come for
poetry to a dictionary maker; you may observe
that the rhymes run in alphabetical order
exactly."

There has been questions as to the year of
Mrs. Thrale's birth, a question only between two
neighbouring years. Mrs. Thrale was not like the
Lady Aldborough, who resolved never to own to
more than twenty-five, and until the day of her
death, at the age of eighty-five, had her passport
always made out for her as a young lady of five-
and-twenty. She used to boast that whenever a
foreign official objected, she never failed to
silence him by the remark that he was the first
gentleman of his country who ever told a lady
she was older than she said she was.

Doctor Johnson gave sound advice as a friend
in the affairs of the brewery, when they were
embarrassed, ending one excellent note with
these sentences: "Surely there is something to
be saved; there is to be saved whatever is the
difference between vigilance and neglect,
between parsimony and profusion. The price of
malt has risen again. It is now two pounds
eight shillings the quarter. Ale is sold in the
public-houses at sixpence a quart, a price which
I never heard of before." This helps us to
understand why Mr. Perkins hung up in the
brewery counting-house a fine proof of the
mezzotint of Doctor Johnson by Doughty. "Why
do you put him up in the counting-house?"
asked Mrs. Thrale, somewhat flippantly. Mr.
Perkins answered, "Because, madam, I wish to
have one wise man there."  "Sir,"  said Johnson,
"I thank you. It is a very handsome compliment,
and I believe you speak sincerely."

Though slovenly in his own dress and short-
sighted, the Doctor could detect the minutest
fault in the dress or behaviour of the ladies
whom he met. Says Mrs. Thrale, "I commended
a young lady for her beauty and pretty
behaviour one day, to whom I thought no
objections could have been made."  "I saw her,"
said Doctor Johnson, "take a pair of scissors in
her left hand though; and for all her father is
now become a nobleman, and you say excessively
rich, I should, were I a youth of quality ten
years hence, hesitate between a girl so neglected
and a negro."  Another lady, whose accomplishments
he never denied, came to our house one
day covered with diamonds, feathers, &c., and
he did not seem inclined to chat with her as
usual. I asked him why when the company
was gone. "Why, her head looked so like that
of a woman who shows puppets," said he, "and
her voice so confirmed the fancy, that I could
not bear her to-day; when she wears a large
cap, I can talk to her."

When Mrs. Thrale was a widow, the wits in
the newspapers of course suggested Doctor
Johnson, among others, for a second husband.
She suspected Soame Jenyn to be the author of
the following Johnsonian question:

          Cervisial coctor's viduate dame,
          Opinst thou this gigantick frame
          Procumbing at thy shrine,
          Shall, catinated by thy charms,
          A captive in thy ambient arms
          Perennially be thine?

Whitbread the brewer offered marriage to
Thrale's widow, and was refused.

In a note by Mrs. Piozzi to Wraxall's
Memoirs of My Own Time, we read of the unlucky
courtesy of Queen Caroline towards a Derbyshire
baronet, Sir Woolston Dixie. The queen,
seeking to make friends before a reception,
gathered facts relating to persons who would be