Chapter II: Part 2

It was just at this moment that one of those ironic little imps that lurk in wainscot nooks looking out for an opportunity to influence an unconscious human being to an act which the little demon, seeing the end of a scene of which mortals only see the beginning, regards with sardonic glee, whispered something in the ear of Mrs. Thrale, and in an instant, in obedience to its prompting, she had left her chair and stolen behind the singer at the piano. Raising her hands and turning up her eyes in imitation of Piozzi, she indulged in a piece of mimicry which must have shocked every one in the room except the singer, who had his back to her, and Dr. Johnson, who, besides being too short-sighted to be able to see her, was gazing into the grate.

No doubt the flippant little lady felt that a touch of farcical fun was the very thing needed to make the party go with a snap; but such flagrant bad taste as was involved in the transaction was more than Dr. Burney could stand. Keeping his temper marvellously well in hand, considering his provocation, he went gently behind the gesticulating woman and put a stop to her fooling. Shaking his head, he whispered in a “half joke whole earnest” way:

“Because, madam, you have no ear yourself for music, will you destroy the attention of all who, in that one point, are otherwise gifted?”

Or words to that effect, it might be safe to add, for the phrases as recorded in the diary of one of his daughters are a trifle too academic for even Dr. Burney to have whispered on the spur of the moment. But he certainly reproved the lady, and she took his remonstrance in good part, and showed herself to be admirably appreciative of the exact pose to assume in order to save the situation. She went demurely to her chair and sat there stiffly, and with the affectation of a schoolgirl who has been admonished for a fault and commanded to take a seat in silence and apart from the rest of the class. It must be apparent to every one that this was the precise attitude for her to strike in the circumstances, and that she was able to perceive this in a rather embarrassing moment shows that Mrs. Thrale was quite as clever as her friends made her out to be.

But regarding the incident itself, surely the phrase, “the irony of fate,” was invented to describe it. A better illustration of the sport of circumstance could not be devised, for in the course of time the lively little lady, who had gone as far as any one could go in making a mock of another, had fallen as deep in love with the man whom she mocked as ever Juliet did with her Romeo. She found that she could not live without him, and, sacrificing friends, position, and fortune, she threw herself into his arms, and lived happy ever after.

The conclusion of the first scene in this saturnine comedy which was being enacted in the drawing-room in that house in St. Martin's Street, was in perfect keeping with the _mise-en-scène_ constructed by Fate, taking the rôle of Puck. It is admirably described in the diary of Charlotte Burney. She wrote that Mr. Greville--whom she nicknamed “Mr. Gruel”--assumed “his most supercilious air of distant superiority” and “planted himself immovable as a noble statue upon the hearth, as if a stranger to the whole set.”

By this time Dr. Johnson must have had enough of the fire at which he had been sitting, and we at once see how utterly hopeless were the social relations at this miserable party when we hear that the men “were so kind and considerate as to divert themselves by making a fire-screen to the whole room.” But Dr. Johnson, having thoroughly warmed himself, was now in a position to administer a rebuke to the less fortunate ones, and, when nobody would have imagined that he had known the gentlemen were in the room, he said that “if he was not ashamed he would keep the fire from the ladies too.”

“This reproof (for a reproof it certainly was, although given in a very comical, dry way) was productive,” Charlotte adds, “of a scene as good as a comedy, for Mr. Suard tumbled on to a sopha directly, Mr. Thrale on to a chair, Mr. Davenant sneaked off the premises, seemingly in as great a fright and as much confounded as if he had done any bad action, and Mr. Gruel being left solus, was obliged to stalk off.”

A more perfect description of the “curtain” to the first act of this, “as good as a comedy,” could not be imagined. In every scene of this memorable evening the mocking figure of an impish Fate can be discerned. There was the tactful and urbane Dr. Burney anxious to gratify his old patron by presenting to him the great Dr. Johnson, and at the same time to show on what excellent terms he himself was with the family of the wealthy brewer, Mr. Thrale. Incidentally he has caused Johnson to put himself to the inconvenience of a clean shirt and a respectable wig; and, like a thoughtful general, lest any of his plans should fall short of fulfilment, he has invited an interesting vocalist to cover up the retreat and make failure almost impossible!

Dr. Burney could do wonders by the aid of his tact and urbanity, but he is no match for Fate playing the part of Puck. Within an hour Johnson has disappointed him and become grumpy--the old bear has found the buns to be stale; Mr. Greville, the patron, is in a patronising mood, and becomes stiff and aloof because Johnson, secure with his pension, resents it; Mrs. Thrale, anxious to do her best for Burney, and at the same time to show Mrs. Greville and her fine daughter how thoroughly at home she is in the house and how delicate is her sense of humour, strikes an appallingly false note, and only saves herself by a touch of cleverness from appearing wholly ridiculous. This is pretty well for the opening scenes, but the closing catastrophe is not long delayed. The men huddle themselves together in stony silence; and they are reproved for impoliteness by--whom? Dr. Johnson, the man who has studied boorishness and advanced it to a place among the arts--the man who calls those who differ from him dolts and fools and rascals--the man whose manners at the dinner table are those of the sty and trough--the man who walks about the streets ungartered and unclean--this is the man who has the effrontery to rebuke for their rudeness such gentlemen as Mr. Fulk Greville, Mr. Seward, and Mr. Thrale! Puck can go no further. Down comes the curtain when one gentleman collapses upon a “sopha,” another into a chair, a third sneaks off like a culprit, and the fourth stalks off with an air of offended dignity!

It might be thought that the imp of mischief who had assumed the control of this evening's entertainment would be satisfied at the result of his pranks so far. Nothing of the sort. He was only satisfied when he had made a match between the insignificant figure who was playing the musical accompaniment to his pranks and the lady who thought that his presence in the room was only justifiable on the ground that he made an excellent butt for her mockery!

And the funniest part of the whole comedy is to be found in the fact that the pair lived happy ever after!

The extraordinary influence which Boswell has had upon almost every student of the life of the latter half of the eighteenth century is shown in a marked way by the general acceptance of his view--which it is scarcely necessary to say was Johnson's view--of the second marriage of Mrs. Thrale. We are treating Boswell much more fairly than he treated Mrs. Thrale when we acknowledge at once that his opinion was shared by a considerable number of the lady's friends, including Dr. Burney and his family. They were all shocked when they heard that the widow of the Southwark brewer had married the Italian musician, Signor Gabrielli Piozzi. Even in the present day, when one might reasonably expect that, the miserable pettiness of Boswell's character having been made apparent, his judgment on most points would be received with a smile, he is taken very seriously by a good many people. It has long ago been made plain that Boswell was quite unscrupulous in his treatment of every one that crossed his path or made an attempt to interfere with the aim of his life, which was to become the biographer of Johnson. The instances of his petty malevolence which have come to light within recent years are innumerable. They show that the opinion which his contemporaries formed of him was absolutely correct. We know that he was regarded as a cur who was ever at Johnson's heels, and took the insults of the great man with a fawning complacency that was pathetically canine. He was daily called a cur. “Oh, no,” said Goldsmith, “he is not a cur, only a burr; Tom Davies flung him at Johnson one day as a joke, and he stuck to him ever since”--a cur, and an ape and a spy and a Branghton--the last by Dr. Johnson himself in the presence of a large company, that included the creator of the contemptible Mr. Branghton. (The incident was not, however, recorded by Mr. Boswell himself.) But as the extraordinary interest in his _Life of Johnson_ began to be acknowledged, the force of contemporary opinion gradually dwindled away, until Boswell's verdicts and Boswell's inferences found general acceptance; and even now Goldsmith is regarded as an Irish _omadhaum_, because Boswell did his best to make him out to be one, and Mrs. Thrale is thought to have forfeited her claims to respect because she married Signor Piozzi.

People forget the origin of Boswell's malevolence in both cases. He detested Goldsmith because Goldsmith was a great writer, who was capable of writing a great biography of Johnson, with whom he had been on the most intimate terms long before Tom Davies flung his burr at Johnson; he hated Baretti and recorded--at the sacrifice of Johnson's reputation for humanity--Johnson's cynical belittling of him, because he feared that Baretti would write _the_ biography; he was spiteful in regard to Mrs. Thrale because she actually did write something biographical about Johnson.

The impudence of such a man as Boswell writing about “honest Dr. Goldsmith” is only surpassed by his allusions to the second marriage of Mrs. Thrale. He was a fellow-guest with Johnson at the Thrales' house in 1775, and he records something of a conversation which he says occurred on the subject of a woman's marrying some one greatly beneath her socially. “When I recapitulate the debate,” he says, “and recollect what has since happened, I cannot but be struck in a manner that delicacy forbids me to express! While I contended that she ought to be treated with inflexible steadiness of displeasure, Mrs. Thrale was all for mildness and forgiveness and, according to the vulgar phrase, making the best of a bad bargain.” This was published after the second marriage. What would be thought of a modern biographer who should borrow a little of Boswell's “delicacy,” and refer to a similar incident in the same style?

In his own inimitable small way Boswell was for ever sneering at Mrs. Thrale. Sometimes he did it with that scrupulous delicacy of which an example has just been given; but he called her a liar more than once with considerable indelicacy, and his readers will without much trouble come to the conclusion that his indelicacy was preferable to his delicacy--it certainly came more natural to him. He was small and mean in all his ways, and never smaller or meaner than in his references to Mrs. Thrale's second marriage.

But, it must be repeated, he did not stand alone in regarding her union with Piozzi as a _mésalliance_. Dr. Burney was shocked at the thought that any respectable woman would so far forget herself as to marry a musician, and his daughter Fanny wept remorseful tears when she reflected that she had once been the friend of a lady who did not shrink from marrying a foreigner and a Roman Catholic--more of the irony of Fate, for Fanny Burney was herself guilty of the same indiscretion later on: she made a happy marriage with a Roman Catholic foreigner, who lived on her pension and her earnings. Dr. Johnson was brutal when the conviction was forced upon him that he would no longer have an opportunity of insulting a lady who had treated him with incredible kindness, or the guests whom he met at her table. Upon one of the last occasions of his dining at Mrs. Thrale's house at Streatham, a gentleman present--an inoffensive Quaker--ventured to make a remark respecting the accuracy with which the red-hot cannon-balls were fired at the Siege of Gibraltar. Johnson listened for some time, and then with a cold sneer said, “I would advise you, sir, never to relate this story again. You really can scarce imagine how very poor a figure you make in the telling of it.” Later on he took credit to himself for not quarrelling with his victim when the latter chose to talk to his brother rather than to the man who had insulted him. Yes, it can quite easily be understood that Johnson should look on the marriage as a sad _mésalliance_, and possibly it is fair to assume from the letter which he wrote to the lady that he felt hurt when he heard that it was to take place.

Mrs. Thrale wrote to tell him that she meant to marry Piozzi, and received the following reply:

“Madam,--If I interpret your letter right, you are ignominiously married; if it is yet undone, let us once more talk together. If you have abandoned your children and your religion, God forgive your wickedness; if you have forfeited your fame and your country, may your folly do no further mischief!”

Possibly the lady may have gathered from the hint or two conveyed to her, with Boswellian delicacy, in this letter, that Johnson was displeased with her. At any rate, she replied, declining to continue the correspondence.

In her letter she summed up the situation exactly as a reasonable person, acquainted with all the facts, and knowing something of the first husband, would do.

“The birth of my second husband is not meaner than that of my first,” she wrote; “his sentiments are not meaner; his profession is not meaner; and his superiority in what he professes acknowledged by all mankind. It is want of fortune, then, that is ignominious; the character of the man I have chosen has no other claim to such an epithet. The religion to which he has always been a zealous adherent, will, I hope, teach him to forgive insults he has not deserved; mine will, I hope, enable [me] to bear them at once with dignity and patience. To hear that I have forfeited my fame is indeed the greatest insult I ever yet received. My fame is as unsullied as snow, or I should think it unworthy of him who must henceforth protect it.”

This brought the surly burly mass of offended dignity to his proper level; but still he would not offer the lady who had been his benefactress for twenty years an apology for his brutality. He had the presumption to offer his advice instead--advice and the story (highly appropriate from his point of view) of Mary Queen of Scots and the Archbishop of St. Andrews. He advised her to remain in England--he would not relinquish his room in her house and his place at her table without a struggle--as her rank would be higher in England than in Italy, and her fortune would be under her own eye. The latter suggestion was a delicate insult to Piozzi.

Mrs. Piozzi, as she then became, showed that she esteemed this piece of presumption, under the guise of advice, at its true value. Immediately after her marriage she went abroad with her husband, though eventually she settled with him in England.

Now, most modern readers will, we think, when they have become acquainted with the whole story of Mrs. Thrale's life, arrive at the conclusion that it was her first marriage that was the _mésalliance_, not her second.

Henry Thrale was a man of humble origin--a fact that revealed itself almost daily in his life--and he was incapable of loving any one except himself. He certainly never made a pretence of devotion to his wife, and it is equally certain that, although she did more for him than any other woman would have done, she never loved him. It might be going too far, considering the diversity of temperament existing among womankind, to assert that he was incapable of being loved by any woman; but beyond a doubt he was not a lovable man. He was a stiff, dignified, morose, uncongenial man, and he was a Member of Parliament into the bargain. What could a pretty, lively, brilliant girl of good family see in such a man as Thrale to make her love him? She never did love him--at times she must have detested him. But she married him, and it was a lucky day for him that she did so. Twice she saved him from bankruptcy, and three times she induced his constituents, who thoroughly hated him, to return him to Parliament as their representative. He never did anything in Parliament, and he did little out of it that was worth remembering. It is customary to make large allowances for a man of business who finds that his wealth and a charming wife serve as a passport into what is called society, though latterly such men do not stand in need of such a favour being shown to them. But if a man betrays his ignorance of certain social usages--not necessarily refinements--his friends excuse him on the ground that he is a first-rate business man. Thrale, however, was unworthy of such a title. He inherited a great scientific business, but he showed himself so incapable of appreciating the methods by which it had been built up, that he brought himself within a week or two of absolute ruin by listening to a clumsy adventurer who advocated the adoption of a system of adulteration of his beer that even a hundred and fifty years ago would have brought him within sight of a criminal prosecution.

His literary wife, by her clever management, aided by the money of her mother and of sundry of her own, not her husband's, friends, succeeded in staving off the threatened disaster. But the pig-headed man did not accept the lesson which one might imagine he would have learned. Seeing the success that crowned other enterprises of the same character as his own, he endeavoured to emulate this success, not by the legitimate way of increasing his customers, but by the idiotic plan of over-production. He had an idea that in the multiplying of the article which he had to sell he was increasing his business. Once again he was helped from the verge of ruin by his literary wife.

He must have been a dreadful trial to her, and to a far-seeing manager whom he had--a man named Perkins. Of course it was inevitable that the force of character possessed by this Mr. Perkins must eventually prevail against the dignified incompetence of the proprietor. The inevitable happened, and the name of Perkins has for more than a hundred years been bracketed with Barclay as a going concern, while the name of Thrale has vanished for ever from “the Borough.”

It was this Mr. Perkins who, when the brewery was within five minutes of absolute disaster, displayed the tactics of a great general in the face of an implacable enemy, and saved the property. As a reward for his services his master authorised the presentation to him of the sum of a hundred pounds. His master's wife, however, being a more generous assessor of the value of the man's ability, ventured to present double the sum, together with a silver tea-service for Mrs. Perkins; but she did so in fear and trembling, failing to summon up sufficient courage to acquaint her husband with her extravagance until further concealment was impossible. She was so overjoyed at his sanctioning the increase that she at once wrote to her friends acquainting them with this evidence of his generosity.

This episode was certainly the most stirring in the history of Thrale's brewery. The Gordon rioters had been terrorising London for several days, burning houses in every direction, as well as Newgate and another prison, and looting street after street. They had already overthrown one brewery, and they found the incident so fascinating that they marched across the bridge to the Southwark concern, raising the cry that Thrale was a Papist. The Thrales were at this time sojourning at Bath, and were in an agony of suspense regarding their property. They had left Dr. Johnson comfortably ensconced at their Streatham house in order that they might learn in dignified language how things were going on.

This is Johnson's thrilling account of the incident:

“What has happened to your house you all know. The harm is only a few butts of beer, and I think you may be sure that the danger is over. Pray tell Mr. Thrale that I live here, and have no fruit, and if he does not interpose am not likely to have much; but I think he might as well give me a little as give all to the gardener.”

There was a double catastrophe threatening, it would appear: the burning of the brewery and the shortage in the supply of Dr. Johnson's peaches.

This is how Mrs. Thrale describes the situation:

“Nothing but the astonishing presence of mind shewed by Perkins in amusing the mob, with meat and drink and huzzas, till Sir Philip Jennings Clerke could get the troops, and pack up the counting-house, bills, bonds etc. and carry them, which he did, to Chelsea College for safety, could have saved us from actual undoing. The villains _had_ broke in, and our brew-house would have blazed in ten minutes, when a property of £150,000 would have been utterly lost, and its once flourishing possessors quite undone.”

It seems almost incredible that Johnson, living at Streatham as the guardian of Mr. Thrale's interests, should require the lady to write to him, begging him to thank Perkins for his heroism. But so it was.

“Perkins has behaved like an Emperor,” she wrote, “and it is my earnest wish and desire--command, if you please to call it so--that you will go over to the brew-house and express _your_ sense of his good behaviour.”

Mrs. Thrale was unreasonable. How could Johnson be expected to take any action when he was deprived of his peaches?

It will strike a good many modern readers of the account of this and other transactions that if it was Perkins who saved the brewery for Mr. Thrale, it was Mrs. Thrale who saved Perkins for the brewery. Possibly it was her prompt gift of the silver plate to Mrs. Perkins that induced this splendid manager to pocket the insult of the beggarly two hundred guineas given to him by Mrs. Thrale--though this was double the amount authorised by the “master.” Thrale never sufficiently valued the services of Perkins. If he had had any gratitude in his composition he would never have made Johnson one of his executors. What a trial it must have been to the competent man of business to see Johnson lumbering about the place with a pen behind his ear and an ink-pot suspended from a button of his coat, getting in the way of everybody, and yet feeling himself quite equal to any business emergency that might crop up. He felt himself equal to anything--even to improve upon the auctioneer's style in appraising the value of the whole concern. “Beyond the dreams of avarice” remains as the sole classic phrase born beneath the shadow of a brew-house.

In the matter of the premium to Perkins, Thrale should have felt that he had a treasure in his wife, to say nothing of all that she had done for him upon another occasion, involving a terrible sacrifice. A quarrel had broken out among the clerks at the brewery, which even the generalship of Perkins was unable to mollify. Had Mrs. Thrale been an ordinary woman she would not have jeopardised her own life and the life of her child--her thirteenth--in her husband's interests. As it was, however, she felt that the duty was imposed on her to settle the difficulties in the counting-house, and she did so; but only after many sleepless nights and the sacrifice of her child. “The men were reconciled,” she wrote, “and my danger accelerated their reconcilement.”

If Henry Thrale was deficient in the best characteristics of a business man, his qualifications to shine socially can scarcely be regarded as abundant. There were stories of his having been a gay dog in his youth, but assuredly he and gaiety had long been strangers when he married his wife, and upon no occasion afterwards could he be so described even by the most indulgent of his friends; so that one rather inclines to the belief that the dull dog must have been a dull puppy. We know what his eldest daughter was, and we are convinced that the nature of that priggish, dignified, and eminently disagreeable young lady was inherited from her father. In Miss Thrale as a girl one feels that one is looking at Henry Thrale as a boy. The only story that survives of those mythical gay days with which he was accredited is that relating to the arrival of the Gunnings to take London by storm. It was said that he and Murphy thought to make these exquisite creatures the laughing-stock of the town by introducing them to a vulgar hanger-on of Murphy, in the character of a wealthy man of title and distinction. Possibly the two young men were put up to play this disgraceful prank upon the Gunnings by some jealous female associate; but however this may be, it not only failed most ignominiously, it recoiled upon the jesters themselves, for Mrs. Gunning, herself the sister of a nobleman, and destined to become the mother-in-law of two dukes and the grandmother of two more--the parent of a peeress in her own right, and an uncommonly shrewd Irishwoman into the bargain--“smoaked,” as the slang of the period had it, the trick, and her footman bundled the trio into the street.

The story may be true; but as both the Gunning girls were married in 1752, and Thrale did not meet Hester Lynch Salusbury till 1763, it was an old story then, and it was not remembered against him except by the Duchess of Hamilton. If it represents the standard of his adolescent wildness, we cannot but think that his youth was less meteoric than his wife believed it to be. At any rate, we do not know much about his early life, but we do know a great deal about his latter years, and it is impossible to believe that his nature underwent a radical change within a year or two of his marriage.

He became the host of a large number of the most notable people of that brilliant period at which he lived, and we perceive from the copious accounts that survive of the Streatham gatherings that he was greatly respected by all his visitors. He never said anything that was worth recording, and he never did anything memorable beyond stopping Johnson when the latter was becoming more than usually offensive to his fellow-guests. He had no ear for music any more than Johnson had, and it does not appear that he cared any more for painting, although he became a splendid patron of Sir Joshua Reynolds, whom he commissioned to paint several portraits of his distinguished friends for the decoration of the library at Streatham. To his munificence in this respect the world owes its finest portraits of Goldsmith, Burke, Garrick, the painter himself, and Mrs. Thrale.

The debt which we feel we owe to Thrale on this account is, however, somewhat discounted when we learn that this enthusiastic patron of art never paid the painter for his work. He left the pictures and the obligation to pay for them as a legacy to his widow--and to pay for them at more than the current rate for each into the bargain. Sir Joshua Reynolds was as good a man of business as Thrale was an indifferent one. At the time of his painting the portraits his price for a three-quarter-length picture was £35, but in the course of a year or two he felt it necessary to charge £50 for the same size, and this was the price which the unfortunate widow had to pay for her husband's pose as the munificent patron of the Arts.

Men of the stamp of Thrale usually have no vices.

They are highly respected. If they had a vice or two they would be beloved. He had a solitary failing, but it did not win for him the affection of any one: it was gluttony. For years of his life he gave himself up to the coarsest form of indulgence. He was not a gourmet: he did not aim at the refinements of the table or at those daintinesses of cuisine which in the days of intemperate eaters and drinkers proved so fatally fascinating to men of many virtues; no, his was the vice of the trough. He ate for the sake of eating, unmindful of the nature of the dish so long as it was plentiful enough to keep him employed for an hour or two.

The dinner-table of the famous Streatham Park must have been a spectacle for some of the philosophers who sat round it. We know what was the food that Johnson's soul loved, and we know how he was accustomed to partake of it. He rioted in pork, and in veal baked with raisins, and when he sat down to some such dainty he fed like a wild animal. He used his fingers as though they were claws, tearing the flesh from the bone in his teeth, and swallowing it not wholly without sound. It is not surprising to learn that his exertions caused the veins in his forehead to swell and the beads of perspiration to drop from his scholarly brow, nor can any one who has survived this account of his muscular feat at the dinner-table reasonably be amazed to hear that when so engaged, he devoted himself to the work before him to the exclusion of every other interest in life. He was oblivious of anything that was going on around him. He was deaf to any remark made by a neighbour, and for himself articulation was suspended. Doubtless the feeble folk on whom he had been trampling in the drawing-room felt that his peculiarities of feeding, though revolting to the squeamish, were not without a bright side. They had a chance of making a remark at such intervals without being gored--“gored,” it will be remembered, was the word employed by Boswell in playful allusion to the effect of his argumentative powers.

Thanks to the careful habits of some of the guests at this famous house we know what fare was placed before the Gargantuan geniuses at one of these dinners. Here is the _carte du jour_, “sufficient for twelve,” as the cookery book says:

“First course, soups at head and foot, removed by fish and a saddle of mutton; second course, a fowl they call galena at head and a capon larger than some of our Irish turkeys at foot; third course, four different sorts of ices, pine-apple, grape, raspberry and a fourth; in each remove there were fourteen dishes.” The world is indebted to an Irish clergyman for these details. It will be seen that they did not include much that could be sneered at as bordering on the kickshaw. All was good solid English fare--just the sort to make the veins in a gormandiser's forehead to swell and to induce the lethargy from which Thrale suffered. He usually fell asleep after dinner; one day he failed to awake, and he has not awakened since.

Of course Johnson, being invariably in delicate health, was compelled to put himself on an invalid's diet when at home. He gives us a sample of a _diner maigre_ at Bolt Court. Feeling extremely ill, he wrote to Mrs. Thrale that he could only take for dinner “skate, pudding, goose, and green asparagus, and could have eaten more but was prudent.” He adds, “Pray for me, dear Madam,”--by no means an unnecessary injunction, some people will think, when they become aware of the details of the meal of an invalid within a year or two of seventy.

It was after one of the Streatham dinners that Mrs. Thrale ventured to say a word or two in favour of Garrick's talent for light gay poetry, and as a specimen repeated his song in _Florizel and Perdita_, and dwelt with peculiar pleasure on this line:

_I'd smile with the simple and dine with the poor._

This is Boswell's account of the matter, and he adds that Johnson cried, “Nay, my dear lady, this will never do. Poor David! Smile with the simple! What folly is that? And who would feed with the poor that can help it? No, no; let me smile with the wise and feed with the rich!”

Quite so; beyond a doubt Johnson spoke from the bottom of his heart--nay, from a deeper depth still.

Boswell was amazed to find that Garrick's “sensibility” as a writer was irritated when he related the story to him, and in Mrs. Thrale's copy of Johnson she made a note--“How odd to go and tell the man!”

It was not at all odd that Boswell, being a professional tale-bearer and mischief-maker, should tell the man; but it is odd that Garrick should be irritated, the fact being that the sally was directed against a line which he did not write. What Garrick did write was something very different. The verse, which was misquoted, runs thus:

That giant Ambition we never can dread;

Our roofs are too low for so lofty a head;

Content and sweet Cheerfulness open our door,

They smile with the simple and feed with the poor.

Such a muddle as was made of the whole thing can only be attributed to the solidity of the Streatham fare.

It was inevitable that Thrale could not continue over-eating himself with impunity. He was warned more than once by his doctors that he was killing himself, and yet when he had his first attack every one was shocked. He recovered temporarily, and all his friends implored him to cultivate moderation at the dinner-table. A touch of humour is to be found among the details of the sordid story, in his wife's begging Johnson--Johnson of the swollen forehead and the tokens of his submission to the primeval curse in the eating of his bread--to try to reason the unhappy man out of his dreadful vice. After wiping from the front of his coat the remains of the eighth peach which he had eaten before breakfast, or the dregs of his nineteenth cup of tea from his waistcoat, Johnson may have felt equal to the duty. He certainly remonstrated with Thrale. It was all to no purpose, however; he had a second attack of apoplexy in the spring of 1780, and we hear that he was copiously “blooded.” He recovered and went to Bath to recruit. It was during this visit to Bath that the brewery was attacked by the Gordon rioters. On returning to London he failed to induce his constituents to remain faithful to him, and he continued eating voraciously for another year. He began a week of gorging on April 1st, 1781. His wife implored him to be more moderate, and Johnson said very wisely, “Sir, after the denunciation of your physicians this morning, such eating is little better than suicide.” It was all to no purpose. He survived the gorge of Sunday and Monday, but that of Tuesday was too much for him. He was found by his daughter on the floor in a fit of apoplexy, and died the next morning.

Such was the man whose memory was outraged by the marriage of his widow with Piozzi, an Italian musician, whose ability was so highly appreciated that his earnings, even when he had lost his voice, amounted to £1200 a year, a sum equal to close upon £2500 of our money. And yet Johnson had the effrontery to suggest in that letter of his to Mrs. Thrale, which we have quoted, that she would do well to live in England, so that her money might be under her own eye!

The truth is that Mrs. Thrale was in embarrassed circumstances when she married Signor Piozzi. Her worthy husband left her an annuity of £2000, which was to be reduced by £800 in the event of her marrying again; and also £500 for her immediate expenses. Johnson wrote to her, making her acquainted with this fact, in order, it would seem, to allay any unworthy suspicion which she might entertain as to the extent of her husband's generosity. But his last will and testament cannot have wholly dispersed the doubt into which her experience of Mr. Thrale may have led her. For a man who had been making from £16,000 to £20,000 a year to leave his wife only £2000 a year, with a possibility of its being reduced to £1200, would not strike any one as being generous to a point of recklessness. When, however, it is remembered that Thrale's wife plucked him and his business from the verge of bankruptcy more than once, that she bore him fourteen children, and that she lived with him for eighteen years, all question as to the generosity of his bequest to her vanishes. But when, in addition, it is remembered that the lady's fortune at her marriage to Thrale amounted to £10,000, all of which he pocketed, and that later on she brought him another £500 a year, that it was her mother's money, added to the sum which she herself collected personally, which saved the brewery from collapse--once again at the sacrifice of her infant--all question even of common fairness disappears, and the meanness of the man stands revealed.

It was through the exertions and by the business capacity of his widow that the brewery was sold for £135,000. She was the only one of the trustees who knew anything definite about the value of the property, and had she not been on the spot, that astute Mr. Perkins could have so worked the concern that he might have been able to buy it in a year or two for the value of the building materials. And yet when she became involved in a lawsuit that involved the paying of £7000, she had difficulty in persuading her daughters' trustees to advance her the money, although the security of the mortgage which she offered for the accommodation would have satisfied any bankers. A wretch named Crutchley, who was one of this precious band of incompetents, on the completion of the deed bade her thank her daughters for keeping her out of gaol. It is not recorded that the lady replied, though she certainly might have done so, and with truth on her side, that if her daughters had kept her out of a gaol she had kept her daughters out of a workhouse. She would have done much better to have gone to her friends the Barclays, whose bank had a hundred and fifty years ago as high a reputation for probity combined with liberality as the same concern enjoys to-day.

Enough of the business side of Mrs. Thrale's second marriage has been revealed to make it plain that Piozzi was not influenced by any mercenary motives in the transaction. On the contrary, it was he who came to her assistance when she was in an extremity, and by the prompt loan of £1000 extricated her from her embarrassment, and left the next day for Italy, without having any hope of marrying her.

Johnson's verdict on Piozzi, communicated to Miss Seward, was that he was an ugly dog, without particular skill in his profession. Unfortunately for this musical enthusiast and devotee to beauty, Miss Seward met Piozzi on his return from Italy with his wife. (His excellent control of her money had resulted in every penny of the mortgage being paid, and of the lodgment of £1500 to their credit in the bank). And Miss Seward, writing from Lichfield--more of the irony of Fate--in 1787, affirmed that the great Lichfield man “did not tell me the truth when he asserted that Piozzi was an ugly dog, without particular skill in his profession. M. Piozzi is a handsome man in middle life, with gentle, pleasing, unaffected manners, and with very eminent skill in his profession. Though he has not a powerful or fine-toned voice, he sings with transcending grace and expression. I was charmed with his perfect expression on his instrument. Surely the finest sensibilities must vibrate through his frame, since they breathe so sweetly through his song.” From this verdict no person who was acquainted with Signor Piozzi differed. Mrs. Thrale's marriage with Piozzi was as fortunate for her as her first marriage was for Thrale.

A TRAGEDY IN THE HAYMARKET

ABOUT half-past nine o'clock on the night of October 6th, 1769, a tall, middle-aged gentleman named Joseph Baretti was walking up the Hay-market. The street was probably as well lighted as any other in London, and this is equivalent to saying that a foot passenger, by keeping close to the windows of the shops and taking cross bearings of the economically distributed oil lamps hung out at the corners of the many lanes, might be able to avoid the deep channel of filth that slunk along the margin of cobble stones. But just at this time the Haymarket must have been especially well illuminated, for the Opera House was in the act of discharging its audience, and quite a number of these fashionable folk went home in their chairs, with link boys walking by the side of the burly Irish chairmen, showing a flaring flame which left behind it a long trail of suffocating smoke, and spluttered resin and bitumen into the faces and upon the garments of all who were walking within range of the illuminant. Then there was the little theatre higher up the street, and its lamps were not yet extinguished; so that Mr. Baretti may have felt that on the whole he was fortunate in the hour he had chosen for his stroll to the coffee-house where he meant to sup. He may have thought that he had a chance of coming across his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds leaving one of the playhouses, and of being invited by that hospitable gentleman to his house in Leicester Fields; or his still more intimate friend Dr. Samuel Johnson, who would certainly insist on carrying him off to the “Mitre,” unless the great man were accompanied by that little Scotch person, James Boswell, who usually wanted him all to himself, after he had given people a chance of seeing him in the company of his distinguished friend, and envying him his position of intimacy--the same position of intimacy that exists between a Duke and his doormat. Mr. Baretti was too short-sighted to have any chance of recognising Sir Joshua Reynolds unless he chanced to be standing under the lamp in the portico of the playhouse, but he felt that he would have no trouble in recognising Dr. Johnson. The latter had characteristics that appealed to other senses than the sense of seeing, and made the act of recognition easy enough to his intimates.

Mr. Baretti, however, passed along the dispersing crowd, and was soon in the dim regions of Panton Street, where pedestrians were few. But before he had turned down this street he found his way barred by a couple of half-drunken women. His infirmity of sight prevented his being aware of their presence until he was almost in the arms of one of them, and the very second that he made his sudden stop she made a change in the details of the accident that seemed imminent and threw herself into his arms with a yell.

The good man was staggered for a moment, but, recovering himself, he flung her off with an expressive word or two in the Italian tongue. She went limply back and, being adroitly avoided by her companion, gave a circular stagger or two and fell into the gutter with a screech.

Baretti was hurrying on when out of the darkness of Panton Street a big man sprang, followed quickly by two others. The first seized him by the right arm with the oath of a bully, the others tried to trip him up, shouting that he had killed a lady. Baretti was a powerful man and decidedly tough. He struck at the fellow who had closed with him, and used his feet against the attack of the others with considerable effect. He managed to free his arm, but before he could draw his sword he was pulled backward and would have fallen upon his head if he had not clutched the coat of the man from whom he had freed himself. There was a pause of a few seconds, filled up by the wild street yell of the women. The most aggressive of the three men leapt upon the unfortunate Baretti, but before their bodies met, gave a guttural shriek, then a groan. He staggered past, his fingers tearing like talons at his ribs; he whirled twice round and, gasping, fell on his knees, motionless only for a few seconds; his hands dropped limply from his side, and he pitched forward on his head into the gutter.

Baretti was standing, awaiting a further attack, with a knife in his hand, when he was seized by some of the crowd. He offered no resistance. He seemed to be so amazed at finding himself alive as to be incapable of taking any further action.

“He has killed the man--stabbed him with a dagger to the very heart!” was the cry that came from those of the crowd who were kneeling beside the wretch in the gutter.

“And a woman--he had slain a woman at the outset. Hold him fast. None of us are safe this night. Have a care for the dagger, friends!”

A sufficiency of advice was given by the excited onlookers to the men who had encircled Baretti--one of them was clinging to him with his arms clasped around his body--until two of the Haymarket watch hurried up, striking right and left with their staves after the wholesome manner of the period, and so making a way for their approach through the crowd.

“'Tis more than a street brawl--a man has been slain--some say a woman also,” a shopkeeper explained to them, having run bareheaded out of his shop; his apprentice had just put up the last of the shutters.

They had Baretti by the collar in a second, cautiously disarming him, holding the weapon up to the nearest lamp. The blade was still wet with blood.

“A swinging matter this,” one of them remarked. “I can swear to the blood. No dagger, but a knife. What man walks the streets at night with a naked knife unless slaughter is his intent?”

“Friends, I was attacked by three bullies, and I defended myself--that is all,” said Baretti. He spoke English perfectly.

“You will need to tell that to Sir John in the morning,” said one of the watchmen. “You are apprehended in the King's name. Where is the poor victim?”

“There must be some of the crowd who saw how I was attacked,” said Baretti. “They will testify that I acted in self-defence. Sirs, hear me make an appeal to you. Out of your sense of justice--you will not see an innocent man apprehended.”

“The knife--who carries a bare knife in the streets unless with intent?” said a man.

“'Twas my fruit-knife. I never go abroad without it. I eat my fruit like a Christian, not like a pig or an Englishman,” was the defence offered by Baretti, who had now quite lost his temper and was speaking with his accustomed bitterness. He usually sought to pass as an Englishman, but he was now being arrested by the minions of the law as it was in England.

“Hear him! A pig of an Englishman. Those were his words! A foreign hound. Frenchie, I'll be bound.”

“A spy--most like a Papist. He has the hanging brow of a born Papist.”

“He'll hang like a dog at Tyburn--he may be sure o' that.”

“'Tis the mercy o' Heaven that the rascal was caught red-handed! Sirs, this may be the beginning of a dreadful massacring plot against the lives of honest and peaceful people.”

The comments of a crowd of the period upon such an incident as the stabbing of an Englishman by a foreigner in the streets of London can easily be imagined.

Even when Baretti was put into a hackney coach and driven off to Bow Street the crowd doubtless remained talking in groups of the menace to English freedom and true religion by the arrival of pestilent foreigners, every man of them carrying a knife. It would be a sad day for England when Jesuitical fruit-knives took the place of good wholesome British bludgeons in the settlement of the ordinary differences incidental to a Protestant people.

It is certain that this was one of the comments of the disintegrating crowd, and it is equally certain that Baretti commented pretty freely to his custodians in the hackney coach upon the place occupied in the comity of nations of that State, the social conditions of whose metropolis made possible so gross a scandal as the arrest of a gentleman and a scholar, solely by reason of his success in snatching his life out of the talons of a ruffian and a bully.

Mr. Baretti was a gentleman and a scholar whose name appears pretty frequently in the annals of the eighteenth century, but seldom with any great credit to himself. As a matter of fact, this dramatic episode of the stabbing of the man in the Haymarket is the happiest with which his name is associated. He made his most creditable appearance in the chronicles of the period as the chief actor in this sordid drama. He cuts a very poor figure indeed upon every other occasion when he appears in the pages of his contemporaries, though they all meant to be kind to him.

He never could bear people to be kind to him, and certainly, so far as he himself was concerned, it cannot be said that any blame attaches to him for the persistence of his friends in this direction. He did all that mortal man could do to discourage them, and if after the lapse of a year or two he was still treated by some with cordiality or respect, assuredly it was not owing to his display of any qualities that justified their maintenance of such an attitude.

Mr. Baretti was an eminently detestable scholar of many parts. He was as detestable as he was learned--perhaps even more so. Learned men are not invariably horrid, unless they are men of genius as well, and this rarely happens.

Baretti had no such excuse, though it must be acknowledged that his capacity for being disagreeable almost amounted to genius. Such a character as his is now and again met with in daily life. A man who feels himself to be, in point of scholarly attainment, far above the majority of men, and who sees inferiority occupying a place of distinction while he remains neglected and, to his thinking, unappreciated, is not an uncommon figure in learned or artistic circles. Baretti was a disappointed man, and he showed himself to be such. He had a grievance against the world for being constituted as it is. He had a grievance against society. He had a grievance against his friends who got on in the world. But the only people against whom he was really malevolent were those who were signally and unaccountably kind to him. He accepted their kindness, and then turned and rent them.