Mr. Barclay the Quaker, and her old friend Mr. Perkins, the head clerk; the dwelling-house in the Borough being thrown in at the last as a gift from Mrs. Thrale to Mrs. Perkins. fort they expected. Signor Piozzi the singer, sent for by the queen of France, had also been absent, and was now also returned, "loaded with presents, honours, and emoluments." "When he comes, and For fifteen years Johnson had called I come," Johnson had said in one of his Streatham his home. The white house letters, "you will have two about you that on the common had come to be dear and love you; and I question if either of us familiar to the old man beyond what he heartily care how few more you have." or the world knew; and he would willing- The philosopher was already jealous; and ly have continued a fixture there to his still more so when Mrs. Thrale's pleasure life's end. Any change was for him sim- in Piozzi's society increased day by day. ple loss. His dear "mistress," saddened To make matters more difficult, Johnson, but not quite broken-hearted, with the now in his seventy-third year, was already pretty Queeney growing into womanhood sinking into an unhealthy old age. The at her side, and himself in her cosiest huge frame was tortured by symptoms of easy-chair, or presiding among the wits asthma, dropsy, and other painful diseases, and notables at her sumptuous board: partly inherited, partly the result of unthis was the pleasant picture he had drawn wholesome habits of living. His rich, for himself of what might still be. "Let full mind and big heart had as much of us pray for one another," he had written vitality as ever, or more; but the temper, to her in the early days of her widow- never a gentle one, had become, to those hood; "when we meet, we may try what who loved him most, captious, fretful, and fidelity and tenderness will do for us." extortionate. He had reached a period The sale of the brewery and subsequent in his life when the most unfit companion retrenchments disturbed to a considerable for him in the world was a lady, herself degree the magnanimity of Johnson's sor- weighed down with suffering and domesSOW. His dream-fabric tottered visibly. | tic anxiety, but with a spirit of joy in her "The diminution of the estate, though that rebelled at the prospect of sorrow. unpleasing and unexpected, must," he said, "be borne, because it cannot be helped." He and she were to make good resolutions before they met, which on his side he hoped to keep; but such hopes are very deceitful, and "I would not will-pressed it, his old friend for kindness, ingly think the same of all hopes," he added, very ambiguously. From Lichfield, with poor dying Lucy Porter at his side, palsied Mrs. Aston, and other aged and ailing friends, he wrote to her: "There is little of the sunshine of life, and my own health does not gladden me. But, to scatter the gloom, I went last night to the ball, where, you know, I can be happy even without you. On the ball, which was very gay, I looked a while, and went away." What dreams of the preposterously happy, what visions of far-off sunny Streatham, filled the old man's mind as he stood watching the dancers through dim half-closed eyes on that last night of October 1781, are not now to be recorded. The little widow's replies to his constant letters are sprightly and trim, with here and there a touch of filial tenderness, or of half-concealed pain, as when she says, "Come home, however, for 'tis dull living without you. You are not happy away, and I fear I shall never be happy again in this world between one thing and another." Their reunion at the close of the year did not bring to either the com By a process too natural to require explanation, Johnson's residence at Streatham became less habitual than formerly. But he continued to write from the dusky retreat of Bolt Court, dunning, as she ex wishing himself back with her at Streatham, detailing his complaints and medicines, and peevishly repining at his own old age. The tie of many years was hard to break; and, when Streatham Park was let on lease, in 1782, to Lord Shelburne, afterwards Marquis of Lansdowne, Dr. Johnson accompanied Mrs. Thrale and her family to Brighton, returning with them in the winter to Argyle Street, London, where Boswell found him, very ill but kindly tended, in the following March. Between this last date, however, and June 17th, 1783, an irremediable break had occurred in the friendship of Johnson and Mrs. Thrale. No sooner had her husband been laid at rest beside his little son in Streatham Church than the gossips had set themselves to map out his widow's future. She was angry enough at them for fancying her "such an amorous idiot." Lord Loughborough, Sir Richard Jebb, Mr. Piozzi, Mr. Selwyn, Dr. Johnson, every man that came to the house, she complained, was put in the papers for her to marry. She wrote to the Morning Herald, begging it to say no more about her, good or bad, took refuge in the country, and had more than half a mind to leave England altogether. "One day," she writes in her diary, "the paper rings with my marriage to Johnson, one day to Crutchley, one day to Seward. I give no reason for such impertinence, but cannot deliver myself from it. Whitbread, the rich brewer, is in love with me too: oh, I would rather, as Anne Page says, be set breast deep in the earth and be bowled to death with turnips." Still, though incensed at this random gossip, Mrs. Thrale had a fair consciousness of her own eligibility and power. She remembered her wealth, her ancient lineage, her reputation for wit and learning, and triumphed to herself, between the pages of her diary, that to marry for love would be rational in her, who wanted no advancement of birth or fortune; and, "till I am in love," she added, "I will not marry, nor perhaps then." That she did eventually promise her hand to the singer Piozzi has puzzled her biographers as it at first puzzled, nay, astounded, her family and friends. They regarded the act as little less than a crime against society, her children, and herself. What could a woman with three thousand a year, half a dozen daughters, and a considerable reputation for talent, care for a man who was known only for his music? True it was, the singer had long since lost his voice, that he was neither poor, nor very handsome, nor in any sense an adventurer. He was in fact eminently respectable and harmless; and she loved him. This fact constituted his greatest virtue and her most unpardonable folly. Johnson and Burney bemoaned together with wet eyes the weakness of their former hostess and their own loosened hold of her affection. The two drove into London from Streatham on one occasion to gether-Burney in the secret of the loveaffair, and very grave and sad; Johnson either innocent of it or pretending to be So. But the heart of the old man was none the less heavy. "His look," says the lady, "was stern, though dejected, as he followed her into the vehicle;" and he was overcome with emotion as, with a shaking hand and pointing finger, he directed her looks to the mansion from which they were driving, and, when they faced it from the coach window as they turned into Streatham Common, tremulously exclaimed, "That house is lost to me- forever!" Too long indeed had the "Streathamites" dreamt that Mrs. Thrale and all that was hers belonged to them; and now it was a bitter thing to 66 find that she was strictly and wholly free, and knew it. Could some one among that crowd of literary men and women, who had feasted and paraded all those years in the gardens and gay rooms of Streatham, have been sufficiently heroic to think and say that she was in the right! And, still more, could that single-handed champion have been the great and revered Dr. Johnson! A word from him at that time would have silenced the whole midge swarm of discontents, with Burney at their head. And might it not have been? Might he not, sitting over his fire on his two-legged stool in Bolt Court, have called to mind her long and spirited service to her master," her tears over her dying babies, her bright and innocent wit, which had so often dispelled for him the gathering clouds of gloom and sickness? And might not he, the wise old man, have given due weight to the fact that all her tenderness, all her devotion, all her vanity, had hitherto been called into play only by old men, by children, by strangers! But other and less kind thoughts rankled in the heart of the old lexicographer. He joined, alas, the midge swarm; hated Piozzi, with his plain face and broken English, despised Mrs. Thrale, and let the inquisitive world know that he did so. There are few more ugly stories on record than that of Johnson's quarrel with the little widow. Early in 1783, Mrs. Thrale was induced by the persecution of her children and the public to bid good-bye to her lover, who at her request at once gave up her letters to her eldest daughter, and prepared to leave England. The poor lady's health appeared at this time completely broken, and she was moreover much harassed by debts, the heaviest of which had been incurred by her father, and fell now upon her as his heir. Placing her younger children at school in Streatham, she left Argyle Street, and went with the elder ones to Bath, where she hoped to live in retirement, out of reach of her "friends," and to pay her debts. The little Streatham schoolgirls, however, fell ill in the spring of measles and whooping-cough, and one of them died. The poor mother, herself seriously ill, started from Bath to visit them. She lodged in Streatham, avoiding "hateful London," "for fear of encountering Piozzi's eyes somewhere." Nor did she know, until Piozzi told her long after, when all their troubles were over, that he had been sitting at a front window of a public house on the road "all that dreadful Saturday," to see her carriage pass backwards and forwards to where the children resided. She had maintained her resolution not to see him again, and returned to Bath with a heavier heart than ever. When her child died, she had written to Dr. Johnson to inform him of her trouble; but the old friends did not meet whilst she was at Streatham; and his reply to her letter beginning, "I am glad that you went to Streatham, though you could not save the dear pretty little girl," went on at once to relate how he had been dining at the opening of the exhibition, with a splendid company, and other irrelevant gossip. A few more letters passed between them; he telling her the news of the day, and praising her "placid acquiescence "in her present mode of life; she writing back in a softened, broken-hearted strain, "very sick," she says, "and a little sullen, and disposed now and then to say like King David, 'My lovers and my friends have been put away from me, and my acquaintance hid out of my sight.'" These words were probably on their way from Bath to Bolt Court when Johnson was struck dumb by paralysis on the early morning of June 17th, 1783.. It was a strange impulse which made him, within a few hours of his visitation, write an elaborate and eloquent account of it to Mrs. Thrale; and this was followed up for some time by a regular diary of his disease addressed to her. Her replies amused him, and she, in her bitter solitude, accepted his lectures in a humbled spirit, and was obliged, consoled, and delighted" by them. "You are now retired," Johnson tells her, "and have nothing to impede self-examination or self-improvement. Endeavour to reform that instability of attention which your last letter has happened to betray." Oh, soul of Quintilian! Here was stuff for your copy-book headings, with a vengeance! Mrs. Thrale's miserable life during the year 1783, at Bath, was varied by a visit to Weymouth in the autumn, illnesses of her children in the winter, and correspondences with Dr. Johnson and Miss Burney. The last was in some sort her confidante; to her she could speak of her sufferings and their cause, and the two ladies regretted that they lived so far apart. Mrs. Thrale's daughters were now growing up about her, a bevy of proud, handsome girls, with fortunes of their own, and no little ambition of a small kind. "I have read to them," she tells Miss Burney in March 1784, "the Bible from beginning to end; the Roman and English histories; Milton, Shakespeare, Pope, and Young's works, from head to heel; Warton and Johnson's crit icisms on the poets; besides a complete system of dramatic writing; and the classics - I mean English classics — they are most perfectly acquainted with. Such works of Voltaire, too, as were not dangerous, we have worked at; 'Rollin des BellesLettres,' and a hundred more. But my best powers are past; and I think I must look out a lady to supply my deficiency to attend them, if they should like a jaunt next summer or so; for I will not quit Bath." Here at least she had her physicians about her, who knew how ill she was, and would do their best not to let her die; but of what other friends could she say as much? Her children's utter lack of sympathy with her, and Dr. Johnson's flagrant egotism, at length exasperated the poor lady into something like vigour of speech. "You tell one of my daughters," she wrote to Johnson, "that you know not with distinctness the cause of my complaints. I believe she, who lives with me, knows it no better." The lady then scolds him roundly, and in English as eloquent as his own. "It is kind in you to quarrel no more," she says, "about expressions which were not meant to offend; but unjust to suppose I have not lately thought myself dying. Let us, however, take the Prince of Abyssinia's advice, and not add to the other evils of life the bitterness of controversy. All this," she continues, relenting again, "is not written by a person in high health and happiness, but by a fellow-sufferer, who has more to endure than she can tell or you can guess; and now let us talk of the Severn salmons, which will be coming in soon: I shall send you one of the finest, and shall be glad to hear that your appetite is good." lady did not forget her promise, and three weeks later Dr. Johnson wrote: "The Hooles, Miss Burney, and Mrs. Hull (Wesley's sister), feasted yesterday with me very cheerfully on your noble salmon. Mr. Allen could not come, but I sent him a piece, and a great tail is still left." The While Dr. Johnson was enjoying an interval of comparative good health among his London friends, Mrs. Thrale was becoming each day more ill and more unhappy; until at length her good physician, taking the matter into his own hands, informed her daughters that he must write to Signor Piozzi concerning their mother's health. Piozzi, who was living in Milan, received Dr. Dobson's welcome epistle; and in eleven days he was at her side. In the mean time Mrs. Thrale had made up her mind to be broken-hearted no more. The guardians whom Mr. Thrale had placed over her children were formally acquainted with the fact; and that the three eldest, having heard that Mr. Piozzi was coming back from Italy, had left Bath for their own house at "Brighthelmstone." But Dr. Johnson received, in addition to the "circular," the following letter: — BATH, June 30. MY DEAR SIR,The inclosed is a circular letter which I have sent to all the guardians, but our friendship demands somewhat more; it requires that I should beg your pardon for concealing from you a connection which you must have heard of by many, but I suppose never believed. Indeed, my dear sir, it was concealed only to save us both needless pain; I could not have borne to reject that counsel it would have kilied me to take, and I only tell it you now because all is irrevocably settled and out of your power to prevent. I will say, however, that the dread of your disapprobation has given me some anxious moments; and, though perhaps I am become by many privations the most independent woman in the world, I feel as if acting without a parent's consent till you write kindly to Your faithful servant. This was Dr. Johnson's 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. If the last act is yet to do, I who have loved you, esteemed you, reverenced you, and served you, I who long thought you the first of womankind, entreat that, before your fate is irrev; ocable, I may once more see you. once was, madam, most truly yours, July 2, 1784. I was, SAM. JOHNSON. I I will come down if you permit it. Mrs. Thrale lost no time, but despatched a letter by the coach, "the more speedily and effectually to prevent" the doctor's visit. She was very angry now, and bid him rather a fiery farewell. The next post brought to her a softer missive, "one more sigh of tenderness, perhaps useless, but at least sincere." Her old irascible friend did not forget, he told her, in this moment of final separation, "the kindness which had soothed twenty years of a life radically wretched." His last advice was, however, that she should induce Mr. Piozzi to settle in England, "where her fortune would be more under her own eye;" his last peroration, enforcing that advice, was an eloquent allusion to the story of Queen Mary, who had crossed the fatal Solway in spite of a similar warning, and -suffered for it. The marriage which all the world was execrating was solemnized at Bath on July 25, 1784, and in a few weeks the Piozzis were on their way to Italy. Here, among her husband's own people and friends, Mrs. Piozzi found him popular and respected, while the proud Lombardians were at first disposed to doubt whether his wife whom he had brought to visit them could be a gentlewoman by birth, since her first husband was a brewer! The travellers were feasted and honoured wherever they went. When dukes, duchesses, marquises d'Araciel, and princes of Sisterna, showered kindness on her for Piozzi's sake, Mrs. Piozzi took good care to let her English friends hear of it. "Here's honour and glory for you!" she wrote home, in the joy of her heart. But it was not long before she had forgiven her enemies. To her children she lost no opportunity of sending presents and letters; and on December 7th, 1784, she wrote to a young law-student, Samuel Lysons, afterwards keeper of the Tower records: "Do not neglect Dr. Johnson; you will never see any other mortal so wise or so good. I works on my chimney." A week later, keep his picture in my chamber, and his and her old friend had breathed his last in his dingy home in Fleet Street, London. No sooner was the event known, and the old philosopher at rest under the stones of Westminster Abbey, than the printers were busy issuing "Anecdotes." Everybody who had a story of the dead lion was in a hurry to tell it; and of course Boswell and Mrs. Piozzi were looked to by all the world for the largest and most interesting collections. Her "Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, during the Last Twenty Years of his Life," were written in Italy immediately after the news of his death reached her, shipped off to England from Leghorn, and published in London in 1786, young Samuel Lysons making her bargain for her with Mr. Cadell the publisher. "Judge my transport and my husband's," she wrote nearly thirty years afterwards, "when at Rome we received letters saying the book was bought with such avidity that Cadell had not one copy left when the king sent for it at ten o'clock at night, and he was forced to beg one from a friend to supply his Majesty's impatience, who sate up all night reading it." Boswell, who was preparing his "pyramid," as he called his "Life of Johnson," was outraged at this sudden flare of feminine popularity, and strove to undermine his rival's position by accusing her of inaccuracy and untruth. His efforts were in vain. The whole of A the first impression of her little book was | English, and gentle, kindly manners. sold on the first day it was published; portrait of him is preserved among the 300l. were lying ready for her in her pub- family pictures at Brynbella, which reprelisher's hands; and her " Anecdotes" were sents him as good-looking, about forty the gossip of the whole town, although years old, in a straight-cut brown coat, Walpole sneered at them, Hannah More with frill and ruffles, and some leaves of yawned, and Peter Pindar grew funny. music in his hand; and one wing of the Italian villa which he built is still said to be haunted by the sounds of his violin. During his life Mr. Piozzi had attended with much prudence and economy to the somewhat confused money matters of his little wife. He had steered her safely through her debts; and at his death he left her mistress of everything they possessed, except a few thousands which he had saved before their marriage, and which he bequeathed to his relatives in Italy. During their residence in Italy, the Piozzis visited Salzburg in Bavaria, the ancient seat of the little Welshwoman's race; and the heralds there, examining her "schedule," acknowledged her, "to the triumphant delight of dear Piozzi," a true descendant of their own prince Adam. Mrs. Piozzi, though this was perhaps no great feather in her cap, shone with some éclat among the stars of the Della Crusca Academy in Florence, and wrote a preface to their "Miscellany" of verses, which Walpole called "short, sen- The loss of her husband left Mrs. Piozzi sible, and genteel." On their return to once more solitary in the world; but no London in 1787, Mr. and Mrs. Piozzi lived sorrow, not even the greatest sorrow of first in Hanover Square, and afterwards remembering happier things, could quench at her old home at Streatham Park. In now the sunshine which filled her life. the mean time her children had become During the twelve years which remained partially reconciled to their Italian step- for her, we see her, in her letters, and in father; and Cecilia, the youngest, after- the records of her friends, still happy, still wards Mrs. Mostyn, remained constantly triumphant, still supremely satisfied. For resident with her mother. Mrs. Piozzi's her, old age was no uglier, no sadder, than old friends discovered by degrees that her a plucked flower that lies doomed and marriage was after all no very dire misfor- sweet in the sunlight. She had had her tune to her or to them. Her dinners were full share of earthly joy, and the brightest as good a formerly, and her drawing-room day in her calendar was ever the anniverwas as much as ever the resort of notables sary of her second marriage. "No, my and eccentrics. After a few years, Piozzi, dear sir,” she wrote to a friend from Bath having become enraptured during a tour in 1817, "I will not stir from home till with the scenery of North Wales, built an after the 25th of July, which day made me Italian villa on the banks of the Clwydd, happy thirty-three years ago, after the sufnear to his wife's ruined mansion of Bachy-fering so many sorrows; and here will I graig, to which they gave the pretty hy-keep its beloved anniversary, always rebrid name of Brynbella; and to this spot membering he and his wife retired in 1795. French war in Italy in 1799 having involved Piozzi's relations in great difficulties, Mrs. Piozzi rescued from the general wreck a nephew of her husband, whom his parents had christened John Salusbury, after herself. The little Lombardian, with recollections in his baby head of bloody scenes in fighting cities, was brought to England; and Mrs. Piozzi adopted him as her heir. When he was old enough, she placed him at the school where her own son Henry Thrale had conned his Latin grammar some thirty years before; and the young Salusbury-Piozzi was reared by Henry's mother with exceptional tenderness and care. The Mr. Piozzi died at Brynbella in 1809, and was buried at the little church there. Legends of the courteous Italian linger in the neighbourhood of his broken St. James's Church and St. James's Day, Until 1814 she had continued to live at Brynbella, visiting occasionally both Bath and Streatham. But at this date young Salusbury left the university and married, and Mrs. Piozzi very generously relinquished to him and his young wife her little Welsh estate and its revenue. To compensate her daughters for their loss of it, she set to work to improve Streatham Park, which they would inherit at her death, and landed herself by this means in new and serious money difficulties. Nevertheless she jogged on, as lighthearted as ever, in her Bath lodging, with her two maids, and with a drawing of Brynbella over her chimney-piece-often, in spite of her 2,000l. a year, without 5% of ready money to spend on herself. She al |