genteel appearance, and that is all. I know nobody who blasts by praise as you do: for whenever there is exaggerated praise, every body is set against a character....By the same principle, your malice defeats itself; for your censure is too violent. And yet (looking to her with a leering smile) she is the first woman in the world, could she but restrain that wicked tongue of hers;—she would be the only woman, could she but command that little whirligig.' Shortly after this party Mr Thrale died, having made Johnson one of the executors of his will. "I could not but be somewhat diverted" says Boswell "by hearing Johnson talk in a pompous manner of his new office, and particularly of the concerns of the brewery, which it was at last resolved should be sold....When the sale...was going forward, Johnson appeared bustling about, with an ink-horn and pen in his button-hole, like an excise-man; and on being asked what he really considered to be the value of the property which was to be disposed of, answered, 'We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich, beyond the dreams of avarice'.' "The death of Mr Thrale...made a very material alteration with respect to Johnson's reception in that family. The manly authority of the husband no longer curbed the lively exuberance of the lady; and as her vanity had been fully gratified, by having the Colossus of Literature 1 The brewery is now the property of Messrs Barclay and Perkins. attached to her for many years, she gradually became less assiduous to please him." Johnson, however, continued to spend much of his time with Mrs Thrale both in London and Brighton. But near the end of Johnson's life there came the final blow to the friendship: "Dr Johnson had the mortification of being informed by Mrs Thrale, that, 'what she supposed he never believed,' was true; namely, that she was actually going to marry Signor Piozzi, an Italian musick-master. He endeavoured to prevent it; but in vain." Though he wrote rather bitterly of the marriage to his friends, Johnson was generous in his farewell letter to Mrs Thrale: "What you have done, however I may lament it, I have no pretence to resent, as it has not been injurious to me. I therefore breathe out one sigh more of tenderness, perhaps useless, but at least sincere.... Whatever I can contribute to your happiness I am very ready to repay, for that kindness which soothed twenty years of a life radically wretched." 124 A Fanny Burney FULL account of the twenty years' friendship of Johnson and the Thrales would fill book much larger than this; and in such a volume there would often occur the name of Fanny Burney. Dr Burney was a musician who had come to London in 1760. He was a member of the Club, and became an intimate friend of Johnson. Frances, who had lived with her father, while her sisters went to school in France, had had a passion for writing since the age of 10, and was eager to meet the great man. She first saw him in 1777 at one of her father's parties, where her sisters were playing a duet. In the midst of their performance Dr Johnson was announced. "He is very ill-favoured..."she wrote to a friend "his body is in continual agitation, see-sawing up and down....He is shockingly near-sighted, and did not, till she held out her hand to him, even know Mrs Thrale. He poked his nose over the keys of the harpsichord, till the duet was finished, and then my father introduced Hetty to him as an old acquaintance, and he kissed her! When she was a little girl, he had made her a present of The Idler. His attention, however, was not to be diverted five minutes from the books, as we were in the |