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ANECDOTES OF THE LATE SAMUEL JOHNSON
BY HESTHER LYNCH PIOZZI.
INTRODUCTION
Mrs. Piozzi, by her second marriage, was by her first marriage the Mrs.
Thrale in whose house at Streatham Doctor Johnson was, after the year of
his first introduction, 1765, in days of infirmity, an honoured and a
cherished friend. The year of the beginning of the friendship was the year
in which Johnson, fifty-six years old, obtained his degree of LL.D. from
Dublin, and--though he never called himself Doctor--was thenceforth called
Doctor by all his friends.
Before her marriage Mrs. Piozzi had been Miss Hesther Lynch Salusbury, a
young lady of a good Welsh family. She was born in the year 174O, and she
lived until the year 1821. She celebrated her eightieth birthday on the
27th of January, 182O, by a concert, ball, and supper to six or seven
hundred people, and led off the dancing at the ball with an adopted son for
partner. When Johnson was first introduced to her, as Mrs. Thrale, she was
a lively, plump little lady, twenty-five years old, short of stature, broad
of build, with an animated face, touched, according to the fashion of life
in her early years, with rouge, which she continued to use when she found
that it had spoilt her complexion. Her hands were rather coarse, but her
handwriting was delicate.
Henry Thrale, whom she married, was the head of the great brewery house now
known as that of Barclay and Perkins. Henry Thrale's father had succeeded
Edmund Halsey, who began life by running away from his father, a miller at
St. Albans. Halsey was taken in as a clerk-of-all-work at the Anchor
Brewhouse in Southwark, became a house-clerk, able enough to please Child,
his master, and handsome enough to please his master's daughter. He
married the daughter and succeeded to Child's Brewery, made much money, and
had himself an only daughter, whom he married to a lord. Henry Thrale's
father was a nephew of Halseys, who had worked in the brewery for twenty
years, when, after Halsey's death, he gave security for thirty thousand
pounds as the price of the business, to which a noble lord could not
succeed. In eleven years he had paid the purchase-money, and was making a
large fortune. To this business his son, who was Johnson's friend, Henry
Thrale, succeeded; and upon Thrale's death it was bought for 15O,OOO pounds
by a member of the Quaker family of Barclay, who took Thrale's old manager,
Perkins, into partnership.
Johnson became, after 1765, familiar in the house of the Thrales at
Streatham. There was much company. Mrs. Thrale had a taste for literary
guests and literary guests had, on their part, a taste for her good
dinners. Johnson was the lion-in-chief. There was Dr. Johnson's room
always at his disposal; and a tidy wig kept for his special use, because
his own was apt to be singed up the middle by close contact with the
candle, which he put, being short-sighted, between his eyes and a book.
Mrs. Thrale had skill in languages, read Latin, French, Italian, and
Spanish. She read literature, could quote aptly, and put knowledge as well
as playful life into her conversation. Johnson's regard for the Thrales
was very real, and it was heartily returned, though Mrs. Thrale had, like
her friend, some weaknesses, in common with most people who feed lions and
wish to pass for wits among the witty.
About fourteen years after Johnson's first acquaintance with the Thrales--
when Johnson was seventy years old and Mrs. Thrale near forty--the little
lady, who had also lost several children, was unhappy in the thought that
she had ceased to be appreciated by her husband. Her husband's temper
became affected by the commercial troubles of 1762, and Mrs. Thrale became
jealous of the regard between him and Sophy Streatfield, a rich widow's
daughter. Under January, 1779, she wrote in her "Thraliana," "Mr. Thrale
has fallen in love, really and seriously, with Sophy Streatfield; but there
is no wonder in that; she is very pretty, very gentle, soft, and
insinuating; hangs about him, dances round him, cries when she parts from
him, squeezes his hand slily, and with her sweet eyes full of tears looks
so fondly in his face--and all for love of me, as she pretends, that I can
hardly sometimes help laughing in her face. A man must not be a MAN but an
IT to resist such artillery." Mrs. Thrale goes on to record conquests made
by this irresistible Sophy in other directions, showing the same temper of
jealousy. Thrale died on the 4th of April, 1781.
Mrs. Thrale had entered in her "Thraliana" under July, 178O, being then at
Brighton, "I have picked up Piozzi here, the great Italian singer. He is
amazingly like my father. He shall teach Hesther." On the 25th of July,
1784, being at Bath, her entry was, "I am returned from church the happy
wife of my lovely, faithful Piozzi. . . . subject of my prayers, object of
my wishes, my sighs, my reverence, my esteem." Her age then was
forty-four, and on the 13th of December in the same year Johnson died. The
newspapers of the day dealt hardly with her. They called her an amorous
widow, and Piozzi a fortune-hunter. Her eldest daughter (afterwards
Viscountess Keith) refused to recognise the new father, and shut herself up
in a house at Brighton with a nurse, Tib, where she lived upon two hundred
a year. Two younger sisters, who were at school, lived afterwards with the
eldest. Only the fourth daughter, the youngest, went with her mother and
her mother's new husband to Italy. Johnson, too, was grieved by the
marriage, and had shown it, but had written afterwards most kindly. Mrs.
Piozzi in Florence was playing at literature with the poetasters of "The
Florence Miscellany" and "The British Album" when she was working at these
"Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson." Her book of anecdotes was planned
at Florence in 1785, the year after her friend's death, finished at
Florence in October, 1785, and published in the year 1786. There is a
touch of bitterness in the book which she thought of softening, but her
"lovely, faithful Piozzi" wished it to remain.
H. M.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE.
I have somewhere heard or read that the preface before a book, like the
portico before a house, should be contrived so as to catch, but not detain,
the attention of those who desire admission to the family within, or leave
to look over the collection of pictures made by one whose opportunities of
obtaining them we know to have been not unfrequent. I wish not to keep my
readers long from such intimacy with the manners of Dr. Johnson, or such
knowledge of his sentiments as these pages can convey. To urge my distance
from England as an excuse for the book's being ill-written would be
ridiculous; it might indeed serve as a just reason for my having written it
at all; because, though others may print the same aphorisms and stories, I
cannot HERE be sure that they have done so. As the Duke says, however, to
the Weaver, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, "Never excuse; if your play be a
bad one, keep at least the excuses to yourself."
I am aware that many will say I have not spoken highly enough of Dr.
Johnson; but it will be difficult for those who say so to speak more
highly. If I have described his manners as they were, I have been careful
to show his superiority to the common forms of common life. It is surely
no dispraise to an oak that it does not bear jessamine; and he who should
plant honeysuckle round Trajan's column would not be thought to adorn, but
to disgrace it.
When I have said that he was more a man of genius than of learning, I mean
not to take from the one part of his character that which I willingly give
to the other. The erudition of Mr. Johnson proved his genius; for he had
not acquired it by long or profound study: nor can I think those
characters the greatest which have most learning driven into their heads,
any more than I can persuade myself to consider the River Jenisca as
superior to the Nile, because the first receives near seventy tributary
streams in the course of its unmarked progress to the sea, while the great
parent of African plenty, flowing from an almost invisible source, and
unenriched by any extraneous waters, except eleven nameless rivers, pours
his majestic torrent into the ocean by seven celebrated mouths.
But I must conclude my preface, and begin my book, the first I ever
presented before the public; from whose awful appearance in some measure to
defend and conceal myself, I have thought fit to retire behind the
Telamonian shield, and show as little of myself as possible, well aware of
the exceeding difference there is between fencing in the school and
fighting in the field. Studious, however, to avoid offending, and careless
of that offence which can be taken without a cause, I here not unwillingly
submit my slight performance to the decision of that glorious country,
which I have the daily delight to hear applauded in others, as eminently
just, generous, and humane.
0. ANECDOTES OF THE LATE SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D.
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