Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi Part 4

"Will it do this way in English, Sir? (said Mrs. Thrale)--

"'Persuasions to freedom fall oddly from you, If freedom we seek, fair Maria, adieu."

Mr. Croker's version is:--

"'You wish me, fair Maria, to be free, Then, fair Maria, I must fly from thee.'

Boswell also has tried his hand at it; and a correspondent of the "Gentleman's Magazine" suggests that Johnson had in his mind an epigram on a young lady who appeared at a masquerade in Paris, habited as a Jesuit, during the height of the contention between the Jansenists and Molinists concerning free will:--

"On s'etonne ici que Calviniste Eut pris l'habit de Moliniste, Puisque que cette jeune beaute ote a chacun sa liberte, N'est ce pas une Janseniste."[1]

[Footnote 1: "Menagiana," vol. iii. p. 376. Edition of 1716. Equally happy were Lord Chesterfield's lines to a young lady who appeared at a Dublin ball, with an orange breastknot:--

Mrs. Thrale took the lead even when her husband might be expected to strike in, as when Johnson was declaiming paradoxically against action in oratory: "Action can have no effect on reasonable minds. It may augment noise, but it never can enforce argument." _Mrs. Thrale_.

"What then, Sir, becomes of Demosthenes' saying, Action, action, action?" _Johnson_. "Demosthenes, Madam, spoke to an a.s.sembly of brutes, to a barbarous people." "The polished Athenians!" is her marginal protest, and a conclusive one.

In English literature she was rarely at fault. In

"Pretty Tory, where's the jest To wear that riband on thy breast, When that same breast betraying shows The whiteness of the rebel rose?"

White was adopted by the malcontent Irish as the French emblem.

Johnson's epigram may have been suggested by Propertius:

"Nullus liber erit si quis amare volet."]

reference to the flattery lavished on Garrick by Lord Mansfield and Lord Chatham, Johnson had said, "When he whom everybody else flatters, flatters me, then I am truly happy." _Mrs. Thrale_. "The sentiment is in Congreve, I think." _Johnson_. "Yes, Madam, in 'The Way of the World.'

"'If there's delight in love, 'tis when I see The heart that others bleed for, bleed for me.'"

When Johnson is reported saying, "Those who have a style of distinguished excellence can always be distinguished," she objects: "It seems not. The lines always quoted as Dryden's, beginning,

'To die is landing on some silent sh.o.r.e,'

are Garth's after all." Johnson would have been still less pleased at her discovery that a line in his epitaph on Phillips,

"Till angels wake thee with a note like thine,"

was imitated from Pope's

"And saints embrace thee with a love like mine."

In one of her letters to him (June, 1782) she writes: "Meantime let us be as _merry_ as reading Burton upon _Melancholy_ will make us.

You bid me study that book in your absence, and now, what have I found? Why, I have found, or fancied, that he has been cruelly plundered: that Milton's first idea of 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso'

were suggested by the verses at the beginning; that Savage's speech of Suicide in the 'Wanderer' grew up out of a pa.s.sage you probably remember towards the 216th page; that Swift's tale of the woman that holds water in her mouth, to regain her husband's love by silence, had its source in the same farrago; and that there is an odd similitude between my Lord's trick upon Sly the Tinker, in Shakspeare's 'Taming of the Shrew,' and some stuff I have been reading in Burton."

It would be easy to heap proof upon proof of the value and variety of Mrs. Thrale's contributions to the colloquial treasures acc.u.mulated by Boswell and other members of the set; and Johnson's deliberate testimony to her good qualities of head and heart will far more than counterbalance any pa.s.sing expressions of disapproval or reproof with her mistimed vivacity, or alleged disregard of scrupulous accuracy in narrative, may have called forth. No two people ever lived much together for a series of years without many fretful, complaining, dissatisfied, uncongenial moments,--without letting drop captious or unkind expressions, utterly at variance with their habitual feelings and their matured judgments of each other. The hasty word, the pa.s.sing sarcasm, the sly hit at an acknowledged foible, should count for nothing in the estimate, when contrasted with earnest and deliberate a.s.surances, proceeding from one who was commonly too proud to flatter, and in no mood for idle compliment when he wrote.

"Never (he writes in 1773) imagine that your letters are long; they are always too short for my curiosity. I do not know that I was ever content with a single perusal.... My nights are grown again very uneasy and troublesome. I know not that the country will mend them; but I hope your company will mend my days. Though I cannot now expect much attention, and would not wish for more than can be spared from the poor dear lady (her mother), yet I shall see you and hear you every now and then; and to see and hear you, is always to hear wit, and to see virtue."

He would not suffer her to be lightly spoken of in his presence, nor permit his name to be coupled jocularly with hers. "I yesterday told him," says Boswell, when they were traversing the Highlands, "I was thinking of writing a poetical letter to him, on his return from Scotland, in the style of Swift's humorous epistle in the character of Mary Gulliver to her husband, Captain Lemuel Gulliver, on his return to England from the country of the Houyhnhnms:--

"'At early morn I to the market haste, Studious in ev'ry thing to please thy taste.

A curious _fowl_ and _sparagra.s.s_ I chose; (For I remember you were fond of those:) Three shillings cost the first, the last seven groats; Sullen you turn from both, and call for OATS.'

He laughed, and asked in whose name I would write it. I said in Mrs.

Thrale's. He was angry. 'Sir, if you have any sense of decency or delicacy, you won't do that.' _Boswell_. 'Then let it be in Cole's, the landlord of the Mitre tavern, where we have so often sat together.' _Johnson_. 'Ay, that may do.'"

Again, at Inverary, when Johnson called for a gill of whiskey that he might know what makes a Scotchman happy, and Boswell proposed Mrs.

Thrale as their toast, he would not have _her_ drunk in whiskey.

Peter Pindar has maliciously added to this reproof:--

"We supped most royally, were vastly frisky, When Johnson ordered up a gill of whiskey.

Taking the gla.s.s, says I, 'Here's Mistress Thrale,'

'Drink her in _whiskey_ not,' said he, 'but _ale_.'"

So far from making light of her scholarship, he frequently accepted her as a partner in translations from the Latin. The translations from Boethius, printed in the second volume of the Letters, are their joint composition.

After recapitulating Johnson's other contributions to literature in 1766, Boswell says, "'The Fountains,' a beautiful little fairy tale in prose, written with exquisite simplicity, is one of Johnson's productions; and I cannot withhold from Mrs. Thrale the praise of being the author of that admirable poem 'The Three Warnings.'"

_Marginal note_: "How sorry he is!" Both the tale and the poem were written for a collection of "Miscellanies," published by Mrs.

Williams in that year. The character of Floretta in "The Fountains"

was intended for Mrs. Thrale, and she thus gracefully alludes to it in a letter to Johnson in Feb. 1782:

"The newspapers would spoil my few comforts that are left if they could; but you tell me that's only because I have the reputation, whether true or false, of being a _wit_ forsooth; and you remember _poor Floretta_, who was teased into wishing away her spirit, her beauty, her fortune, and at last even her life, never could bear the bitter water which was to have washed away her wit; which she resolved to keep with all its consequences."

Her fugitive pieces, mostly in verse, thrown off from time to time at all periods of her life, are numerous; and the best of them that have been recovered will be included in these volumes. In a letter to the author of "Piozziana," she says:--"When Wilkes and Liberty were at their highest tide, I was bringing or losing children every year; and my studies were confined to my nursery; so, it came into my head one day to send an infant alphabet to the 'St. James Chronicle':--

"'A was an Alderman, factious and proud; B was a Bellas that bl.u.s.tered aloud, &c.'

"In a week's time Dr. Johnson asked me if I knew who wrote it? 'Why, who did write it, Sir?' said I. 'Steevens,' was the reply. Some time after that, years for aught I know, he mentioned to me Steevens's veracity! 'No, no;' answered H.L.P., anything but that;' and told my story; showing him by incontestable proofs that it was mine. Johnson did not utter a word, and we never talked about it any more. I durst not introduce the subject; but it served to hinder S. from visiting at the house: I suppose Johnson kept him away."

It does not appear that Steevens claimed the Alphabet; which may have suggested the celebrated squib that appeared in the "New Whig Guide,"

and was popularly attributed to Mr. Croker. It was headed "The Political Alphabet; or, the Young Member's A B C," and begins:

"A was an Althorpe, as dull as a hog: B was black Brougham, a surly cur dog: C was a Cochrane, all stripped of his lace."

What widely different a.s.sociations are now awakened by these names!

The sting is in the tail:

"W was a Warre, 'twixt a wasp and a worm, But X Y and Z are not found in this form, Unless Moore, Martin, and Creevey be said (As the last of mankind) to be X Y and Z."

Amongst Miss Reynolds' "Recollections" will be found:--"On the praises of Mrs. Thrale, he (Johnson) used to dwell with a peculiar delight, a paternal fondness, expressive of conscious exultation in being so intimately acquainted with her. One day, in speaking of her to Mr. Harris, author of 'Hermes,' and expatiating on her various perfections,--the solidity of her virtues, the brilliancy of her wit, and the strength of her understanding, &c.--he quoted some lines (a stanza, I believe, but from what author I know not[1]), with which he concluded his most eloquent eulogium, and of these I retained but the two last lines:--

'Virtues--of such a generous kind, Pure in the last recesses of the mind.'"

[Footnote 1: Dryden's Translation of Persius.]

The place a.s.signed to Mrs. Thrale by the popular voice amongst the most cultivated and accomplished women of the day, is fixed by some verses printed in the "Morning Herald" of March 12th, 1782, which attracted much attention. They were commonly attributed to Mr.

(afterwards Sir W.W.) Pepys, and Madame d'Arblay, who alludes to them complacently, thought them his; but he subsequently repudiated the authorship, and the editor of her Memoirs believes that they were written by Dr. Burney. They were provoked by the p.r.o.neness of the Herald to indulge in complimentary allusions to ladies of the demirep genus: