more, grieved for his loss severely, the more so, as he himself said, because Sarà quel che sarà, ma alla fin, il sangue non e acqua.' His brother, I am afraid, joined the Republicans, leaving a very deserving lady, born at Venice, whose friends were wholly ruined, though her uncle, the Abbate Zendrini, was afterwards in high favor, and even appointed confessor to Buonaparte. They had baptized one of their babies by name of John Salusbury in compliment to me, and Mr. Piozzi sent to bring him out of the confusion. He came an infant between three and four years old. We educated him first at Mr. Davis's school at Streatham, where my own son had been placed so many years before, and then with Mr. Shephard, of Enborne, Berkshire, whence he commonly came to us at Streatham Park, or Bath, or Brynbella.

You know the rest. You know that dear Mr. Piozzi died of the gout at his pretty villa in North Wales. You know that he left me that, and everything else, never naming his nephew in the will, only leaving among his father's children £ 6,000 in the three per cents, being the whole of his savings during the twentyfive years he had shared and enjoyed my fortune. Unexampled generosity indeed! And true love! Could I do less than repay it to the child whose situation in life I now felt responsible for! I bred him with his friends at Oxford, yet he stood alone, insulated in a nation where he had no natural friend. Incapacitated to return where his religion would have rendered him miserable, and petted and spoiled till any profession would have been painful. What could I do? The boy had besides all this formed an attachment to his friend's sister. What could I do? You know what I did do. I gave them my estate; and resolving that Mr. Thrale's daughters should suffer as little as possible by this arrangement, I repaired and new fronted their house at Streatham Park, and by the enormous expense incurred there, and the loss of my rents from Denbighshire and Flintshire, reduced myself to the very wretched state you found me in, and lavished upon me a friendship, which, at the sauciest hour of my life, would by my mind have been esteemed an honor, but in this sad, deserted stage of it the truest, very near the only cordial. Thus then, as Adam says to Raphael in Milton's " Paradise Lost": :

THRALE'S WILL.

SALE OF THE BREWERY.

201

THRALE'S WILL.-SALE OF THE BREWERY.

“WE read the will to-day." — Johnson to Mrs. Thrale, April 5, 1781.

It was neither kind or civil, you will say, to open the will in my absence, but Mr. Thrale had been both civil and kind in laboring to restore to me the Welsh estate, which I had meant to give him in our moments of uneasiness when I became possessed of it by Sir Thomas Salusbury's death, from whom we had once expected Offley Place in Hertfordshire, and all its wide domain. Notwithstanding that disappointment, my husband left me the interest of £50,000 for my life, doubtless in return for my diligence during our distresses in 1772, because it is specified to be given over and above what was provided in our marriage settlement. He left me also the plate, pictures, and linen of both houses, forgetting even to name Brighthelmstone, so all I had bought for that place fell to the ladies (who said loudly what a wretched match their poor papa had made). It was not so, however. Mr. Thrale had received the rents and profits from Wales, £9,000, and had cut timber for £ 4,000 more. My mother and my aunts, and an old Doctor Bernard Wilson, had left me £5,000 among them, more or less, and I carried £ 10,000 in my hand, so that the family was benefited by me £ 28,000 at the lowest, besides having been, as King Richard expresses it,

On Mr. Thrale's death I kept the counting-house from nine o'clock every morning till five o'clock every evening till June, when God Almighty sent us a knot of rich Quakers who bought the whole, and saved me and my coadjutors from brewing ourselves into another bankruptcy, which hardly could, I think, have been avoided, being, as we were five in number, Cator, Crutchley, Johnson, myself, and Mr. Smith, all with equal power, yet all

incapable of using it without help from Mr. Perkins, who wished to force himself into partnership, though hating the whole lot of us, save only me. Upon my promise, however, that if he would find us a purchaser, I would present his wife with my dwellinghouse at the Borough, and all its furniture, he soon brought forward these Quaker Barclays, from Pennsylvania I believe they came, her own relations I have heard, - and they obtained the brewhouse a prodigious bargain, but Miss Thrale was of my mind to part with it for £ 150,000; and I am sure I never did repent it, as certainly it was best for us five females at the time, although the place has now doubled its value, and although men have almost always spirit to spend, while women show greater resolution to spare.

Will it surprise you now to hear that, among all my fellow-executors, none but Johnson opposed selling the concern? Cator, a rich timber merchant, was afraid of implicating his own credit as a commercial man. Crutchley hated Perkins, and lived upon the verge of a quarrel with him every day while they acted together. Smith cursed the whole business, and wondered what his relation, Mr. Thrale, could mean by leaving him £ 200, he said, and such a burden on his back to bear for it. All were well pleased to find themselves secured, and the brewhouse decently, though not very advantageously disposed of, except dear Doctor Johnson, who found some odd delight in signing drafts for hundreds and for thousands, to him a new, and as it appeared delightful, occupation. When all was nearly over, however, I cured his honest heart of its incipient passion for trade, by letting him into some, and only some, of its mysteries. The plant, as it is called, was sold, and I gave God thanks upon Whit Sunday, 1781, for sparing me farther perplexity, though at the cost of a good house, &c.

THE CHARMING S. S.

"So you may set the Streatfield at defiance."15, 1778; Letters, Vol. II. p. 20.

Johnson, Oct.

My dear and ever honored Doctor Collier was the cause of my making this Miss Streatfield's acquaintance. I had learned from others that he dropped into her hands soon as dismissed from mine; and that he gained rather than lost by the exchange had long been my secret consolation. She was but fourteen or fifteen when they first met, and he was growing sickly. She did her own way, and her way was to wait on him, who instructed her in Greek, and who obtained from her excess of tenderness for him, what I could not have bestowed. I have heard her say she grudged his old valet the happiness of reaching him a glass of wine, and out of her house did he never more make his residence, but died in her arms, and was buried at her expense, the moment she came of age.* All these accounts did I never cease listening to, till I observed my beautiful friend, not contented with her legitimate succession to the heart of Doctor Collier, was endeavoring to supplant me in the esteem of Mr. Thrale, whose good opinion, assailed vainly by Baretti, it was my business and my bounden duty to retain. Miss Thrale, now Lady Keith, was in this case my coadjutor; though she had acted in concert with Baretti, she abhorred this attack of Miss Streatfield, who was very dangerous indeed, both from her beauty and learning. Wit she possessed none of, and was as ignorant as an infant of

*The attachment inspired by Dr. Collier in both his pupils resembles that of Stella and Vanessa for Swift, the growth of which is described in the Dean's best poem, "Cadenus and Vanessa" :

"I knew by what you said and writ

How dang'rous things were men of wit:
You cautioned me against their charms,

But never gave me equal arms.

Your lessons found the weakest part,

Aimed at the head, but reached the heart."