will here, while the Saxons were wondering how Count Bruhle could think of marrying a lady born Miss Carpenter. The Lombards doubted in the mean time of my being a gentlewoman by birth, because my first husband was a brewer. A pretty world, is it not? A Ship of Fooles, according to the old poem; and they will upset the vessel by and by."

This is not the language of one who wished to apologize for a misalliance.

As to Piozzi's want of youth and good looks, Johnson's knowledge of womankind, to say nothing of his self-love, should have prevented him from urging this as an objection, or as an aggravation of her offence. He might have recollected the Roman matron in Juvenal, who considers the world well lost for an old and disfigured prize-fighter; or he would have quoted Spenser's description of Lust :

"Who rough and rude and filthy did appear,
Unseemly man to please fair lady's eye,
Yet he of ladies oft was loved dear,

When fairer faces were bid standen by:

Oh! who can tell the bent of woman's phantasy?"

Madame Campan, speaking of Caroline of Naples, the sister of Marie Antoinette, says, she had great reason to complain of the insolence of a Spaniard named Las Casas, whom the king, her father-in-law, had sent to persuade her to remove M. Acton from the conduct of affairs and from about her person. She had told him, to convince him of the nature of her sentiments, that she would have Acton painted and sculptured by the most celebrated artists of Italy, and send his bust and his portrait to the King of Spain, to prove to him that the desire of fixing a man of superior capacity could alone have induced her to confer the favor he enjoyed. Las Casas had dared to reply, that she would be taking useless trouble; that a man's ugliness did not always prevent him from pleasing, and that the King of Spain had too much experience to be ignorant that the caprices of a woman were inexplicable. Johnson may surely be allowed credit for as much knowledge of the sex as the King of Spain.

There is no need, however, for citing precedents or authorities on the point; for Piozzi was about forty-one or forty-two, a year

or two younger than herself, and was not reputed ugly. Miss Seward (October, 1787) writes:

"I am become acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Piozzi. Her conversation is that bright wine of the intellects which has no lees. Dr. Johnson told me truth when he said she had more colloquial wit than most of our literary women; it is indeed a fountain of perpetual flow. But he did not tell me truth when he asserted that Piozzi was an ugly dog, without particular skill in his profession. Mr. Piozzi is a handsome man, in middle life, with gentle, pleasing, unaffected manners, and with very eminent skill in his profession. Though he has not a powerful or fine-toned voice, he sings with transcending grace and expression. I am charmed with his perfect expression on his instrument. Surely the finest sensibilities must vibrate through his frame, since they breathe so sweetly through his song."

The concluding sentence contains what Partridge would call a non sequitur, for the finest musical sensibility may coexist with the most commonplace qualities. But the lady's evidence is clear and unequivocal on the essential point; and another passage from her letters may assist us in determining the precise nature of Johnson's feelings towards Mrs. Piozzi, and the extent to which his later language and conduct regarding her were influenced by pique :

"Love is the great softener of savage dispositions. Johnson had always a metaphysic passion for one princess or another: first, the rustic Lucy Porter, before he married her nauseous mother; next the handsome, but haughty, Molly Aston; next the sublimated, methodistic Hill Boothby, who read her Bible in Hebrew; and lastly, the more charming Mrs. Thrale, with the beauty of the first, the learning of the second, and with more worth than a bushel of such sinners and such saints. It is ridiculously diverting to see the old elephant forsaking his nature before these princesses

"To make them mirth, use all his might, and writhe,

His mighty form disporting.'

"This last and long-enduring passion for Mrs. Thrale was, however, composed perhaps of cupboard love, Platonic love,

and vanity tickled and gratified, from morn to night, by incessant homage. The two first ingredients are certainly oddly heterogeneous; but Johnson, in religion and politics, in love and in hatred, was composed of such opposite and contradictory materials as never before met in the human mind. This is the reason why folk are never weary of talking, reading, and writing about a man

In the teeth of Miss Seward's description of Piozzi, it would be difficult to maintain Lord Macaulay's statement that Mrs. Piozzi "fell in love with a music-master from Brescia, in whom nobody but herself could see anything to admire ; and the eloquent passage which succeeds would have been materially impaired by adherence to the facts:

"She did not conceal her joy when he (Johnson) left Streatham. She never pressed him to return; and if he came unbidden, she received him in a manner which convinced him that he was no longer a welcome guest. He took the very intelligible hints which she gave. He read, for the last time, a chapter of the Greek Testament in the library which had been formed by himself. In a solemn and tender prayer he commended the house and its inmates to the Divine protection, and with emotions which choked his voice and convulsed his powerful frame, left forever that beloved home for the gloomy and desolate house behind Fleet Street, where the few and the evil days which still remained to him were to run out."

Streatham had been let to Lord Shelburne, and they quitted it together. She never pressed him to return, because she never returned during his lifetime; for the same reason, he could not have come again as her guest, bidden or unbidden: and instead of leaving Streatham for his gloomy and desolate house behind Fleet Street, he accompanied her, on the wonted footing of an inmate, first to Brighton, where we have seen him making himself particularly disagreeable to her friends, and then to Argyll Street.

* Letters, Vol. II. p. 103.

The brilliant historian proceeds:

"Here (Bolt Court) in June, 1783, he had a paralytic stroke, from which however he recovered, and which does not appear to have impaired his intellectual faculties. But other maladies came thick upon him. His asthma tormented him day and night. Dropsical symptoms made their appearance. While sinking under a complication of diseases, he heard that the woman whose friendship had been the chief happiness of sixteen years of his life had married an Italian fiddler; that all London was crying shame upon her; and that the newspapers and magazines were filled with allusions to the Ephesian matron and the two pictures in 'Hamlet.' He vehemently said he would try to forget her existence. He never uttered her name. Every memorial of her which met his eye he flung into the fire. She meanwhile fled from the laughter and hisses of her countrymen and countrywomen to a land where she was unknown, hastened across Mount Cenis, and learned, while passing a merry Christmas of concerts and lemonade parties at Milan, that the great man with whose name hers is inseparably associated, had ceased to exist."

In his last letter on her marriage, Johnson admits that he has no pretence to resent it, as it has not been injurious to him, and says: "Whatever I can contribute to your happiness I am ever ready to repay, for that kindness which soothed twenty years of a life radically wretched." If, directly after writing this, he vowed to forget her existence, and flung every memorial of her into the fire, he stands self-convicted of ingratitude and deceit. The only proof that he did anything of the sort is a passage in Madame D'Arblay's diary: "We talked of poor Mrs. Thrale, but only for a moment; for I saw him so greatly moved, and with such severity of displeasure, that I hastened to start another subject, and he solemnly enjoined me to mention that no more." This was towards the end of November, a few weeks before he died, and he might be excused for being angry at the introduction of any agitating topic.

His affection for Mrs. Piozzi was far from being a deep, devoted, or absorbing feeling at any time; and the gloom which settled upon the evening of his days was owing to his infirmities

and his dread of death, not to the loosening of cherished ties, nor to the compelled solitude of a confined dwelling in Bolt Court. The plain matter of fact is that, during the last two years of his life, he was seldom a month together at his own house, unless when the state of his health prevented him from enjoying the hospitality of his friends. When the fatal marriage was announced, he was planning what Boswell calls a jaunt into the country; and in a letter dated Lichfield, Oct. 4, 1784, he says: "I passed the first part of the summer at Oxford (with Dr. Adams); afterwards I went to Lichfield, then to Ashbourne (Dr. Taylor's), and a week ago I returned to Lichfield, then to Ashbourne (Dr. Taylor's), and a week ago I returned to Lichfield."

In the journal which he kept for Dr. Brocklesby, he writes, Oct. 20: "The town is my element; there are my friends, there are my books, to which I have not yet bid farewell, and there are my amusements. Sir Joshua told me long ago that my vocation was to public life; and I hope still to keep my station, till God shall bid me Go in peace."

Thrale died on the 4th of April. "On Friday, April 6 (writes Boswell), he (Johnson) carried me to dine at a club which at his desire had been lately formed at the Queen's Arms." In April, 1784, a year and a half after his heart was broken by the alleged expulsion from Streatham, Johnson sends a regular diary of his feelings, and proceedings to Mrs. Thrale. One item may suffice:

"I received this morning your magnificent fish (ante, p. 67), and in the afternoon your apology for not sending it. I have invited the Hooles and Miss Burney to dine upon it to-morrow."

After another visit to Dr. Adams at Pembroke College, he returned about the middle of November to London, where he died December 13th, 1784. The proximate cause of his death was dropsy; and there is not the smallest sign of its having been acclerated or imbittered by unkindness or neglect.

If he chose to repudiate and denounce one "whose kindness had soothed twenty years of a life radically wretched," because she refused to submit to his dictation in a matter of life and death to her and of comparative indifference to him, the severance of the tie was entirely his own act. In a letter to Mr. S. Lysons,