Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/293

Rh of laboratory at Streatham one summer, and diverted ourselves with drawing essences and colouring liquors. But the danger Mr. Thrale found his friend in, one day when I was driven to London and he had got the children and servants round him to see some experiments performed, put an end to all our entertainments; so well was the master of the house persuaded that his short sight would have been his destruction in a moment, by bringing him close to a fierce and violent flame. Indeed, it was a perpetual miracle that he did not set himself on fire reading abed, as was his constant custom, when exceedingly unable even to keep clear of mischief with our best help; and, accordingly, the fore-top of all his wigs was burnt by the candle down to the very network. Mr. Thrale's valet-de-chambre for that reason kept one always in his own hands, with which he met him at the parlour door when the bell had called him down to dinner; and, as he went up-stairs to sleep in the afternoon, the same man constantly followed him with another."

Johnson took a lively interest in Mr. Thrale's Parliamentary work. He accompanied Mrs. Thrale in her canvassing expeditions, when she learned by heart every nook of Southwark; and his first and favourite political pamphlet, "The False Alarm," was written in her house "between eight o'clock on Wednesday night and twelve o'clock on Thursday night; and we read it," she adds, "to Mr. Thrale when he came very late home from the House of Commons." This was in 1770. In the same year Mr. Thrale was carried from London to Streatham, insensible and dangerously ill." He recovered; but it was not long after this event that what Mrs. Thrale called "the distresses of 1772" set in.

Mr. Thrale had become involved in a fruitless speculation, suggested to him in the first instance by a quack chemist, and, without the knowledge of his family or friends, had constructed a costly manufactory of some curiously useless concoction for the preservation of wood from decay. Twenty thousand hogsheads of "this pernicious mess," as Mrs. Thrale called it, were being brewed in East Smithfield, in which all their money, and a great deal of government money besides, was swallowed up. "We had, in the commercial phrase, no beer to start for customers. We had no money to purchase with. Our clerks, insulted long, rebelled and ratted, but I held them in. A sudden run menaced the house, and death hovered over the head of its principal." The energies and sympathies of every member of the family were stimulated in this hour of distress. Until now Dr. Johnson and Thrale's mother-in-law had never been on good terms, and Mrs. Salusbury had persisted in preferring her newspaper to the doctor's conversation. Now, however, a common anxiety united them. Poor Thrale was driven to threaten suicide, and Johnson set himself to comfort the frightened women. "Fear not," he said, "the menaces of suicide; the man who has two such females to console him never yet killed himself, and will not now." Each did and gave what they could. Dr. Johnson scarcely left Thrale a moment, and "tried every artifice to amuse, as well as every argument to console him." But money, in round thousands, was after all the only effectual medicine for the broken-hearted brewer. In their distress they applied to their surest friends first. Down at Brighton there lived an old gouty solicitor, retired from business, the friend and contemporary of old Ralph Thrale. He had money; but how should they get at him, and at his heart, with this long troublesome story? "Well," says Mrs. Thrale, "first we made free with our mother's money, her little savings, about 3,000l.—'twas all she had; and, big as I was with child, I drove down to Brighthelmstone to beg of Mr. Scrase 6,000l. more—he gave it us—and Perkins, the head clerk, had never done repeating my short letter to our master, which only said: 'I have done my errand, and you soon shall see returned, whole, as I hope, your heavy but faithful messenger, H. L. T.

Other friends in due time volunteered their assistance, and the crisis was over. But the business was burdened with a debt of 130,000l. "Yet in nine years," continues Mrs. Thrale, "was every shilling paid; one, if not two, elections well contested; and we might at Mr. Thrale's death have had money had he been willing to listen to advice The baby that I carried lived an hour—my mother a year; but she left our minds more easy." Dr. Johnson wrote for this kind and much-suffering mother an affectionate epitaph in finely sounding Latin; and the descendant of old Adam de Saltzburg—"Nata 1707, Nupta 1739, Obiit 1773 "—slept in peace.

The events of the last three years had linked Johnson and the Thrales more closely than ever. "And who will be my biographer, do you think?" said he to