Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/295

Rh of Johnson annoyed Mrs. Thrale. Mr. Thrale would sometimes check him by saying coldly, "There, there! now we have had enough for one lecture, Dr. Johnson; we will not be upon education any more till after dinner, if you please."

He lived, Mrs. Thrale tells us, always upon the verge of a quarrel: and she relates how one evening, for example, she came into the room where he and a gentleman had been conversing, and found that a lady who had walked in two minutes before "had blown them both into a flame" by whispering something to Johnson's companion. It was in vain to make explanations, or to attempt to pacify him; the doctor's suspicions were all alive.

"And have a care, sir," he was saying just as Mrs. Thrale entered the room; "the old lion will not bear to be tickled." The gentleman was pale with rage, the lady weeping at the confusion she had caused; "and," adds Mrs. Thrale, "I could only say with Lady Macbeth —

It was as much as Mrs. Thrale could do during the next two or three years to keep her wits clear and her heart from breaking. Business troubles were, it is true, subsiding; but others and heavier were taking their place, which no buoyancy of spirit could overcome, nor friendly skill alleviate. Her husband's health was broken; her children were falling ill, and two or three of them died in rapid succession. No wonder she replied to the dictatorial and exacting letters of her old friend with some petulance: "You ask, dear sir, if I keep your letters. To be sure I do My only reason to suppose that we should dislike looking over the correspondence twelve or twenty years hence was because the sight of it would not revive the memory of cheerful times at all. God forbid that I should be less happy then than now, when I am perpetually bringing or losing babies, both very dreadful operations to me, and which tear mind and body in pieces very cruelly." And again: "You say, too, that I shall not grow wiser in twelve years, which is a bad account of futurity; but if I grow happier I shall grow wiser, for, being less chained down to surrounding circumstances, what power of thinking my mind naturally possesses will have fair play at least." The death of their eldest son, in 1776, then a promising youth already at school, and the pride of Streatham Park, was a heart-breaking matter to both parents. "Poor dear, sweet, little boy!" Johnson wrote tenderly on hearing the news of his death; "I loved him as I never expect to love any other little boy: but I could not love him as a parent. I know that such a love is a laceration of the mind. I know that a whole system of hopes and designs and expectations is swept away at once, and nothing is left but bottomless vacuity. What you feel I have felt, and hope that your disquiet will be shorter than mine." The old man is remembering his wife, dead twenty-four years ago, and the tears are falling while he writes.

It was two years after this event when Dr. Burney took his daughter, the authoress of "Evelina," to visit Mr. and Mrs. Thrale at Streatham. By that time Streatham Park had come to be the headquarters of literary society; and for the young novelist, still trembling on the threshold of public life, this was, to use her own words, "the most consequential day she had spent since her birth." The white house upon the common, pleasantly situated in a fine paddock, with hothouses and kitchen-gardens about it, and its like well stocked with perch, peeps out vividly enough from the pages of her amusing "Diary and Letters." The central feature of the house itself was the library. Here the books had been selected by Dr. Johnson, and the friendly faces which hung above them were, one and all, the work of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Over the fireplace were Mrs. Thrale and her eldest daughter, "pretty Queeney," as Johnson used to call her. Mr. Thrale was above the door which led to his study; and the collection round the room included Dr. Johnson, Mr. Murphy, Burke, Dr. Burney, Garrick, Goldsmith, Sir Joshua himself, and other intimate friends of the hospitable brewer. These formed the nucleus of the society of Streatham Park; these were the great few who have made the memory of the white house on the common immortal. But in 1778, as in 1765, the two most familiar faces by the Streatham fireside were still Mr. Murphy's and Dr. Johnson's. There was also a Lady Ladd, Thrale's sister, once a beauty, six feet high, and with very strong opinions concerning " the respect due from the lower class of the people." "I know my place," she would say, "and I always take it, and I've no notion of not taking it; but Mrs. Thrale lets all sorts of people do just as they've a mind by her." Dr. Johnson and Lady Ladd were very good friends; and, when he accosted her ladyship in verse —