Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/621

Rh her, good or bad, took refuge in the country, and had more than half a mind to leave England altogether. "One day," she writes in her diary, "the paper rings with my marriage to Johnson, one day to Crutchley, one day to Seward. I give no reason for such impertinence, but cannot deliver myself from it. Whitbread, the rich brewer, is in love with me too: oh, I would rather, as Anne Page says, be set breast deep in the earth and be bowled to death with turnips." Still, though incensed at this random gossip, Mrs. Thrale had a fair consciousness of her own eligibility and power. She remembered her wealth, her ancient lineage, her reputation for wit and learning, and triumphed to herself, between the pages of her diary, that to marry for love would be rational in her, who wanted no advancement of birth or fortune; and, "till I am in love," she added, "I will not marry, nor perhaps then." That she did eventually promise her hand to the singer Piozzi has puzzled her biographers as it at first puzzled, nay, astounded, her family and friends. They regarded the act as little less than a crime against society, her children, and herself. What could a woman with three thousand a year, half a dozen daughters, and a considerable reputation for talent, care for a man who was known only for his music? True it was, the singer had long since lost his voice, that he was neither poor, nor very handsome, nor in any sense an adventurer. He was in fact eminently respectable and harmless; and—she loved him. This fact constituted his greatest virtue and her most unpardonable folly. Johnson and Burney bemoaned together with wet eyes the weakness of their former hostess and their own loosened hold of her affection. The two drove into London from Streatham on one occasion together—Burney in the secret of the love-affair, and very grave and sad: Johnson either innocent of it or pretending to be so. But the heart of the old man was none the less heavy. "His look," says the lady, "was stern, though dejected, as he followed her into the vehicle;" and he was overcome with emotion as, with a shaking hand and pointing finger, he directed her looks to the mansion from which they were driving, and, when they faced it from the coach window as they turned into Streatham Common, tremulously exclaimed, "That house is lost to me—forever!" Too long indeed had the "Streathamites" dreamt that Mrs. Thrale and all that was hers belonged to them; and now it was a bitter thing to find that she was strictly and wholly free, and knew it. Could some one among that crowd of literary men and women, who had feasted and paraded all those years in the gardens and gay rooms of Streatham, have been sufficiently heroic to think and say that she was in the right! And, still more, could that single-handed champion have been the great and revered Dr. Johnson! A word from him at that time would have silenced the whole midge swarm of discontents, with Burney at their head. And might it not have been? Might he not, sitting over his fire on his two-legged stool in Bolt Court, have called to mind her long and spirited service to her "Master," her tears over her dying babies, her bright and innocent wit, which had so often dispelled for him the gathering clouds of gloom and sickness? And might not he, the wise old man, have given due weight to the fact that all her tenderness, all her devotion, all her vanity, had hitherto been called into play only by old men, by children, by strangers! But other and less kind thoughts rankled in the heart of the old lexicographer. He joined, alas, the midge swarm; hated Piozzi, with his plain face and broken English, despised Mrs. Thrale, and let the inquisitive world know that he did so. There are few more ugly stories on record than that of Johnson's quarrel with the little widow.

Early in 1783, Mrs. Thrale was induced by the persecution of her children and the public to bid good-bye to her lover, who at her request at once gave up her letters to her eldest daughter, and prepared to leave England. The poor lady's health appeared at this time completely broken, and she was moreover much harassed by debts, the heaviest of which had been incurred by her father, and fell now upon her as his heir. Placing her younger children at school in Streatham, she left Argyle Street, and went with the elder ones to Bath, where she hoped to live in retirement, out of reach of her "friends," and to pay her debts. The little Streatham schoolgirls, however, fell ill in the spring of measles and whooping-cough, and one of them died. The poor mother, herself seriously ill, started from Bath to visit them. She lodged in Streatham, avoiding "hateful London," "for fear of encountering Piozzi's eyes somewhere." Nor did she know, until Piozzi told her long after, when all their troubles were over, that he had been sitting at a front window of a public house on the road "all that dreadful Saturday," to see her carriage pass backwards and forwards to where the