Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/54

50 speaking of Johnson’s expressions of contempt, she gives as an instance a retort that he made to her. ‘He was no gentler with myself, or those for whom I had the greatest regard. When I one day lamented the loss of a first cousin killed in America—“Prithee, my dear (said he), have done with canting: how would the world be worse for it, I may ask, if all your relations were at once spitted like larks, and roasted for Presto’s supper?” Presto was the dog that lay under the table while we talked.’

One story is good till another is told. Joseph Baretti, who had been for some years a tutor in the Thrales’ house, was fortunately present at this conversation, and gave his version, which, on the face of it, is the true one. ‘Mrs. Thrale,’ he says, ‘while supping very heartily upon larks, laid down her knife and fork, and abruptly exclaimed, “O, my dear Mr. Johnson, do you know what has happened? The last letters from abroad have brought us an account that our poor cousin’s head was taken off by a cannon-ball.” Johnson, who was shocked both at the fact, and her light, unfeeling manner of mentioning it, replied, “Madam, it would give you very little concern if all your relations were spitted like those larks and drest for Presto's supper.”’

Is not this a live piece of drama? Mrs. Thrale, quite unaware of any cause in herself, and her flow of pleasant chatter, for Johnson’s reproof, took it as a gratuitous display of surliness and rudeness, showing how a great philosopher can be deficient in humane feeling. She does not even mention that she was eating larks, so that the larks, which were her own supper, become, under her light hand, a merely rhetorical adornment of Johnson’s invective. Yet it is strange that she did not see