��Anecdotes.
��one being chained to the oar by authority, the other by want *. I had however (said he, laughing), the wit to get her daughter on my side always before we began the dispute 2 . She read comedy better than any body he ever heard (he said) ; in tragedy she mouthed too much.'
Garrick told Mr. Thrale however, that she was a little painted puppet, of no value at all, and quite disguised with affectation, full of odd airs of rural elegance ; and he made out some comical scenes, by mimicking her in a dialogue he pretended to have overheard : I do not know whether he meant such stuff to be believed or no, it was so comical ; nor did I indeed ever see him represent her ridiculously, though my husband did 3 . The f intelligence I gained of her from old Levett, was only perpetual illness and perpetual opium. The picture I found of her at s Litchfield was very pretty, and her daughter Mrs. Lucy Porter said it was like 4 . Mr. Johnson has told me, that her hair was eminently beautiful, quite blonde like that of a baby ;
��1 * Un jour, en me promenant sur la Tamise, Tun de mes rameurs, voyant que j'etais Fran^ais, se mit k m'exalter, d'un air fier, la liberte de son pays, et me dit, en jurant Dieu, qu'il aimait mieux etre batelier sur la Tamise qu'archeveque en France.' (Euvres de Voltaire, ed. 1821, xliii.
157-
2 The daughter, Lucy Porter, only lived with them for about two years. She never visited London. Life, ii. 462.
3 Boswell, after giving the descrip tion of her which he received from Garrick, continues : ' He probably, as is the case in all such represen tations, considerably aggravated the picture.' /. i. 99. Seepost in Percy's Anecdotes.
4 This portrait is in the possession of Colonel G. F. Pearson, of Nantlys, St. Asaph, who had it from his grandfather, the Rev. J. B. Pearson, the husband of the lady who was
��Lucy Porter's heir. In an inter leaved copy of Harwood's Lichfield, in the Bodleian, at p. 450, is a pic ture of Mrs. Johnson, as well as an engraving by T. Cook (1807) of Hogarth's picture of Joseph Porter.
The author of the Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Dr. Johnson, (ed. 1785, p. 25), who had some of his information from Mrs. Desmoulins the daughter of Johnson's godfather, says that Mrs. Porter was still hand some at the time of her second mar riage. He adds (p. 1 1 1) : ' She was a lady of great sensibility and worth ; so shrewd and cultivated that in the earlier part of their connection he was fond of consulting her in all his literary pursuits, and so handsome that his associates in letters and wit were often very pleasant with him on the strange disparity which, in this respect, subsisted between hus band and wife.'
but
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