breakfast for him till the bell rung for dinner, though much displeased if the toilet was neglected, and though much of the time we passed together was spent in blaming or deriding, very justly, my neglect of œconomy, and waste of that money which might make many families happy. The original reason of our connection, his particularly disordered health and spirits, had been long at an end[1], and he had no other ailments than old age and general infirmity[2], which every professor of medicine was ardently zealous and generally attentive to palliate, and to contribute all in their power for the prolongation of a life so valuable.
Veneration for his virtue, reverence for his talents, delight in his conversation, and habitual endurance of a yoke my husband first put upon me, and of which he contentedly bore his share for sixteen or seventeen years, made me go on so long with Mr. Johnson; but the perpetual confinement I will own to have been terrifying in the first years of our friendship, and irksome in the last; nor could I pretend to support it without help, when my coadjutor was no more[3]. To the assistance we gave him, the shelter our house afforded to his uneasy fancies, and to the pains we took to sooth or repress them, the world perhaps is indebted for the three political pamphlets[4], the new edition and correction of his Dictionary, and for the Poets' Lives, which he would scarce have lived, I think, and kept his faculties entire, to have written, had not incessant care been exerted at the time of
- ↑ Ante, p. 234. What had come to an end was the life of Mr. Thrale who, perhaps chiefly from compassion, had at first made Johnson an inmate of his house, but who came to take so much delight in his company that, as his wife said, 'he would go no-where that he could help without him.' Life, iii. 28, n.
- ↑ Her readers would hardly infer that he had had a stroke of palsy, a dangerous sarcocele, asthma, and dropsy.
- ↑ Boswell, quoting this passage, continues: – 'Alas! how different is this from the declarations which I have heard Mrs. Thrale make in his life-time, without a single murmur against any peculiarities, or against any one circumstance which attended their intimacy.' Ib. iv. 340.
- ↑ He wrote four political pamphlets.
having lived with the Thrales five years and a half. Letters, i. 403, n. 6. He cannot therefore speak of the time after Mr. Thrale's death. The cheerfulness of the Streatham life during the life-time of its master is shown in Miss Burney's Diaries.
