JOHNSON, LL.D.***




This eText was transcribed from the 1901 Cassell and Company edition by
Les Bowler.





Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
DURING THE LAST
_TWENTY YEARS OF HIS LIFE_.
BY
Hesther Lynch Piozzi.


CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED
_LONDON_, _PARIS_, _NEW YORK & MELBOURNE_
1901




INTRODUCTION


Mrs. Piozzi, by her second marriage, was by her first marriage the Mrs.
Thrale in whose house at Streatham Doctor Johnson was, after the year of
his first introduction, 1765, in days of infirmity, an honoured and a
cherished friend.  The year of the beginning of the friendship was the
year in which Johnson, fifty-six years old, obtained his degree of LL.D.
from Dublin, and--though he never called himself Doctor--was thenceforth
called Doctor by all his friends.

Before her marriage Mrs. Piozzi had been Miss Hesther Lynch Salusbury, a
young lady of a good Welsh family.  She was born in the year 1740, and
she lived until the year 1821.  She celebrated her eightieth birthday on
the 27th of January, 1820, by a concert, ball, and supper to six or seven
hundred people, and led off the dancing at the ball with an adopted son
for partner.  When Johnson was first introduced to her, as Mrs. Thrale,
she was a lively, plump little lady, twenty-five years old, short of
stature, broad of build, with an animated face, touched, according to the
fashion of life in her early years, with rouge, which she continued to
use when she found that it had spoilt her complexion.  Her hands were
rather coarse, but her handwriting was delicate.

Henry Thrale, whom she married, was the head of the great brewery house
now known as that of Barclay and Perkins.  Henry Thrale's father had
succeeded Edmund Halsey, who began life by running away from his father,
a miller at St. Albans.  Halsey was taken in as a clerk-of-all-work at
the Anchor Brewhouse in Southwark, became a house-clerk, able enough to
please Child, his master, and handsome enough to please his master's
daughter.  He married the daughter and succeeded to Child's Brewery, made
much money, and had himself an only daughter, whom he married to a lord.
Henry Thrale's father was a nephew of Halseys, who had worked in the
brewery for twenty years, when, after Halsey's death, he gave security
for thirty thousand pounds as the price of the business, to which a noble
lord could not succeed.  In eleven years he had paid the purchase-money,
and was making a large fortune.  To this business his son, who was
Johnson's friend, Henry Thrale, succeeded; and upon Thrale's death it was
bought for 150,000 pounds by a member of the Quaker family of Barclay,
who took Thrale's old manager, Perkins, into partnership.

Johnson became, after 1765, familiar in the house of the Thrales at
Streatham.  There was much company.  Mrs. Thrale had a taste for literary
guests and literary guests had, on their part, a taste for her good
dinners.  Johnson was the lion-in-chief.  There was Dr. Johnson's room
always at his disposal; and a tidy wig kept for his special use, because
his own was apt to be singed up the middle by close contact with the
candle, which he put, being short-sighted, between his eyes and a book.
Mrs. Thrale had skill in languages, read Latin, French, Italian, and
Spanish.  She read literature, could quote aptly, and put knowledge as
well as playful life into her conversation.  Johnson's regard for the
Thrales was very real, and it was heartily returned, though Mrs. Thrale
had, like her friend, some weaknesses, in common with most people who
feed lions and wish to pass for wits among the witty.

About fourteen years after Johnson's first acquaintance with the
Thrales--when Johnson was seventy years old and Mrs. Thrale near
forty--the little lady, who had also lost several children, was unhappy
in the thought that she had ceased to be appreciated by her husband.  Her
husband's temper became affected by the commercial troubles of 1762, and
Mrs. Thrale became jealous of the regard between him and Sophy
Streatfield, a rich widow's daughter.  Under January, 1779, she wrote in
her "Thraliana," "Mr. Thrale has fallen in love, really and seriously,
with Sophy Streatfield; but there is no wonder in that; she is very
pretty, very gentle, soft, and insinuating; hangs about him, dances round
him, cries when she parts from him, squeezes his hand slily, and with her
sweet eyes full of tears looks so fondly in his face--and all for love of
me, as she pretends, that I can hardly sometimes help laughing in her
face.  A man must not be a _man_ but an _it_ to resist such artillery."
Mrs. Thrale goes on to record conquests made by this irresistible Sophy
in other directions, showing the same temper of jealousy.  Thrale died on
the 4th of April, 1781.

Mrs. Thrale had entered in her "Thraliana" under July, 1780, being then
at Brighton, "I have picked up Piozzi here, the great Italian singer.  He
is amazingly like my father.  He shall teach Hesther."  On the 25th of
July, 1784, being at Bath, her entry was, "I am returned from church the
happy wife of my lovely, faithful Piozzi.... subject of my prayers,
object of my wishes, my sighs, my reverence, my esteem."  Her age then
was forty-four, and on the 13th of December in the same year Johnson
died.  The newspapers of the day dealt hardly with her.  They called her
an amorous widow, and Piozzi a fortune-hunter.  Her eldest daughter
(afterwards Viscountess Keith) refused to recognise the new father, and
shut herself up in a house at Brighton with a nurse, Tib, where she lived
upon two hundred a year.  Two younger sisters, who were at school, lived
afterwards with the eldest.  Only the fourth daughter, the youngest, went
with her mother and her mother's new husband to Italy.  Johnson, too, was
grieved by the marriage, and had shown it, but had written afterwards
most kindly.  Mrs. Piozzi in Florence was playing at literature with the
poetasters of "The Florence Miscellany" and "The British Album" when she
was working at these "Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson."  Her book of
anecdotes was planned at Florence in 1785, the year after her friend's
death, finished at Florence in October, 1785, and published in the year
1786.  There is a touch of bitterness in the book which she thought of
softening, but her "lovely, faithful Piozzi" wished it to remain.

H. M.




AUTHOR'S PREFACE.


I have somewhere heard or read that the preface before a book, like the
portico before a house, should be contrived so as to catch, but not
detain, the attention of those who desire admission to the family within,
or leave to look over the collection of pictures made by one whose
opportunities of obtaining them we know to have been not unfrequent.  I
wish not to keep my readers long from such intimacy with the manners of
Dr. Johnson, or such knowledge of his sentiments as these pages can
convey.  To urge my distance from England as an excuse for the book's
being ill-written would be ridiculous; it might indeed serve as a just
reason for my having written it at all; because, though others may print
the same aphorisms and stories, I cannot _here_ be sure that they have
done so.  As the Duke says, however, to the Weaver, in _A Midsummer
Night's Dream_, "Never excuse; if your play be a bad one, keep at least
the excuses to yourself."

I am aware that many will say I have not spoken highly enough of Dr.
Johnson; but it will be difficult for those who say so to speak more
highly.  If I have described his manners as they were, I have been
careful to show his superiority to the common forms of common life.  It
is surely no dispraise to an oak that it does not bear jessamine; and he
who should plant honeysuckle round Trajan's column would not be thought
to adorn, but to disgrace it.

When I have said that he was more a man of genius than of learning, I
mean not to take from the one part of his character that which I
willingly give to the other.  The erudition of Mr. Johnson proved his
genius; for he had not acquired it by long or profound study: nor can I
think those characters the greatest which have most learning driven into
their heads, any more than I can persuade myself to consider the River
Jenisca as superior to the Nile, because the first receives near seventy
tributary streams in the course of its unmarked progress to the sea,
while the great parent of African plenty, flowing from an almost
invisible source, and unenriched by any extraneous waters, except eleven
nameless rivers, pours his majestic torrent into the ocean by seven
celebrated mouths.

But I must conclude my preface, and begin my book, the first I ever
presented before the public; from whose awful appearance in some measure
to defend and conceal myself, I have thought fit to retire behind the
Telamonian shield, and show as little of myself as possible, well aware
of the exceeding difference there is between fencing in the school and
fighting in the field.  Studious, however, to avoid offending, and
careless of that offence which can be taken without a cause, I here not
unwillingly submit my slight performance to the decision of that glorious
country, which I have the daily delight to hear applauded in others, as
eminently just, generous, and humane.




ANECDOTES OF THE LATE SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D.


Too much intelligence is often as pernicious to biography as too little;
the mind remains perplexed by contradiction of probabilities, and finds
difficulty in separating report from truth.  If Johnson then lamented
that so little had ever been said about Butler, I might with more reason
be led to complain that so much has been said about himself; for
numberless informers but distract or cloud information, as glasses which
multiply will for the most part be found also to obscure.  Of a life,
too, which for the last twenty years was passed in the very front of
literature, every leader of a literary company, whether officer or
subaltern, naturally becomes either author or critic, so that little less
than the recollection that it was _once_ the request of the deceased, and
_twice_ the desire of those whose will I ever delighted to comply with,
should have engaged me to add my little book to the number of those
already written on the subject.  I used to urge another reason for
forbearance, and say, that all the readers would, on this singular
occasion, be the writers of his life: like the first representation of
the _Masque of Comus_, which, by changing their characters from
spectators to performers, was _acted_ by the lords and ladies it was
_written_ to entertain.  This objection is, however, now at an end, as I
have found friends, far remote indeed from literary questions, who may
yet be diverted from melancholy by my description of Johnson's manners,
warmed to virtue even by the distant reflection of his glowing
excellence, and encouraged by the relation of his animated zeal to
persist in the profession as well as practice of Christianity.

Samuel Johnson was the son of Michael Johnson, a bookseller at Lichfield,
in Staffordshire; a very pious and worthy man, but wrong-headed,
positive, and afflicted with melancholy, as his son, from whom alone I
had the information, once told me: his business, however, leading him to
be much on horseback, contributed to the preservation of his bodily
health and mental sanity, which, when he stayed long at home, would
sometimes be about to give way; and Mr. Johnson said, that when his
workshop, a detached building, had fallen half down for want of money to
repair it, his father was not less diligent to lock the door every night,
though he saw that anybody might walk in at the back part, and knew that
there was no security obtained by barring the front door.  "_This_," says
his son, "was madness, you may see, and would have been discoverable in
other instances of the prevalence of imagination, but that poverty
prevented it from playing such tricks as riches and leisure encourage."
Michael was a man of still larger size and greater strength than his son,
who was reckoned very like him, but did not delight in talking much of
his family: "One has," says he, "_so_ little pleasure in reciting the
anecdotes of beggary."  One day, however, hearing me praise a favourite
friend with partial tenderness as well as true esteem: "Why do you like
that man's acquaintance so?" said he.  "Because," replied I, "he is open
and confiding, and tells me stories of his uncles and cousins; I love the
light parts of a solid character."  "Nay, if you are for family history,"
says Mr. Johnson, good-humouredly, "_I_ can fit you: I had an uncle,
Cornelius Ford, who, upon a journey, stopped and read an inscription
written on a stone he saw standing by the wayside, set up, as it proved,
in honour of a man who had leaped a certain leap thereabouts, the extent
of which was specified upon the stone: 'Why now,' says my uncle, 'I could
leap it in my boots