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Said Widow Thrale then, explanatorily: "Mother will be fretting by reason that the old soul would take no refreshment. But reckon you can't with Wills and Won'ts, do what you may! They just drove away, sharp, they did! I tell mother she took no harm, and if she did, t'was no fault of hers, or mine, I lay!" Two days later, Widow Thrale went over by arrangement to Mrs.
Mr Gladstone, proposing a Parliamentary vote of thanks to Lord Napier for 'having planted the Standard of St George upon the mountains of Rasselas; Sir Robert Peel, quoting, in his address to Glasgow University as Lord Rector, Johnson's description of Iona; Sir Walter Scott finding in Skye that he and his friends had in their memories, as the one typical association of the island, the ode to Mrs Thrale, all combine to shew the abiding interest attaching to the Rambler even in Abyssinia and to his foot-steps in Scotland.
You are a Scotchman without the faults of a Scotchman. You would not have been so valuable as you are, had you not been a Scotchman. Talking of divorces, I asked if Othello's doctrine was not plausible? 'He that is robb'd, not wanting what is stolen, Let him not know't, and he's not robb'd at all . Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale joined against this.
I may debauch yours." Mr. Thrale called upon him, and appeared to bear the loss of his son with a manly composure. There was no affectation about him; and he talked, as usual, upon indifferent subjects. He seemed to me to hesitate as to the intended Italian tour, on which, I flattered myself, he and Mrs. Thrale and Dr. Johnson were soon to set out; and, therefore, I pressed it as much as I could.
But, in spite of young Maisie's confidence on the subject, her mother could not resist the misgiving that her expected grandchild was girding up its insignificant loins to make a dash for existence. Consider its feelings if it had inherited its great-grandmother's scrupulous punctuality! Widow Thrale was between two fires duty to a mother and duty to a daughter.
He led Keith to talk to him of the Excise in Scotland, and, in the course of conversation, mentioned that his friend Mr. Thrale, the great brewer, paid twenty thousand pounds a year to the revenue; and that he had four casks, each of which holds sixteen hundred barrels, above a thousand hogsheads. After this there was little conversation that deserves to be remembered.
It must be admitted that Johnson derived a considerable portion of happiness from the comforts and elegancies which he enjoyed in Mr. Thrale's family ; but Mrs. Thrale assures us he was indebted for these to her husband alone, who certainly respected him sincerely. Her words are,
Thrale justly and wittily accounted for such conduct by saying, that Johnson's conversation was by much too strong for a person accustomed to obsequiousness and flattery; it was mustard in a young child's mouth!
Hogarth had it for a year with an intention to engrave it, and even went so far as almost to finish the plate, which, as he told me himself, he broke into pieces upon finding that after many trials he could not bring the woman's head to answer his idea, or to resemble the picture. The lady, let us note, is a portrait of Miss Hester Lynch Salusbury, afterwards Mrs. Thrale and Madame Piozzi.
Piozzi, whom the world frowned upon, whom the wits jeered at, and society neglected, whose friends nobody now knows, will be best remembered and best liked as having once been Mrs. Thrale. There is no great charge against her; she was more sinned against than sinning; she was only weak and foolish, only degenerated from her first excellence.
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