MRS. THRALE.* IN the course of his interesting introduction to

Mr. Broadley's new book Mr. Thomas Seccombe declares that Mrs. Thrale occupies "a place in letters midway between Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Jane Welsh Carlyle, approached by few and surpassed altogether by none." The controversies which have hitherto raged about her have been purely personal. Mr. Seccombe is preparing for one of a different kind if he is really claiming for Mrs. Thrale's writings a literary value. And in such a discussion how much support will he receive ? Mr. Broadley's newly discovered documents can scarcely assist him, and may even induce the reader to sympathise a little with Horace Walpole, who can be made to reply to Mr. Seccombe with an exaggerated invective :—

" Two days ago," he wrote in 1786, "appeared Madame Pioni's Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson. I am lamentably disappointed—in her, I mean; not in him. I had conceived a favourable opinion of her capacity. But this new book is wretched ; a high-varnished preface to a heap of rubbish, in a very vulgar style, and too void of method even for such a farrago."

But Walpole is perhaps scarcely an impartial critic. For, although against Mrs. Thrale he had no personal feeling, he had a fierce contempt for Johnson and the whole of his milicu

:—

"I never would be in the least acquainted with Johnson," he wrote ; "or, as Boswell calls it, had not a just value for him Johnson's blind Toryism and known brutality kept me aloof ; nor did I ever exchange a syllable with him : nay, I do not think I ever was in a room with him six times in my days. The first time I think was at the Royal Academy. Sir Joshua said, 'Let me present Dr. Goldsmith to you' ; he did. Now I will present Dr. Johnson to you.' 'No,' said I, Sir Joshua, for Dr. Goldsmith, pass—but you shall not present Dr. Johnson to me.'"

But the principal interest in Mrs. Thrale's writings is derived from the light which they throw upon her own character, and upon her relations with the distinguished men and women who gathered around her at Streatham. It is in her writings that we may hope to find the secret of her friend- ships and of her quarrels. But only a great artist can express his character perfectly on paper; and even Mr. Seccombe would admit that the literary powers of Mrs. Thrale had their limits. So it is that we look in vain among her letters and diaries for the "talents and eccentricities," for

• (1) Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrde. By A. X. Broadley. With an Intro. dnctory Essay by Thomas Seccombe. London : John Lane. [Ns. net.]— (2) Dr. Johnson's Mrs. !Male. By A. BuywardL, QC. Newly Selected and Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by J. B. Lobban. London: T. N.

[6e. net.]

the "wit, genius, generosity, spirit, and powers of entertain- ment," which Fanny Burney tells us that she possessed. But the extracts from the Autobiographical Memoirs and Thraliana, reprinted by Mr. Lobban from Hayward's edition, reveal the alert mind of an independent critic. Especially remarkable is the " character " of Mr. Thrale, which has all the aloofness of a foreign historian writing several centuries after the death of his subject :— "Mr. Thrale's person is manly, his countenance agreeable, his

eyes steady and of the deepest blue Mr. Thrale's sobriety, and the decency of his conversation, being wholly free from all oaths, ribaldry and profaneness, make him a man exceedingly com-

fortable to live with Yet I think his servants do not much love him, and I am not sure that his children have much affection for him."

The detachment becomes almost unnatural in the description of Mr. Thrale's death :—

" Mr. Thrale eat voraciously—so voraciously that, encouraged by Jebb and Pepys, who had charged me to do so, I checked him rather severely, and Mr. Johnson added these remarkable words :

• Sir, after the denunciation of your physicians this morning, such eating is little better than suicide."

On the following day he had a stroke :—

'Sir Richard Jebb, who was fetched at the beginning of the distress, seeing death certain, quitted the house without even prescribing. Pepys did all that could be done, and Johnson, who was sent for at eleven o'clock, never left him, for while breath remained he still hoped. I ventured in once, and saw them cutting his clothes off to bleed him, but I saw no more."

It must not be supposed that she was cynical. She was certainly fond of Mr. Thrale, even though she never felt for him the passion that led her to marry her "honourable, ardent, artless Piozzi." The same independence that allowed her to describe so calmly the death of her first husband perhaps gave her the courage to face the insults of her friends when she married her second.

There is a reference in Boswell's Life of Johnson to the friendship between Warburton aid Richardson. On the margin of her copy of the book Mrs. Thrale wrote : "Very curious, and an odd friendship somehow between men so com- pletely dissimilar. The elephant and zebra drawing together." The critical observer might have made this very com- ment upon the chief friendship of her own life,—her friendship with Johnson. What could be more curious than that Mrs. Thrale should have been (to quote once more Mr. Seccombe) "the bride-elect of the great Doctor's intellect for nearly twenty years " ? The recent discovery of Mrs. Thrale's diary of the Welsh journey, of which we already possess Johnson's account, should have offered many instances of contrasted characters. But unfortunately Johnson's entries are in most cases too brief to be characteristic. Here, however, is an instance. On July 26th Mrs. Thrale writes : "On this day we took our leave of Combermere where we had been very kindly treated. I left them, too, liking them better than ever I liked them, though Sir Lynch's rusticity and his Wife's emptiness afforded nothing but a possibility of change from disgust to insipidity." The corresponding words in Dr. Johnson's diary are these : "Sir L. is gross, the lady weak and ignorant." But the difference between the characters was more than one of mere expression. And it is surely to this fundamental difference that the final rupture must be attributed. The marriage with Piozzi was only an excuse for the outburst that a long series of irritations had made inevitable. The two friends, to put it plainly, "got on one another's nerves." And already in the Welsh journey we can imagine that we see the beginning of the process. Is there no touch of sarcasm in these sentences of Johnson's ?— " Mrs. Thrale lost her purse. She expressed so much uneasiness, that I concluded the sum to be very great; but when I heard of only seven guineas, I was glad to find that she had so much sensibility of money."

But the annoyance was not on one side only • "Every day more and more," says Mrs. Thrale, "do I feel the loss of my Mother. My present Companions have too much philosophy for me. One cannot disburthen one's mind to people who are watchful to cavil, or acute to contradict before the sentence is finished."

And in her last entry, on her return to town, there is almost a shriek of despair when she learns that she is to live in Southwark :—

" I thought to have lived at Streatham in quiet and comfort, have kissed my children and cuffed Ahem by turns, and had a place always for them to play in, and here I must be shut up in

that odious dungeon, where nobody will come near me, the children are to be sick for want of air, and / eel never to see a face but lift. Johnson's."

Already the zebra was growing restive.