CONVERSATION WITH JOHNSON. 47 riated, and shows how important a part Mrs. Thrale played in it : "Mrs. Thrale told us, that a curious clergyman of our acquaintance (Dr. Lort is named in the margin) had discovered a licentious stanza, which Pope had originally in his 'Universal Prayer,' before the stanza,— "What conscience dictates to be done, Or warns us not to do,' &c. It was this: "Can sins of moment claim the rod Of everlasting fires? And that offend great Nature's God and that Dr. Johnson observed, it had been borrowed from Guarini. There are, indeed, in Pastor Fido, many such flimsy superficial reasonings as that in the last two lines of this stanza. "Boswell. In that stanza of Pope's, "rod of fires" is certainly a bad metaphor.' Mrs. Thrale." And "sins of moment" is a faulty expression; for its true import is momentous, which cannot be intended.' Johnson. 'It must have been written " of moments." Of moment, is momentous; of moments, momentary. I warrant you, however, Pope wrote this stanza, and some friend struck it out.' "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.' 6 Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale joined against this. such an injury.' Boswell. to make him unhappy?' Would you tell your friend Johnson. Perhaps, Sir, I should not: but that would be from prudence on my own account. A man would tell his father.' Boswell. .?' Yes; because he would not have spurious children to get any share of the family inheritance.' Mrs. Thrale. 'Or he would tell his brother.' Boswell. Certainly his elder brother. Would you tell Mr. (naming a gentleman who assuredly was not in the least danger of so miserable a disgrace, though married to a fine woman). Johnson. No, Sir: because it would do no good; he is so sluggish, he'd never go to Parliament and get through a divorce.'" Marginal Note: "Langton." There is every reason to believe that her behaviour to Johnson was uniformly marked by good-breeding and delicacy. She treated him with a degree of consideration and respect which he did not always receive from other friends and admirers. A foolish rumour having got into the newspapers that he had been learning to dance of Vestris, it was agreed that Lord Charlemont should ask him if it was true, and his lordship with (it is shrewdly observed) the characteristic spirit of a general of Irish volunteers, actually put the question, which provoked a passing feeling of irritation. Opposite Boswell's account of this incident she has written, "Was he not right in hating to be so treated? and would he not have been right to have HER ACQUIREMENTS. 49 loved me better than any of them, because I never did make a Lyon of him?" One great charm of her companionship to cultivated men was her familiarity with the learned languages, as well as with French, Italian, and Spanish. The author of "Piozziana " says: "She not only read and wrote Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, but had for sixty years constantly and ardently studied the Scriptures and the works of commentators in the original languages." She did not know Greek, and he probably over-estimated her other acquirements, which Boswell certainly underestimates when he speaks slightingly of them on the strength of Johnson's having said: "It is a great mistake to suppose that she is above him (Thrale) in literary attainments. She is more flippant, but he has ten times her learning: he is a regular scholar; but her learning is that of a school-boy in one of the lower forms." If this were so, it is strange that Thrale should cut so poor a figure, should seem little better than a nonentity, whilst every imaginable topic was under animated discussion at his table; for Boswell was more ready to report the husband's sayings than the wife's. In a marginal note on one of the printed letters she says: "Mr. Thrale was a very merry talking man in 1760; but the distress of 1772, which affected his health, his hopes, and his whole soul, affected his temper too. Perkins called it being planet struck, and I am not sure he was ever completely the same man again.” The notes of his conversation during the antecedent period are equally meagre.* He is described by Madame D'Arblay as taking a singular amusement in hearing, instigating, and provoking a war of words, alternating triumph and overthrow, between clever and ambitious colloquial combatants. No one would have expected to find her as much at home in Greek and Latin authors as a man of fair ability who had received and profited by an University education, but she could appreciate a classical allusion or quotation, and translate off-hand a Latin epigram. "Mary Aston," said Johnson, "was a beauty and a scholar, and a wit and a whig; and she talked all in praise of liberty; and so I made this epigram upon her. She was the loveliest creature I ever saw! "Liber ut esse velim, suasisti, pulchra Maria, Ut maneam liber, pulchra Maria, vale!' "Will it do this way in English, Sir? (said Mrs. Thrale) "Persuasions to freedom fall oddly from you, If freedom we seek, fair Maria, adieu.' Mr. Croker's version is: "You wish me, fair Maria, to be free, Then, fair Maria, I must fly from thee.' Boswell also has tried his hand at it; and a corres 96 * "Pray, Doctor, said a gentleman to Johnson, is Mr. Thrale a man of conversation, or is he only wise and silent? Why, Sir, his conversation does not show the minute hand; but he generally strikes the hour very correctly." "-Johnsoniana. pondent of the "Gentleman's Magazine" suggests that Johnson had in his mind an epigram on a young lady who appeared at a masquerade in Paris, habited as a Jesuit, during the height of the contention between the Jansenists and Molinists concerning free will: "On s'étonne ici que Calviniste N'est ce pas une Janséniste." Mrs. Thrale took the lead even when her husband might be expected to strike in, as when Johnson was declaiming paradoxically against action in oratory: "Action can have no effect on reasonable minds. It may augment noise, but it never can enforce argument.' Mrs. Thrale. "What then, Sir, becomes of Demosthenes' saying, Action, action, action?" Johnson. "Demosthenes, Madam, spoke to an assembly of brutes, to a barbarous people." "The polished Athenians!" is her marginal protest, and a conclusive one. In English literature she was rarely at fault. In * "Menagiana,” vol. iii. p. 376. Edition of 1716. Equally happy were Lord Chesterfield's lines to a young lady who appeared at a Dublin ball, with an orange breastknot: "Pretty Tory, where's the jest To wear that riband on thy breast, When that same breast betraying shows The whiteness of the rebel rose ? " White was adopted by the malcontent Irish as the French emblem. Johnson's epigram may have been suggested by Propertius: "Nullus liber erit si quis amare volet." |