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Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) by Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi

M >> Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi >> Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.)




In the "Anecdotes" she goes on to say that when she and her husband
called on Johnson one morning in Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, he
gave way to such an uncontrolled burst of despair regarding the world
to come, that Mr. Thrale tried to stop his mouth by placing one hand
before it, and desired her to prevail on him to quit his close
habitation for a period and come with them to Streatham. He complied,
and took up his abode with them from before Midsummer till after
Michaelmas in that year. During the next sixteen years a room in each
of their houses was set apart for him.

The principal difficulty at first was to induce him to live peaceably
with her mother, who took a strong dislike to him, and constantly led
the conversation to topics which he detested, such as foreign news
and politics. He revenged himself by writing to the newspapers
accounts of events which never happened, for the sole purpose of
mystifying her; and probably not a few of his mischievous fictions
have passed current for history. They made up their differences
before her death, and a Latin epitaph of the most eulogistic order
from his pen is inscribed upon her tomb.

It had been well for Mrs. Thrale and her guests if there had existed
no more serious objection to Johnson as an inmate. At the
commencement of the acquaintance, he was fifty-six; an age when
habits are ordinarily fixed: and many of his were of a kind which it
required no common temper and tact to tolerate or control. They had
been formed at a period when he was frequently subjected to the worst
extremities of humiliating poverty and want. He describes Savage,
without money to pay for a night's lodging in a cellar, walking about
the streets till he was weary, and sleeping in summer upon a bulk or
in winter amongst the ashes of a glass-house. He was Savage's
associate on several occasions of the sort. He told Sir Joshua
Reynolds that, one night in particular, when Savage and he walked
round St. James's Square for want of a lodging, they were not at all
depressed; but in high spirits, and brimful of patriotism, traversed
the square for several hours, inveighed against the minister, and
"resolved they would stand by their country." Whilst at college he
threw away the shoes left at his door to replace the worn-out pair in
which he appeared daily. His clothes were in so tattered a state
whilst he was writing for the "Gentleman's Magazine" that, instead of
taking his seat at Cave's table, he sate behind a screen and had his
victuals sent to him.

Talking of the symptoms of Christopher Smart's madness, he said,
"Another charge was that he did not love clean linen; and I have no
passion for it."

His deficiency in this respect seems to have made a lasting
impression on his hostess. Referring to a couplet in "The Vanity of
Human Wishes":--

"Through all his veins the fever of renown
_Spreads_ from the strong contagion of the gown,"

"he had desired me (says Boswell) to change _spreads_ into _burns._ I
thought this alteration not only cured the fault, but was more
poetical, as it might carry an allusion to the shirt by which
Hercules was inflamed." She has written in the margin: "Every fever
burns I believe; but Bozzy could think only on Nessus' dirty shirt,
or Dr. Johnson's." In another marginal note she disclaims that
attention to the Doctor's costume for which Boswell gives her credit,
when, after relating how he had been called into a shop by Johnson to
assist in the choice of a pair of silver buckles, he adds: "Probably
this alteration in dress had been suggested by Mrs. Thrale, by
associating with whom his external appearance was much improved." She
writes: "it was suggested by Mr. Thrale, not by his wife."

In general his wigs were very shabby, and their foreparts were burned
away by the near approach of the candle, which his short-sightedness
rendered necessary in reading. At Streatham, Mr. Thrale's valet had
always a better wig ready, with which he met Johnson at the parlour
door when dinner was announced, and as he went up stairs to bed, the
same man followed him with another.

One of his applications to Cave for a trifling advance of money is
signed _Impransus_ (Dinnerless); and he told Boswell that he could
fast two days without inconvenience, and had never been hungry but
once. What he meant by hungry is not easy to explain, for his every
day manner of eating was that of a half-famished man. When at table,
he was totally absorbed in the business of the moment; his looks were
riveted to his plate, till he had satisfied his appetite; which was
indulged with such in-* tenseness, that the veins of his forehead
swelled, and generally a strong perspiration was visible. Until he
left off drinking fermented liquors altogether, he acted on the maxim
"claret for boys, port for men, brandy for heroes." He preferred the
strongest because he said it did its work (_i.e._ intoxicate) the
soonest. He used to pour capillaire into his port wine, and melted
butter into his chocolate. His favourite dishes are accurately
enumerated by Peter Pindar:

MADAME PIOZZI _(loquitur)._

"Dear Doctor Johnson loved a leg of pork,
And hearty on it would his grinders work:
He lik'd to eat it so much over done,
That _one_ might shake the flesh from off the bone.
A veal pye too, with sugar crammed and plums,
Was wondrous grateful to the Doctor's gums.
Though us'd from morn to night on fruit to stuff,
He vow'd his belly never had enough."

Mr. Thackeray relates in his "Irish Sketches" that on his asking for
currant jelly for his venison at a public dinner, the waiter replied,
"It's all gone, your honour, but there's some capital lobster sauce
left." This would have suited Johnson equally well, or better: he was
so fond of lobster sauce that he would call for the sauce-boat and
pour the whole of its remaining contents over his plum pudding. A
clergyman who once travelled with him relates, "The coach halted as
usual for dinner, which seemed to be a deeply interesting business to
Johnson, who vehemently attacked a dish of stewed carp, using his
fingers only in feeding himself." At the dinner when he passed his
celebrated sentence on the leg of mutton--"That it was as bad as bad
could be: ill-fed, ill-killed, ill-kept, and ill-dressed"--the
ladies, his fellow-passengers, observed his loss or equanimity with
wonder.

Two of Mrs. Thrale's marginal notes on Boswell refer to her
illustrious friend's mode of eating. On his reported remark, that "a
dog will take a small bit of meat as readily as a large, when both
are before him," she adds, "which Johnson would never have done."
When Boswell, describing the dinner with Wilkes at Davies', says, "No
man eat more heartily than Johnson, or loved better what was nice and
delicate," she strikes in with--"What was gustful rather: what was
strong that he could taste it, what was tender that he could chew
it."

When Boswell describes him as occupied for a considerable time in
reading the "Memoirs of Fontenelle," leaning and swinging upon the
low gate into the court (at Streatham) without his hat, her note is:
"I wonder how he liked the story of the asparagus,"--an obvious hint
at his selfish habits of indulgence at table.

With all this he affected great nicety of palate, and did not like
being asked to a plain dinner. "It was a good dinner enough," he
would remark, "but it was not a dinner to ask a man to." He was so
displeased with the performances of a nobleman's French cook, that he
exclaimed with vehemence, "I'd throw such a rascal into the river;"
and in reference to one of his Edinburgh hosts he said, "As for
Maclaurin's imitation of a made dish, it was a wretched attempt."

His voice was loud, and his gesticulations, voluntary or involuntary,
singularly uncouth. He had superstitious fancies about crossing
thresholds or squares in the carpet with the right or left leg
foremost, and when he did not appear at dinner might be found vainly
endeavouring to pass a particular spot in the anteroom. He loved late
hours, or more properly (say Mrs. Thrale) hated early ones. Nothing
was more terrifying to him than the idea of going to bed, which he
never would call going to rest, or suffer another to call it so. "I
lie down that my acquaintance may sleep; but I lie down to endure
oppressive misery, and soon rise again to pass the night in anxiety
and pain." When people could be induced to sit up with him, they were
often amply compensated by his rich flow of mind; but the resulting
sacrifice of health and comfort in an establishment where this
sitting up became habitual, was inevitably great.[1] Instead of being
grateful, he always maintained that no one forbore his own
gratification for the purpose of pleasing another, and "if one did
sit up, it was probably to amuse oneself." Boswell excuses his wife
for not coinciding in his enthusiasm, by admitting that his
illustrious friend's irregular hours and uncouth habits, such as
turning the candles with their ends downwards when they did not burn
bright enough, and letting the wax drop upon the carpet, could not
but be displeasing to a lady. He was generally last at breakfast, but
one morning happened to be first and waited some time alone; when
afterwards twitted by Mrs. Thrale with irregularity, he replied,
"Madam, I do not like to come down to vacuity."

[Footnote 1: Dr. Burney states that in 1765 "he very frequently met
Johnson at Streatham, where they had many long conversations, after
sitting up as long as the fire and candles lasted, and much longer
than the patience of the servants subsisted."]

He was subject to dreadful fits of depression, caused or accompanied
by compunction for venial or fancied sins, by the fear of death or
madness--(the only things he did fear), and by ingrained ineradicable
disease. When Boswell speaks of his "striving against evil," "Ay,"
she writes in the margin, "and against the King's evil."

If his early familiarity with all the miseries of destitution,
aggravated by disease, had increased his natural roughness and
irritability, on the other hand it had helped largely to bring out
his sterling virtues,--his discriminating charity, his genuine
benevolence, his well-timed generosity, his large-hearted sympathy
with real suffering. But he required it to be material and positive,
and scoffed at mere mental or sentimental woes. "The sight of people
who want food and raiment is so common in great cities, that a surly
fellow like me has no compassion to spare for wounds given only to
vanity or softness." He said it was enough to make a plain man sick
to hear pity lavished on a family reduced by losses to exchange a
fine house for a snug cottage; and when condolence was demanded for a
lady of rank in mourning for a baby, he contrasted her with a
washerwoman with half-a-dozen children dependent on her daily labour
for their daily bread.[1]

[Footnote 1: "It's weel wi' you gentles that can sit in the house wi'
handkerchers at your een when ye lose a friend; but the like o' us
maun to our wark again, if our hearts were beating as hard as any
hammer."--_The Antiquary_. For this very reason the "gentles"
commonly suffer most.]

Lord Macaulay thus portrays the objects of Johnson's hospitality as
soon as he had got a house to cover them. "It was the home of the
most extraordinary assemblage of inmates that ever was brought
together. At the head of the establishment he had placed an old lady
named Williams, whose chief recommendations were her blindness and
her poverty. But in spite of her murmurs and reproaches, he gave an
asylum to another lady who was as poor as herself, Mrs. Desmoulins,
whose family he had known many years before in Staffordshire. Room
was found for the daughter of Mrs. Desmoulins, and for another
destitute damsel, who was generally addressed as Mrs. Carmichael, but
whom her generous host called Polly. An old quack doctor called
Levet, who bled and dosed coalheavers and hackney coachmen, and
received for fees crusts of bread, bits of bacon, glasses of gin, and
sometimes a little copper, completed this menagerie."[1]

[Footnote 1: Miscellaneous Writings, vol. i. p. 293.]

Mrs. Williams was the daughter of a physician, and of a good Welsh
family, who did not leave her dependent on Johnson. She is termed by
Madame D'Arblay a very pretty poet, and was treated with uniform
respect by him.[1] All the authorities for the account of Levet were
collected by Hawkins[2]: from these it appears that his patients were
"chiefly of the lowest class of tradesmen," and that, although he
took all that was offered him by way of fee, including meat and
drink, he demanded nothing from the poor, nor was known in any
instance to have enforced the payment of even what was justly his
due. Hawkins adds that he (Levet) had acted for many years in the
capacity of surgeon and apothecary to Johnson under the direction of
Dr. Lawrence.

[Footnote 1: Miss Cornelia Knight, in her "Autobiography," warmly
vindicates her respectability, and refers to a memoir, by Lady
Knight, in the "European Magazine" for Oct. 1799.]

[Footnote 2: Life of Johnson, p. 396-400.]

"When fainting Nature called for aid,
And hovering death prepared the blow,
His vigorous remedy display'd
The power of Art without the show;

No summons mocked by chill delay,
_No petty gains disdained by pride,_
The modest wants of every day
The toil of every day supplied."

Johnson's verses, compared with Lord Macaulay's prose, strikingly
shew how the same subject can be degraded or elevated by the mode of
treatment; and how easily the historian or biographer, who expands
his authorities by picturesque details, may brighten or darken
characters at will.

To complete the picture of Johnson's interior, it should be added
that the inmates of his house were quarrelling from, morning to night
with one another, with his negro servant, or with himself. In one of
his letters to Mrs. Thrale, he says, "Williams hates everybody: Levet
hates Desmoulins, and does not love Williams: Desmoulins hates them
both: Poll (Miss Carmichael) loves none of them." In a conversation
at Streatham, reported by Madame D'Arblay, the _menagerie_ was thus
humorously described:--

"_Mrs. Thrale_.--Mr. Levet, I suppose, Sir, has the office of keeping
the hospital in health? for he is an apothecary.

"_Dr. J_.--Levet, Madam, is a brutal fellow, but I have a good regard
for him; for his brutality is in his manners, not his mind.

"_Mr. Thrale_.--But how do you get your dinners drest?

"_Dr. J_.--Why De Mullin has the chief management of the kitchen; but
our roasting is not magnificent, for we have no jack.

"_Mr. T_.--No jack? Why how do they manage without?

"_Dr. J_.--Small joints, I believe, they manage with a string, and
larger are done at the tavern. I have some thoughts (with a profound
gravity) of buying a jack, because I think a jack is some credit to a
house.

"_Mr. T_.--Well, but you will have a spit, too?

"_Dr. J_.--No, Sir, no; that would be superfluous; for we shall never
use it; and if a jack is seen, a spit will be presumed!

"_Mrs. T_.--But pray, Sir, who is the Poll you talk of? She that you
used to abet in her quarrels with Mrs. Williams, and call out,' At
her again, Poll! Never flinch, Poll!'

"_Dr. J_.--Why I took to Poll very well at first, but she won't do
upon a nearer examination.

"_Mrs. T_.--How came she among you, Sir?

"_Dr. J_.--Why I don't rightly remember, but we could spare her very
well from us. Poll is a stupid slut; I had some hopes of her at
first; but when I talked to her tightly and closely, I could make
nothing of her; she was wiggle waggle, and I could never persuade her
to be categorical."

The effect of an unbroken residence with such inmates, on a man of
irritable temper subject to morbid melancholy, may be guessed; and
the merit of the Thrales in rescuing him from it, and in soothing
down his asperities, can hardly be over-estimated. Lord Macaulay
says, they were flattered by finding that a man so widely celebrated
preferred their house to every other in London; and suggests that
even the peculiarities which seem to unfit him for civilised society,
including his gesticulations, his rollings, his puffings, his
mutterings, and the ravenous eagerness with which he devoured his
food, increased the interest which his new associates took in him.
His hostess does not appear to have viewed them in that light, and
she was able to command the best company of the intellectual order
without the aid of a "lion," or a bear. If his conversation attracted
many, it drove away many, and silenced more. He accounted for the
little attention paid him by the great, by saying that "great lords
and great ladies do not like to have their mouths stopped," as if
this was peculiar to them as a class. "My leddie," remarks Cuddie in
"Old Mortality," "canna weel bide to be contradicted, as I ken
neabody likes, if they could help themselves."

Johnson was in the zenith of his fame when literature, politics, and
fashion began to blend together again by hardly perceptible shades,
like the colours in shot-silk, as they had partially done in the
Augustan age of Queen Anne. One marked sign was the formation of the
Literary Club (The Club, as it still claims to be called), which
brought together Fox, Burke, Gibbon, Johnson, Goldsmith, Garrick,
Reynolds, and Beauclerc, besides blackballing a bishop (the Bishop of
Chester), and a lord-chancellor (Camden).[1] Yet it is curious to
observe within how narrow a circle of good houses the Doctor's
engagements were restricted. Reynolds, Paoli, Beauclerc, Allan
Ramsay, Hoole, Dilly, Strahan, Lord Lucan, Langton, Garrick, and the
Club formed his main reliance as regards dinners; and we find Boswell
recording with manifest symptoms of exultation in 1781: "I dined with
him at a bishop's where were Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mr. Berenger, and
some more company. He had dined the day before at another bishop's."
His reverence for the episcopal bench well merited some return on
their part. Mr. Seward saw him presented to the Archbishop of York,
and described his bow to an Archbishop as such a studied elaboration
of homage, such an extension of limb, such a flexion of body, as have
seldom or ever been equalled. The lay nobility were not equally
grateful, although his deference for the peerage was extreme. Except
in Scotland or on his travels, he is seldom found dining with a
nobleman.

[Footnote 1: Canning was blackballed the first time he was proposed.
He was elected in 1798, Mr. Windham being his proposer, and Dr.
Burney his seconder.]

It is therefore hardly an exaggeration to say that he owed more
social enjoyment to the Thrales than to all the rest of his
acquaintance put together. Holland House alone, and in its best days,
would convey to persons living in our time an adequate conception of
the Streatham circle, when it comprised Burke, Reynolds, Garrick,
Goldsmith, Boswell, Murphy, Dr. Burney and his daughter, Mrs.
Montagu, Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs. Crewe, Lord Loughborough, Dunning
(afterwards Lord Ashburton), Lord Mulgrave, Lord Westcote, Sir Lucas
and Mr. (afterwards Sir William) Pepys, Major Holroyd afterwards Lord
Sheffield, the Bishop of London and Mrs. Porteous, the Bishop of
Peterborough and Mrs. Hinchcliffe, Miss Gregory, Miss Streatfield,
&c. As at Holland House, the chief scene of warm colloquial contest
or quiet interchange of mind was the library, a large and handsome
room, which the pencil of Reynolds gradually enriched with portraits
of all the principal persons who had conversed or studied in it. To
supply any deficiencies on the shelves, a hundred pounds, Madame
D'Arblay states, was placed at Johnson's disposal to expend in books;
and we may take it for granted that any new publication suggested by
him was ordered at once. But a bookish couple, surrounded by a
literary set, were surely not exclusively dependent on him for this
description of help, nor laid under any extraordinary obligation by
reason of it. Whilst the "Lives of the Poets" was in progress, Dr.
Johnson "would frequently produce one of the proof sheets to
embellish the breakfast table, which was always in the library, and
was certainly the most sprightly and agreeable meeting of the day."
... "These proof sheets Mrs. Thrale was permitted to read aloud, and
the discussions to which they led were in the highest degree
entertaining."[1]

[Footnote 1: "Memoirs of Dr. Burney," &c., by his daughter, Madame
D'Arblay. In three volumes, 1832. Vol. ii. p. 173-178.]

It was mainly owing to his domestication with the Thrales that he
began to frequent drawing-rooms at an age when the arm-chair at home
or at the club has an irresistible charm for most men of sedentary
pursuits. It must be admitted that the evening parties in which he
was seen, afforded a chance of something better than the "unidead
chatter of girls," with an undue fondness for which he reproached
Langton; for the _Blue Stocking_ clubs had just come into
fashion,--so called from a casual allusion to the blue stockings of
an _habitue_, Mr. Stillingfleet.[1] Their founders were Mrs. Vesey
and Mrs. Montagu; but according to Madame D'Arblay, "more bland and
more gleeful than that of either of them, was the personal celebrity
of Mrs. Thrale. Mrs. Vesey, indeed, gentle and diffident, dreamed not
of any competition, but Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Thrale had long been
set up as rival candidates for colloquial eminence, and each of them
thought the other alone worthy to be her peer. Openly therefore when
they met, they combated for precedence of admiration, with placid
though high-strained intellectual exertion on the one side, and an
exuberant pleasantry or classical allusion or quotation on the other;
without the smallest malice in either."

[Footnote 1: The first of these was then (about 1768) in the meridian
of its lustre, but had been instituted many years previously at Bath,
It owed its name to an apology made by Mr. Stillingfleet in declining
to accept an invitation to a literary meeting at Mrs. Vesey's, from
not being, he said, in the habit of displaying a proper equipment for
an evening assembly. "Pho, pho," said she, "don't mind dress. Come in
your blue stockings." With which words, humorously repeating them as
he entered the apartment of the chosen coterie, Mr. Stillingfleet
claimed permission for entering according to order. And these words,
ever after, were fixed, in playful stigma, upon Mrs. Vesey's
associations. _(Madame D'Arblay.)_ Boswell also traces the term to
Stillingfleet's blue stockings; and Hannah More's "Bas-Bleu" gave it
a permanent place in literature.]

A different account of the origin of Bluestocking parties was given
by Lady Crewe to a lady who has allowed me to copy her note of the
conversation, made at the time (1816):

"Lady Crewe told me that her mother (Mrs. Greville), the Duchess of
Portland, and Mrs. Montagu were the first who began the conversation
parties in imitation of the noted ones, _temp._ Madame de Sevigne',
at Rue St. Honore. Madame de Polignac, one of the first guests, came
in blue silk stockings, then the newest fashion in Paris. Mrs.
Greville and all the lady members of Mrs. Montagu's _club_, adopted
the _mode_. A foreign gentleman, after spending an evening at Mrs.
Montagu's _soiree_, wrote to tell a friend of the charming
intellectual party, who had one rule; 'they wear blue stockings as a
distinction.'"

Wraxall, who makes the same comparison, remarks: "Mrs. Thrale always
appeared to me to possess at least as much information, a mind as
cultivated, and more brilliancy of intellect than Mrs. Montagu, but
she did not descend among men from such an eminence, and she talked
much more, as well as more unguardedly, on every subject. She was the
provider and conductress of Johnson, who lived almost constantly
under her roof, or more properly under that of Mr. Thrale, both in
Town and at Streatham. He did not, however, spare her more than other
women in his attacks if she courted and provoked his animadversions."

Although he seldom appeared to greater advantage than when under the
combined spell of feminine influence and rank, his demeanour varied
with his mood. On Miss Monkton's (afterwards Countess of Cork)
insisting, one evening, that Sterne's writings were very pathetic,
Johnson bluntly denied it. "I am sure," she rejoined, "they have
affected me." "Why," said Johnson, smiling and rolling himself about,
"that is because, dearest, you're a dunce." When she some time
afterwards mentioned this to him, he said, with equal truth and
politeness, "Madam, if I had thought so, I certainly should not have
said it."

He did not come off so well on another occasion, when the presence of
women he respected might be expected to operate as a cheek. Talking,
at Mrs. Garrick's, of a very respectable author, he told us, says
Boswell, "a curious circumstance in his life, which was that he had
married a printer's devil. _Reynolds_. 'A printer's devil, Sir! why,
I thought a printer's devil was a creature with a black face and in
rags.' _Johnson_. 'Yes, Sir. But I suppose he had her face washed,
and put clean clothes on her.' Then, looking very serious, and very
earnest. 'And she did not disgrace him;--the woman had a bottom of
good sense.' The word _bottom_ thus introduced was so ludicrous when
contrasted with his gravity, that most of us could not forbear
tittering and laughing; though I recollect that the Bishop of
Killaloe kept his countenance with perfect steadiness, while Miss
Hannah More slily hid her face behind a lady's back who sat on the
same settee with her. His pride could not bear that any expression of
his should excite ridicule, when he did not intend it: he therefore
resolved to assume and exercise despotic power, glanced sternly
around, and called out in a strong tone, 'Where's the merriment?'
Then collecting himself, and looking awful, to make us feel how he
could impose restraint, and as it were searching his mind for a still
more ludicrous word, he slowly pronounced, 'I say the _woman_ was
_fundamentally_ sensible;' as if he had said, Hear this now, and
laugh if you dare. We all sat composed as at a funeral."

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