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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 correspondent 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

      Eût pris l'habit de Moliniste,

      Puisque que cette jeune beauté

      Ôte à chacun sa liberté,

      N'est ce pas une Janséniste."[1]

      [1] "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:—

      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

      "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."

      reference to the flattery lavished on Garrick by Lord Mansfield and Lord Chatham, Johnson had said, "When he whom everybody else flatters, flatters me, then I am truly happy." Mrs. Thrale. "The sentiment is in Congreve, I think." Johnson. "Yes, Madam, in 'The Way of the World.'

      "'If there's delight in love, 'tis when I see

      The heart that others bleed for, bleed for me.'"

      When Johnson is reported saying, "Those who have a style of distinguished excellence can always be distinguished," she objects: "It seems not. The lines always quoted as Dryden's, beginning,

      'To die is landing on some silent shore,'

      are Garth's after all." Johnson would have been still less pleased at her discovery that a line in his epitaph on Phillips,

      "Till angels wake thee with a note like thine,"

      was imitated from Pope's

      "And saints embrace thee with a love like mine."

In one of her letters to him (June, 1782) she writes: "Meantime let us be as merry as reading Burton upon Melancholy will make us. You bid me study that book in your absence, and now, what have I found? Why, I have found, or fancied, that he has been cruelly plundered: that Milton's first idea of 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' were suggested by the verses at the beginning; that Savage's speech of Suicide in the 'Wanderer' grew up out of a passage you probably remember towards the 216th page; that Swift's tale of the woman that holds water in her mouth, to regain her husband's love by silence, had its source in the same farrago; and that there is an odd similitude between my Lord's trick upon Sly the Tinker, in Shakspeare's 'Taming of the Shrew,' and some stuff I have been reading in Burton."

      It would be easy to heap proof upon proof of the value and variety of Mrs. Thrale's contributions to the colloquial treasures accumulated by Boswell and other members of the set; and Johnson's deliberate testimony to her good qualities of head and heart will far more than counterbalance any passing expressions of disapproval or reproof with her mistimed vivacity, or alleged disregard of scrupulous accuracy in narrative, may have called forth. No two people ever lived much together for a series of years without many fretful, complaining, dissatisfied, uncongenial moments—without letting drop captious or unkind expressions, utterly at variance with their habitual feelings and their matured judgments of each other. The hasty word, the passing sarcasm, the sly hit at an acknowledged foible, should count for nothing in the estimate, when contrasted with earnest and deliberate assurances, proceeding from one who was commonly too proud to flatter, and in no mood for idle compliment when he wrote.

      "Never (he writes in 1773) imagine that your letters are long; they are always too short for my curiosity. I do not know that I was ever content with a single perusal. … My nights are grown again very uneasy and troublesome. I know not that the country will mend them; but I hope your company will mend my days. Though I cannot now expect much attention, and would not wish for more than can be spared from the poor dear lady (her mother), yet I shall see you and hear you every now and then; and to see and hear you, is always to hear wit, and to see virtue."

      He would not suffer her to be lightly spoken of in his presence, nor permit his name to be coupled jocularly with hers. "I yesterday told him," says Boswell, when they were traversing the Highlands, "I was thinking of writing a poetical letter to him, on his return from Scotland, in the style of Swift's humorous epistle in the character of Mary Gulliver to her husband, Captain Lemuel Gulliver, on his return to England from the country of the Houyhnhnms:—

      "'At early morn I to the market haste,

      Studious in ev'ry thing to please thy taste.

      A curious fowl and sparagrass I chose;

      (For I remember you were fond of those:)

      Three shillings cost the first, the last seven groats;

      Sullen you turn from both, and call for OATS.'

      He laughed, and asked in whose name I would write it. I said in Mrs. Thrale's. He was angry. 'Sir, if you have any sense of decency or delicacy, you won't do that.' Boswell. 'Then let it be in Cole's, the landlord of the Mitre tavern, where we have so often sat together.' Johnson. 'Ay, that may do.'"

      Again, at Inverary, when Johnson called for a gill of whiskey that he might know what makes a Scotchman happy, and Boswell proposed Mrs. Thrale as their toast, he would not have her drunk in whiskey. Peter Pindar has maliciously added to this reproof:—

      "We supped most royally, were vastly frisky,

      When Johnson ordered up a gill of whiskey.

      Taking the glass, says I, 'Here's Mistress Thrale,'

      'Drink her in whiskey not,' said he, 'but ale.'"

      So far from making light of her scholarship, he frequently accepted her as a partner in translations from the Latin. The translations from Boethius, printed in the second volume of the Letters, are their joint composition.

      After recapitulating Johnson's other contributions to literature in 1766, Boswell says, "'The Fountains,' a beautiful little fairy tale in prose, written with exquisite simplicity, is one of Johnson's productions; and I cannot withhold from Mrs. Thrale the praise of being the author of that admirable poem 'The Three Warnings.'" Marginal note: "How sorry he is!" Both the tale and the poem were written for a collection of "Miscellanies," published by Mrs. Williams in that year. The character of Floretta in "The Fountains" was intended for Mrs. Thrale, and she thus gracefully alludes to it in a letter to Johnson in Feb. 1782:

      "The newspapers would spoil

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