1.--What a blockhead Dr. Burney is to be always sending for his
daughter home so! what a monkey! is she not better and happier with
me than she can be anywhere else? Johnson is enraged at the silliness
of their family conduct, and Mrs. Byron disgusted; I confess myself
provoked excessively, but I love the girl so dearly--and the Doctor,
too, for that matter, only that he has such odd notions of
superiority in his own house, and will have his children under his
feet forsooth, rather than let 'em live in peace, plenty, and comfort
anywhere from home. If I did not provide Fanny with every
wearable--every wishable, indeed,--it would not vex me to be served
so; but to see the impossibility of compensating for the pleasures of
St. Martin's Street, makes one at once merry and mortified.

"Dr. Burney did not like his daughter should learn Latin even of
Johnson, who offered to teach her for friendship, because then she
would have been as wise as himself forsooth, and Latin was too
masculine for Misses. A narrow-souled goose-cap the man must be at
last, agreeable and amiable all the while too, beyond almost any
other human creature. Well, mortal man is but a paltry animal! the
best of us have such drawbacks both upon virtue, wisdom, and
knowledge."

In what his daughter calls a doggrel list of his friends and his
feats, Dr. Burney has thus mentioned the Thrales:

"1776.--This year's acquaintance began with the Thrales,
Where I met with great talents 'mongst females and males,
But the best thing it gave me from that time to this,
Was the freedom it gave me to sound the abyss,
At my ease and my leisure, of Johnson's great mind,
Where new treasures unnumber'd I constantly find."

Highly to her credit, Mrs. Thrale did not omit any part of her own
duties to her husband because he forgot his. In March, 1780, she
writes to Johnson:

"I am willing to show myself in Southwark, or in any place, for my
master's pleasure or advantage; but have no present conviction that
to be re-elected would be advantageous, so shattered a state as his
nerves are in just now.--Do not you, however, fancy for a moment,
that I shrink from fatigue--or desire to escape from doing my
duty;--spiting one's antagonist is a reason that never ought to
operate, and never does operate with me: I care nothing about a rival
candidate's innuendos, I care only about my husband's health and
fame; and if we find that he earnestly wishes to be once more memb