Piozzi's imputed ill-treatment of Johnson:

"Johnson was now in his seventy-second year. The infirmities of age
were coming fast upon him. That inevitable event of which he never
thought without horror was brought near to him; and his whole life
was darkened by the shadow of death. He had often to pay the cruel
price of longevity. Every year he lost what could never be replaced.
The strange dependants to whom he had given shelter, and to whom, in
spite of their faults, he was strongly attached by habit, dropped off
one by one; and, in the silence of his home, he regretted even the
noise of their scolding matches. The kind and generous Thrale was no
more; and it would have been well if his wife had been laid beside
him. But she survived to be the laughing-stock of those who had
envied her, and to draw from the eyes of the old man who had loved
her beyond any thing in the world, tears far more bitter than he
would have shed over her grave.

"With some estimable, and many agreeable qualities, she was not made
to be independent. The control of a mind more steadfast than her own
was necessary to her respectability. While she was restrained by her
husband, a man of sense and firmness, indulgent to her taste in
trifles, but always the undisputed master of his house, her worst
offences had been impertinent jokes, white lies, and short fits of
pettishness ending in sunny good humour. But he was gone; and she was
left an opulent widow of forty, with strong sensibility, volatile
fancy, and slender judgment. She soon fell in love with a
music-master from Brescia, in whom nobody but herself could discover
anything to admire. Her pride, and perhaps some better feelings,
struggled hard against this degrading passion. But the struggle
irritated her nerves, soured her temper, and at length endangered her
health. Conscious that her choice was one which Johnson could not
approve, she became desirous to escape from his inspection. Her
manner towards him changed. She was sometimes cold and sometimes
petulant. She did not conceal her joy when he left Streatham: she
never pressed him to return; and, if he came unbidden, she received
him in a manner which convinced him that he was no longer a welcome
guest. He took the very intelligible hints which she gave. He read,
for the last time, a chapter of the Greek Testament in the library
which had been formed by himself. In a solemn and tender prayer he
commended the house and its inmates to th