She fled, he
tells us, from the laughter and hisses of her countrymen and countrywomen
to a land where she was unknown. Thus when Macaulay chastises Mrs.
Elizabeth Porter for marrying Johnson, he is not inconsistent, for he
pursues Mrs. Thrale with equal rigour for her audacity in keeping gaiety
and grace in her mind and manners longer than Macaulay liked to see such
ornaments added to the charm of twice "married brows."

It is not so with succeeding essayists. One of these minor biographers
is so gentle as to call the attachment of Mrs. Thrale and Piozzi "a
mutual affection." He adds, "No one who has had some experience of life
will be inclined to condemn Mrs. Thrale." But there is no such courtesy,
even from him, for Mrs. Johnson. Neither to him nor to any other writer
has it yet occurred that if England loves her great Englishman's memory,
she owes not only courtesy, but gratitude, to the only woman who loved
him while there was yet time.

Not a thought of that debt has stayed the alacrity with which a
caricature has been acclaimed as the only possible portrait of Mrs.
Johnson. Garrick's school reminiscences would probably have made a much
more charming woman grotesque. Garrick is welcome to his remembrances;
we may even reserve for ourselves the liberty of envying those who heard
him. But honest laughter should not fall into that tone of common
antithesis which seems to say, "See what are the absurdities of the
great! Such is life! On this one point we, even we, are wiser than Dr.
Johnson--we know how grotesque was his wife. We know something of the
privacies of her toilet-table. We are able to compare her figure with
the figures we, unlike him in his youth, have had the opportunity of
admiring--the figures of the well-bred and well-dressed." It is a sorry
success to be able to say so much.

But in fact such a triumph belongs to no man. When Samuel Johnson, at
twenty-six, married his wife, he gave the dull an advantage over himself
which none but the dullest will take. He chose, for love, a woman who
had the wit to admire him at first meeting, and in spite of first sight.
"That," she said to her daughter, "is the most sensible man I ever met."
He was penniless. She had what was no mean portion for those times and
those conditions; and, granted that she was affected, and provincial, and
short, and all the rest with which she is charged, she was probably not
without suitors; nor do her defects or fa