Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson

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ANECDOTES OF THE LATE SAMUEL JOHNSON
BY HESTHER LYNCH PIOZZI.

INTRODUCTION

Mrs. Piozzi, by her second marriage, was by her first marriage the Mrs.
Thrale in whose house at Streatham Doctor Johnson was, after the year of
his first introduction, 1765, in days of infirmity, an honoured and a
cherished friend. The year of the beginning of the friendship was the year
in which Johnson, fifty-six years old, obtained his degree of LL.D. from
Dublin, and--though he never called himself Doctor--was thenceforth called
Doctor by all his friends.

Before her marriage Mrs. Piozzi had been Miss Hesther Lynch Salusbury, a
young lady of a good Welsh family. She was born in the year 174O, and she
lived until the year 1821. She celebrated her eightieth birthday on the
27th of January, 182O, by a concert, ball, and supper to six or seven
hundred people, and led off the dancing at the ball with an adopted son for
partner. When Johnson was first introduced to her, as Mrs. Thrale, she was
a lively, plump little lady, twenty-five years old, short of stature, broad
of build, with an animated face, touched, according to the fashion of life
in her early years, with rouge, which she continued to use when she found
that it had spoilt her complexion. Her hands were rather coarse, but her
handwriting was delicate.

Henry Thrale, whom she married, was the head of the great brewery house now
known as that of Barclay and Perkins. Henry Thrale's father had succeeded
Edmund Halsey, who began life by running away from his father, a miller at
St. Albans. Halsey was taken in as a clerk-of-all-work at the Anchor
Brewhouse in Southwark, became a house-clerk, able enough to please Child,
his master, and handsome enough to please his master's daughter. He
married the daughter and succeeded to Child's Brewery, made much money, and
had himself an only daughter, whom he married to a lord. Henry Thrale's
father was a nephew of Halseys, who had worked in the brewery for twenty
years, when, after Halsey's death, he gave security for thirty thousand
pounds as the price of the business, to which a noble lord could not
succeed. In eleven years he had paid the purchase-money, and was making a
large fortune. To this business his son, who was Johnson's friend, Henry
Thrale, succeeded; and upon Thrale's death it was bought for 15O,OOO pounds
by a member of the Quaker family of Barclay, who took Thrale's old manager,
Perkins, into partnership.

Johnson became, after 1765, familiar in the house of the Thrales at
Streatham. There was much company. Mrs. Thrale had a taste for literary
guests and literary guests had, on their part, a taste for her good
dinners. Johnson was the lion-in-chief. There was Dr. Johnson's room
always at his disposal; and a tidy wig kept for his special use, because
his own was apt to be singed up the middle by close contact with the
candle, which he put, being short-sighted, between his eyes and a book.
Mrs. Thrale had skill in languages, read Latin, French, Italian, and
Spanish. She read literature, could quote aptly, and put knowledge as well
as playful life into her conversation. Johnson's regard for the Thrales
was very real, and it was heartily returned, though Mrs. Thrale had, like
her friend, some weaknesses, in common with most people who feed lions and
wish to pass for wits among the witty.

About fourteen years after Johnson's first acquaintance with the Thrales--
when Johnson was seventy years old and Mrs. Thrale near forty--the little
lady, who had also lost several children, was unhappy in the thought that
she had ceased to be appreciated by her husband. Her husband's temper
became affected by the commercial troubles of 1762, and Mrs. Thrale became
jealous of the regard between him and Sophy Streatfield, a rich widow's
daughter. Under January, 1779, she wrote in her "Thraliana," "Mr. Thrale
has fallen in love, really and seriously, with Sophy Streatfield; but there
is no wonder in that; she is very pretty, very gentle, soft, and
insinuating; hangs about him, dances round him, cries when she parts from
him, squeezes his hand slily, and with her sweet eyes full of tears looks
so fondly in his face--and all for love of me, as she pretends, that I can
hardly sometimes help laughing in her face. A man must not be a MAN but an
IT to resist such artillery." Mrs. Thrale goes on to record conquests made
by this irresistible Sophy in other directions, showing the same temper of
jealousy. Thrale died on the 4th of April, 1781.

Mrs. Thrale had entered in her "Thraliana" under July, 178O, being then at
Brighton, "I have picked up Piozzi here, the great Italian singer. He is
amazingly like my father. He shall teach Hesther." On the 25th of July,
1784, being at Bath, her entry was, "I am returned from church the happy
wife of my lovely, faithful Piozzi. . . . subject of my prayers, object of
my wishes, my sighs, my reverence, my esteem." Her age then was
forty-four, and on the 13th of December in the same year Johnson died. The
newspapers of the day dealt hardly with her. They called her an amorous
widow, and Piozzi a fortune-hunter. Her eldest daughter (afterwards
Viscountess Keith) refused to recognise the new father, and shut herself up
in a house at Brighton with a nurse, Tib, where she lived upon two hundred
a year. Two younger sisters, who were at school, lived afterwards with the
eldest. Only the fourth daughter, the youngest, went with her mother and
her mother's new husband to Italy. Johnson, too, was grieved by the
marriage, and had shown it, but had written afterwards most kindly. Mrs.
Piozzi in Florence was playing at literature with the poetasters of "The
Florence Miscellany" and "The British Album" when she was working at these
"Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson." Her book of anecdotes was planned
at Florence in 1785, the year after her friend's death, finished at
Florence in October, 1785, and published in the year 1786. There is a
touch of bitterness in the book which she thought of softening, but her
"lovely, faithful Piozzi" wished it to remain.
H. M.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

I have somewhere heard or read that the preface before a book, like the
portico before a house, should be contrived so as to catch, but not detain,
the attention of those who desire admission to the family within, or leave
to look over the collection of pictures made by one whose opportunities of
obtaining them we know to have been not unfrequent. I wish not to keep my
readers long from such intimacy with the manners of Dr. Johnson, or such
knowledge of his sentiments as these pages can convey. To urge my distance
from England as an excuse for the book's being ill-written would be
ridiculous; it might indeed serve as a just reason for my having written it
at all; because, though others may print the same aphorisms and stories, I
cannot HERE be sure that they have done so. As the Duke says, however, to
the Weaver, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, "Never excuse; if your play be a
bad one, keep at least the excuses to yourself."

I am aware that many will say I have not spoken highly enough of Dr.
Johnson; but it will be difficult for those who say so to speak more
highly. If I have described his manners as they were, I have been careful
to show his superiority to the common forms of common life. It is surely
no dispraise to an oak that it does not bear jessamine; and he who should
plant honeysuckle round Trajan's column would not be thought to adorn, but
to disgrace it.

When I have said that he was more a man of genius than of learning, I mean
not to take from the one part of his character that which I willingly give
to the other. The erudition of Mr. Johnson proved his genius; for he had
not acquired it by long or profound study: nor can I think those
characters the greatest which have most learning driven into their heads,
any more than I can persuade myself to consider the River Jenisca as
superior to the Nile, because the first receives near seventy tributary
streams in the course of its unmarked progress to the sea, while the great
parent of African plenty, flowing from an almost invisible source, and
unenriched by any extraneous waters, except eleven nameless rivers, pours
his majestic torrent into the ocean by seven celebrated mouths.

But I must conclude my preface, and begin my book, the first I ever
presented before the public; from whose awful appearance in some measure to
defend and conceal myself, I have thought fit to retire behind the
Telamonian shield, and show as little of myself as possible, well aware of
the exceeding difference there is between fencing in the school and
fighting in the field. Studious, however, to avoid offending, and careless
of that offence which can be taken without a cause, I here not unwillingly
submit my slight performance to the decision of that glorious country,
which I have the daily delight to hear applauded in others, as eminently
just, generous, and humane.

ANECDOTES OF THE LATE SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D.

Too much intelligence is often as pernicious to biography as too little;
the mind remains perplexed by contradiction of probabilities, and finds
difficulty in separating report from truth. If Johnson then lamented that
so little had ever been said about Butler, I might with more reason be led
to complain that so much has been said about himself; for numberless
informers but distract or cloud information, as glasses which multiply will
for the most part be found also to obscure. Of a life, too, which for the
last twenty years was passed in the very front of literature, every leader
of a literary company, whether officer or subaltern, naturally becomes
either author or critic, so that little less than the recollection that it
was ONCE the request of the deceased, and TWICE the desire of those whose
will I ever delighted to comply with, should have engaged me to add my
little book to the number of those already written on the subject. I used
to urge another reason for forbearance, and say, that all the readers
would, on this singular occasion, be the writers of his life: like the
first representation of the Masque of Comus, which, by changing their
characters from spectators to performers, was ACTED by the lords and ladies
it was WRITTEN to entertain. This objection is, however, now at an end, as
I have found friends, far remote indeed from literary questions, who may
yet be diverted from melancholy by my description of Johnson's manners,
warmed to virtue even by the distant reflection of his glowing excellence,
and encouraged by the relation of his animated zeal to persist in the
profession as well as practice of Christianity.

Samuel Johnson was the son of Michael Johnson, a bookseller at Lichfield,
in Staffordshire; a very pious and worthy man, but wrong-headed, positive,
and afflicted with melancholy, as his son, from whom alone I had the
information, once told me: his business, however, leading him to be much
on horseback, contributed to the preservation of his bodily health and
mental sanity, which, when he stayed long at home, would sometimes be about
to give way; and Mr. Johnson said, that when his workshop, a detached
building, had fallen half down for want of money to repair it, his father
was not less diligent to lock the door every night, though he saw that
anybody might walk in at the back part, and knew that there was no security
obtained by barring the front door. "THIS," says his son, "was madness,
you may see, and would have been discoverable in other instances of the
prevalence of imagination, but that poverty prevented it from playing such
tricks as riches and leisure encourage." Michael was a man of still larger
size and greater strength than his son, who was reckoned very like him, but
did not delight in talking much of his family: "One has," says he, "SO
little pleasure in reciting the anecdotes of beggary." One day, however,
hearing me praise a favourite friend with partial tenderness as well as
true esteem: "Why do you like that man's acquaintance so?" said he.
"Because," replied I, "he is open and confiding, and tells me stories of
his uncles and cousins; I love the light parts of a solid character."
"Nay, if you are for family history," says Mr. Johnson, good-humouredly,
"_I_ can fit you: I had an uncle, Cornelius Ford, who, upon a journey,
stopped and read an inscription written on a stone he saw standing by the
wayside, set up, as it proved, in honour of a man who had leaped a certain
leap thereabouts, the extent of which was specified upon the stone: 'Why
now,' says my uncle, 'I could leap it in my boots;' and he did leap it in
his boots. I had likewise another uncle, Andrew," continued he, "my
father's brother, who kept the ring in Smithfield (where they wrestled and
boxed) for a whole year, and never was thrown or conquered. Here now are
uncles for you, Mistress, if that's the way to your heart." Mr. Johnson
was very conversant in the art of attack and defence by boxing, which
science he had learned from this uncle Andrew, I believe; and I have heard
him descant upon the age when people were received, and when rejected, in
the schools once held for that brutal amusement, much to the admiration of
those who had no expectation of his skill in such matters, from the sight
of a figure which precluded all possibility of personal prowess; though,
because he saw Mr. Thrale one day leap over a cabriolet stool, to show that
he was not tired after a chase of fifty miles or more, HE suddenly jumped
over it too, but in a way so strange and so unwieldy, that our terror lest
he should break his bones took from us even the power of laughing.

Michael Johnson was past fifty years old when he married his wife, who was
upwards of forty, yet I think her son told me she remained three years
childless before he was born into the world, who so greatly contributed to
improve it. In three years more she brought another son, Nathaniel, who
lived to be twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, and of whose manly
spirit I have heard his brother speak with pride and pleasure, mentioning
one circumstance, particular enough, that when the company were one day
lamenting the badness of the roads, he inquired where they could be, as he
travelled the country more than most people, and had never seen a bad road
in his life. The two brothers did not, however, much delight in each
other's company, being always rivals for the mother's fondness; and many of
the severe reflections on domestic life in Rasselas took their source from
its author's keen recollections of the time passed in his early years.
Their father, Michael, died of an inflammatory fever at the age of
seventy-six, as Mr. Johnson told me, their mother at eighty-nine, of a
gradual decay. She was slight in her person, he said, and rather below
than above the common size. So excellent was her character, and so
blameless her life, that when an oppressive neighbour once endeavoured to
take from her a little field she possessed, he could persuade no attorney
to undertake the cause against a woman so beloved in her narrow circle:
and it is this incident he alludes to in the line of his "Vanity of Human
Wishes," calling her

"The general favourite as the general friend."

Nor could any one pay more willing homage to such a character, though she
had not been related to him, than did Dr. Johnson on every occasion that
offered: his disquisition on Pope's epitaph placed over Mrs. Corbet is a
proof of that preference always given by him to a noiseless life over a
bustling one; but however taste begins, we almost always see that it ends
in simplicity; the glutton finishes by losing his relish for anything
highly sauced, and calls for his boiled chicken at the close of many years
spent in the search of dainties; the connoisseurs are soon weary of Rubens,
and the critics of Lucan; and the refinements of every kind heaped upon
civil life always sicken their possessors before the close of it.

At the age of two years Mr. Johnson was brought up to London by his mother,
to be touched by Queen Anne for the scrofulous evil, which terribly
afflicted his childhood, and left such marks as greatly disfigured a
countenance naturally harsh and rugged, beside doing irreparable damage to
the auricular organs, which never could perform their functions since I
knew him; and it was owing to that horrible disorder, too, that one eye was
perfectly useless to him; that defect, however, was not observable, the
eyes looked both alike. As Mr. Johnson had an astonishing memory, I asked
him if he could remember Queen Anne at all? "He had," he said, "a
confused, but somehow a sort of solemn, recollection of a lady in diamonds,
and a long black hood."

The christening of his brother he remembered with all its circumstances,
and said his mother taught him to spell and pronounce the words 'little
Natty,' syllable by syllable, making him say it over in the evening to her
husband and his guests. The trick which most parents play with their
children, that of showing off their newly-acquired accomplishments,
disgusted Mr. Johnson beyond expression. He had been treated so himself,
he said, till he absolutely loathed his father's caresses, because he knew
they were sure to precede some unpleasing display of his early abilities;
and he used, when neighbours came o' visiting, to run up a tree that he
might not be found and exhibited, such, as no doubt he was, a prodigy of
early understanding. His epitaph upon the duck he killed by treading on it
at five years old--

"Here lies poor duck
That Samuel Johnson trod on;
If it had liv'd it had been good luck,
For it would have been an odd one"--

is a striking example of early expansion of mind and knowledge of language;
yet he always seemed more mortified at the recollection of the bustle his
parents made with his wit than pleased with the thoughts of possessing it.
"That," said he to me one day, "is the great misery of late marriages; the
unhappy produce of them becomes the plaything of dotage. An old man's
child," continued he, "leads much such a life. I think, as a little boy's
dog, teased with awkward fondness, and forced, perhaps, to sit up and beg,
as we call it, to divert a company, who at last go away complaining of
their disagreeable entertainment." In consequence of these maxims, and
full of indignation against such parents as delight to produce their young
ones early into the talking world, I have known Mr. Johnson give a good
deal of pain by refusing to hear the verses the children could recite, or
the songs they could sing, particularly one friend who told him that his
two sons should repeat Gray's "Elegy" to him alternately, that he might
judge who had the happiest cadence. "No, pray, sir," said he, "let the
dears both speak it at once; more noise will by that means be made, and the
noise will be sooner over." He told me the story himself, but I have
forgot who the father was.

Mr. Johnson's mother was daughter to a gentleman in the country, such as
there were many of in those days, who possessing, perhaps, one or two
hundred pounds a year in land, lived on the profits, and sought not to
increase their income. She was, therefore, inclined to think higher of
herself than of her husband, whose conduct in money matters being but
indifferent, she had a trick of teasing him about it, and was, by her son's
account, very importunate with regard to her fears of spending more than
they could afford, though she never arrived at knowing how much that was, a
fault common, as he said, to most women who pride themselves on their
economy. They did not, however, as I could understand, live ill together
on the whole. "My father," says he, "could always take his horse and ride
away for orders when things went badly." The lady's maiden name was Ford;
and the parson who sits next to the punch-bowl in Hogarth's "Modern
Midnight Conversation" was her brother's son. This Ford was a man who
chose to be eminent only for vice, with talents that might have made him
conspicuous in literature, and respectable in any profession he could have
chosen. His cousin has mentioned him in the lives of Fenton and of Broome;
and when he spoke of him to me it was always with tenderness, praising his
acquaintance with life and manners, and recollecting one piece of advice
that no man surely ever followed more exactly: "Obtain," says Ford, "some
general principles of every science; he who can talk only on one subject,
or act only in one department, is seldom wanted, and perhaps never wished
for, while the man of general knowledge can often benefit, and always
please." He used to relate, however, another story less to the credit of
his cousin's penetration, how Ford on some occasion said to him, "You will
make your way the more easily in the world, I see, as you are contented to
dispute no man's claim to conversation excellence; they will, therefore,
more willingly allow your pretensions as a writer." Can one, on such an
occasion, forbear recollecting the predictions of Boileau's father, when
stroking the head of the young satirist?--"Ce petit bon homme," says he,
"n'a point trop d'esprit, MAIS IL ne dira jamais mal de personne." Such
are the prognostics formed by men of wit and sense, as these two certainly
were, concerning the future character and conduct of those for whose
welfare they were honestly and deeply concerned; and so late do those
features of peculiarity come to their growth, which mark a character to all
succeeding generations.

Dr. Johnson first learned to read of his mother and her old maid Catharine,
in whose lap he well remembered sitting while she explained to him the
story of St. George and the Dragon. I know not whether this is the proper
place to add that such was his tenderness, and such his gratitude, that he
took a journey to Lichfield fifty-seven years afterwards to support and
comfort her in her last illness; he had inquired for his nurse, and she was
dead. The recollection of such reading as had delighted him in his infancy
made him always persist in fancying that it was the only reading which
could please an infant; and he used to condemn me for putting Newbery's
books into their hands as too trifling to engage their attention. "Babies
do not want," said he, "to hear about babies; they like to be told of
giants and castles, and of somewhat which can stretch and stimulate their
little minds." When in answer I would urge the numerous editions and quick
sale of "Tommy Prudent" or "Goody Two-Shoes." "Remember always," said he,
"that the parents BUY the books, and that the children never read them."
Mrs. Barbauld, however, had his best praise, and deserved it; no man was
more struck than Mr. Johnson with voluntary descent from possible splendour
to painful duty.

At eight years old he went to school, for his health would not permit him
to be sent sooner; and at the age of ten years his mind was disturbed by
scruples of infidelity, which preyed upon his spirits and made him very
uneasy, the more so as he revealed his uneasiness to no one, being
naturally, as he said, "of a sullen temper and reserved disposition." He
searched, however, diligently but fruitlessly, for evidences of the truth
of revelation; and at length, recollecting a book he had once seen in his
father's shop, entitled "De Veritate Religionis," etc., he began to think
himself highly culpable for neglecting such a means of information, and
took himself severely to task for this sin, adding many acts of voluntary,
and to others unknown, penance. The first opportunity which offered, of
course, he seized the book with avidity, but on examination, not finding
himself scholar enough to peruse its contents, set his heart at rest; and,
not thinking to inquire whether there were any English books written on the
subject, followed his usual amusements, and considered his conscience as
lightened of a crime. He redoubled his diligence to learn the language
that contained the information he most wished for, but from the pain which
guilt had given him he now began to deduce the soul's immortality, which
was the point that belief first stopped at; and from that moment, resolving
to be a Christian, became one of the most zealous and pious ones our nation
ever produced. When he had told me this odd anecdote of his childhood, "I
cannot imagine," said he, "what makes me talk of myself to you so, for I
really never mentioned this foolish story to anybody except Dr. Taylor, not
even to my DEAR, DEAR Bathurst, whom I loved better than ever I loved any
human creature; but poor Bathurst is dead!" Here a long pause and a few
tears ensued. "Why, sir," said I, "how like is all this to Jean Jacques
Rousseau--as like, I mean, as the sensations of frost and fire, when my
child complained yesterday that the ice she was eating BURNED her mouth."
Mr. Johnson laughed at the incongruous ideas, but the first thing which
presented itself to the mind of an ingenious and learned friend whom I had
the pleasure to pass some time with here at Florence was the same
resemblance, though I think the two characters had little in common,
further than an early attention to things beyond the capacity of other
babies, a keen sensibility of right and wrong, and a warmth of imagination
little consistent with sound and perfect health. I have heard him relate
another odd thing of himself too, but it is one which everybody has heard
as well as me: how, when he was about nine years old, having got the play
of Hamlet in his hand, and reading it quietly in his father's kitchen, he
kept on steadily enough till, coming to the Ghost scene, he suddenly
hurried upstairs to the street door that he might see people about him.
Such an incident, as he was not unwilling to relate it, is probably in
every one's possession now; he told it as a testimony to the merits of
Shakespeare. But one day, when my son was going to school, and dear Dr.
Johnson followed as far as the garden gate, praying for his salvation in a
voice which those who listened attentively could hear plain enough, he said
to me suddenly, "Make your boy tell you his dreams: the first corruption
that entered into my heart was communicated in a dream." "What was it,
sir?" said I. "Do not ask me," replied he, with much violence, and walked
away in apparent agitation. I never durst make any further inquiries. He
retained a strong aversion for the memory of Hunter, one of his
schoolmasters, who, he said, once was a brutal fellow, "so brutal," added
he, "that no man who had been educated by him ever sent his son to the same
school." I have, however, heard him acknowledge his scholarship to be very
great. His next master he despised, as knowing less than himself, I found,
but the name of that gentleman has slipped my memory. Mr. Johnson was
himself exceedingly disposed to the general indulgence of children, and was
even scrupulously and ceremoniously attentive not to offend them; he had
strongly persuaded himself of the difficulty people always find to erase
early impressions either of kindness or resentment, and said "he should
never have so loved his mother when a man had she not given him coffee she
could ill afford, to gratify his appetite when a boy." "If you had had
children, sir," said I, "would you have taught them anything?" "I hope,"
replied he, "that I should have willingly lived on bread and water to
obtain instruction for them; but I would not have set their future
friendship to hazard for the sake of thrusting into their heads knowledge
of things for which they might not perhaps have either taste or necessity.
You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets, and wonder when you
have done that they do not delight in your company. No science can be
communicated by mortal creatures without attention from the scholar; no
attention can be obtained from children without the infliction of pain, and
pain is never remembered without resentment." That something should be
learned was, however, so certainly his opinion that I have heard him say
how education had been often compared to agriculture, yet that it resembled
it chiefly in this: "That if nothing is sown, no crop," says he, "can be
obtained." His contempt of the lady who fancied her son could be eminent
without study, because Shakespeare was found wanting in scholastic
learning, was expressed in terms so gross and so well known, I will not
repeat them here.

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