Preceding commentators were not bound to know what is now learned from “Thraliana”; but they were bound to know what might always have been learned from Johnson’s printed letters; and the tone of these from the separation in April, 1783, to the marriage in July, 1784, is identically the same as at any period of the intimacy which can be specified.  There are the same warm expressions of regard, the same gratitude for acknowledged kindness, the same alternations of hope and disappointment, the same medical details, and the same reproaches for silence or fancied coldness, in which he habitually indulged towards all his female correspondents.  Shew me a complaint or reproach, and I will instantly match it with one from a period when the intimacy was confessedly and notoriously at its height.  If her occasional explosions of irritability are to be counted, what inference is to be drawn from Johnson’s depreciatory remarks on her, and indeed on everybody, so carefully treasured up by Hawkins and Boswell?

On June 13th, 1783, he writes to her: 

“Your last letter was very pleasing; it expressed kindness to me, and some degree of placid acquiescence in your present mode of life, which is, I think, the best which is at present within your reach.

“My powers and attention have for a long time been almost wholly employed upon my health, I hope not wholly without success, but solitude is very tedious.”

She replies: 

“Bath, June 15th, 1783.

“I believe it is too true, my dear Sir, that you think on little except yourself and your own health, but then they are subjects on which every one else would think too—­and that is a great consolation.

“I am willing enough to employ all my thoughts upon myself, but there is nobody here who wishes to think with or about me, so I am very sick and a little sullen, and disposed now and then to say, like king David, ’My lovers and my friends have been put away from me, and my acquaintance hid out of my sight.’  If the last letter I wrote showed some degree of placid acquiescence in a situation, which, however displeasing, is the best I can get at just now, I pray God to keep me in that disposition, and to lay no more calamity upon me which may again tempt me to murmur and complain. In the meantime assure yourself of my undiminished kindness and veneration:  they have been long out of accident’s power either to lessen or increase."....

“That you should be solitary is a sad thing, and a strange one too, when every body is willing to drop in, and for a quarter of an hour at least, save you from a tete-a-tete with yourself.  I never could catch a moment when you were alone whilst we were in London, and Miss Thrale says the same thing.”

A few days afterwards, June 19th, he writes: 

“I am sitting down in no cheerful solitude to write a narrative which would once have affected you with tenderness and sorrow, but which you will perhaps pass over now with the careless glance of frigid indifference.  For this diminution of regard, however, I know not whether I ought to blame you, who may have reasons which I cannot know, and I do not blame myself, who have for a great part of human life done you what good I could, and have never done you evil.”