“Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love,
  But why did you kick me down stairs?”

“His ugly old wife,” says the reviewer, “was an angel.”  Yes, an angel so far as exalted language could make her one; and he had always half-a-dozen angels or goddesses on his list. “Je change d’objet, mais la passion reste.”  For this very reason, I repeat, his affection for Mrs. Piozzi was not a deep, devoted, or absorbing feeling at any time; and the gloom which settled upon the evening of his days was owing to his infirmities and his dread of death, not to the loosening of cherished ties, nor to the compelled solitude of a confined dwelling in Bolt Court.  The plain matter of fact is that, during the last two years of his life, he was seldom a month together at his own house, unless when the state of his health prevented him from enjoying the hospitality of his friends.  When the fatal marriage was announced, he was planning what Boswell calls a jaunt into the country; and in a letter dated Lichfield, Oct. 4, 1784, he says:  “I passed the first part of the summer at Oxford (with Dr. Adams); afterwards I went to Lichfield, then to Ashbourne (Dr. Taylor’s), and a week ago I returned to Lichfield.”

In the journal which he kept for Dr. Brocklesby, he writes, Oct. 20:  “The town is my element; there are my friends, there are my books to which I have not yet bid farewell, and there are my amusements.  Sir Joshua told me long ago that my vocation was to public life; and I hope still to keep my station, till God shall bid me Go in peace.”  Boswell reports him saying about this time, “Sir, I look upon every day to be lost when I do not make a new acquaintance.”

After another visit to Dr. Adams, at Pembroke College, he returned on the 16th Nov. to London, where he died on the 13th Dec. 1784.  The proximate cause of his death was dropsy; and there is not the smallest sign of its having been accelerated or embittered by unkindness or neglect.

Whoever has accompanied me thus far will be fully qualified to form an independent opinion of Lord Macaulay’s dashing summary of Mrs. 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.