“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 the Divine protection, and, with emotions which choked his voice and convulsed his powerful frame, left for ever that beloved home for the gloomy and desolate house behind Fleet Street, where the few and evil days which still remained to him were to run out.

“Here, in June 1783, he had a paralytic stroke, from which, however, he recovered, and which does not appear to have at all impaired his intellectual faculties.  But other maladies came thick upon him.  His asthma tormented him day and night.  Dropsical symptoms made their appearance.  While sinking under a complication of diseases, he heard that the woman whose friendship had been the chief happiness of sixteen years of his life, had married an Italian fiddler; that all London was crying shame upon her; and that the newspapers and magazines were filled with allusions to the Ephesian matron and the two pictures in Hamlet.  He vehemently said that he would try to forget her existence.  He never uttered her name.  Every memorial of her which met his eye he flung into the fire.  She meanwhile fled from the laughter and hisses of her countrymen and countrywomen to a land where she was unknown, hastened across Mount Cenis, and learned, while passing a merry Christmas of concerts and lemonade-parties at Milan, that the great man with whose name hers is inseparably associated, had ceased to exist."[1]

[Footnote 1:  “Encyclopaedia Britannica,” last edition.  The Essay on Johnson is reprinted in the first volume of Lord Macaulay’s “Miscellaneous Writings.”]