of help, nor laid under any extraordinary obligation by reason of it.  Whilst the “Lives of the Poets” was in progress, Dr. Johnson “would frequently produce one of the proof sheets to embellish the breakfast table, which was always in the library, and was certainly the most sprightly and agreeable meeting of the day.” ...  “These proof sheets Mrs. Thrale was permitted to read aloud, and the discussions to which they led were in the highest degree entertaining."[1]

[Footnote 1:  “Memoirs of Dr. Burney,” &c., by his daughter, Madame D’Arblay.  In three volumes, 1832.  Vol. ii. p. 173-178.]

It was mainly owing to his domestication with the Thrales that he began to frequent drawing-rooms at an age when the arm-chair at home or at the club has an irresistible charm for most men of sedentary pursuits.  It must be admitted that the evening parties in which he was seen, afforded a chance of something better than the “unidead chatter of girls,” with an undue fondness for which he reproached Langton; for the Blue Stocking clubs had just come into fashion,—­so called from a casual allusion to the blue stockings of an habitue, Mr. Stillingfleet.[1] Their founders were Mrs. Vesey and Mrs. Montagu; but according to Madame D’Arblay, “more bland and more gleeful than that of either of them, was the personal celebrity of Mrs. Thrale.  Mrs. Vesey, indeed, gentle and diffident, dreamed not of any competition, but Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Thrale had long been set up as rival candidates for colloquial eminence, and each of them thought the other alone worthy to be her peer.  Openly therefore when they met, they combated for precedence of admiration, with placid though high-strained intellectual exertion on the one side, and an exuberant pleasantry or classical allusion or quotation on the other; without the smallest malice in either.”

[Footnote 1:  The first of these was then (about 1768) in the meridian of its lustre, but had been instituted many years previously at Bath, It owed its name to an apology made by Mr. Stillingfleet in declining to accept an invitation to a literary meeting at Mrs. Vesey’s, from not being, he said, in the habit of displaying a proper equipment for an evening assembly.  “Pho, pho,” said she, “don’t mind dress.  Come in your blue stockings.”  With which words, humorously repeating them as he entered the apartment of the chosen coterie, Mr. Stillingfleet claimed permission for entering according to order.  And these words, ever after, were fixed, in playful stigma, upon Mrs. Vesey’s associations. (Madame D’Arblay.) Boswell also traces the term to Stillingfleet’s blue stockings; and Hannah More’s “Bas-Bleu” gave it a permanent place in literature.]

A different account of the origin of Bluestocking parties was given by Lady Crewe to a lady who has allowed me to copy her note of the conversation, made at the time (1816):