She thus mentions this event in “Thraliana,” January 17th, 1798: 

“Italy is ruined and England threatened.  I have sent for one little boy from among my husband’s nephews.  He was christened John Salusbury:  he shall be naturalised, and then we will see whether he will be more grateful and natural and comfortable than Miss Thrales have been to the mother they have at length driven to desperation.”

She could hardly have denied her husband the satisfaction of rescuing a single member of his family from the wreck; and they were bound to provide handsomely for the child of their adoption.  Whether she carried the sentiment too far in giving him the entire estate (not a large one) is a very different question; on which she enters fearlessly in one of the fragments of the Autobiography.  In a marginal note on one of the printed letters in which Johnson writes:  “Mrs. Davenant says you regain your health,”—­she remarks:  “Mrs. Davenant neither knew nor cared, as she wanted her brother Harry Cotton to marry Lady Keith, and I offered my estate with her.  Miss Thrale said she wished to have nothing to do either with my family or my fortune.  They were all cruel and all insulting.”  Her fits of irritation and despondency never lasted long.

Her mode of bringing up her adopted nephew was more in accordance with her ultimate liberality, than with her early intentions or professions of teaching him to “work his way among our islanders.”  Instead of suffering him to travel to and from the University by coach, she insisted on his travelling post; and she is said to have remarked to the mother of a Welsh baronet, who was similarly anxious for the comfort and dignity of her heir, “Other people’s children are baked in coarse common pie dishes, ours in patty-pans.”

She was misreported, or afterwards improved upon the thought; for, in June 1810, she writes to Dr. Gray:  “He is a boy of excellent principle.  Education at a private school has an effect like baking loaves in a tin.  The bread is more insipid, but it comes out clean; and Mr. Gray laughed, when at breakfast this morning, our undercrusts suggested the comparison.”

In the Conway Notes, she says: 

“Had we vexations enough?  We had certainly many pleasures.  The house in Wales was beautiful, and the Boy was beautiful too.  Mr. Piozzi said I had spoiled my own children and was spoiling his.  My reply was, that I loved spoiling people, and hated any one I could not spoil.  Am I not now trying to spoil dear Mr. Conway?”

When she talks of spoiling, she must not be understood literally.  In 1817 she writes from Bath to Dr. Gray: 

“Sir John and Lady Salusbury staid with me six or seven weeks, and made themselves most beloved among us.  They are very good young creatures....  My children read your Key to each other on Sunday noons:  the Connection on Sunday nights.  You remember me hoping and proposing to make dear Salusbury a gentleman, a Christian, and a scholar; and when one has succeeded in the first two wishes, there is no need to fret if the third does fail a little.  Such is my situation concerning my adopted, as you are accustomed to call him.”