Women almost always like men who like women; or as the phenomenon is explained by Pope—­

  “Lust, through some certain strainers well refined, Is gentle love,
  and charms all womankind.”

Johnson, despite of his unwieldy figure, scarred features and uncouth gestures, was a favourite with the fair, and talked of affairs of the heart as things of which he was entitled to speak from personal experience as confidently as of any other moral or social topics.  He told Mrs. Thrale, without the smallest consciousness of presumption or what Mr. Square would term the unfitness of things, of his and Lord Lyttleton’s having contended for Miss Boothby’s preference with an emulation that occasioned hearty disgust and ended in lasting animosity.  “You may see,” he added, when the Lives of the Poets were printed, “that dear Boothby is at my heart still.  She would delight in that fellow Lyttleton’s company though, all that I could do, and I cannot forgive even his memory the preference given by a mind like hers.” [1]

[Footnote 1:  In point of personal advantages the man of rank and fashion and the scholar were nearly on a par.

  “But who is this astride the pony,
  So long, so lean, so lank, so bony? 
  Dat be de great orator, Littletony.”]

Mr. Croker surmises that “Molly Aston,” not “dear Boothby,” must have been the object of this rivalry[1]; and the surmise is strengthened by Johnson’s calling Molly the loveliest creature he ever saw; adding (to Mrs. Thrale), “My wife was a little jealous, and happening one day when walking in the country to meet a fortune-hunting gipsy, Mrs. Johnson made the wench look at my hand, but soon repented of her curiosity,’for,’ says the gipsy, ’your heart is divided between a Betty and a Molly:  Betty loves you best, but you take most delight in Molly’s company.’  When I turned about to laugh, I saw my wife was crying.  Pretty charmer, she had no reason.”  This pretty charmer was in her forty-eighth year when he married her, he being then twenty-seven.  He told Beauclerc that it was a love match on both sides; and Garrick used to draw ludicrous pictures of their mutual fondness, which he heightened by representing her as short, fat, tawdrily dressed, and highly rouged.

[Footnote 1:  See “Croker’s Boswell,” p. 672, and Malone’s note in the prior edition.]

On the question whether “Molly Aston” or “dear Boothby” was the cause of his dislike of Lyttleton, one of Mrs. Piozzi’s marginal notes is decisive.  “Mrs. Thrale (says Boswell) suggests that he was offended by Molly Aston’s preference of his lordship to him.”  She retorts:  “I never said so.  I believe Lord Lyttleton and Molly Aston were not acquainted.  No, no:  it was Miss Boothby whose preference he professed to have been jealous of, and so I said in the ‘Anecdotes.’”