“Oft in danger, yet alive,
  We are come to thirty-five;
  Long may better years arrive,
  Better years than thirty-five. 
  Could philosophers contrive
  Life to stop at thirty-five,
  Time his hours should never drive
  O’er the bounds of thirty-five. 
  High to soar, and deep to dive,
  Nature gives at thirty-five. 
  Ladies, stock and tend your hive,
  Trifle not at thirty-five;
  For howe’er we boast and strive,
  Life declines from thirty-five;
  He that ever hopes to thrive
  Must begin by thirty-five;
  And all who wisely wish to wive
  Must look on Thrale at thirty-five.”

“‘And now,’ said he, as I was writing them down, ’you may see what it is to come for poetry to a dictionary-maker; you may observe that the rhymes run in alphabetical order exactly.’  And so they do.”

Byron’s estimate of life at the same age, is somewhat different: 

  “Too old for youth—­too young, at thirty-five
    To herd with boys, or hoard with good threescore,
  I wonder people should he left alive. 
    But since they are, that epoch is a bore.”

Lady Aldborough, whose best witticisms unluckily lie under the same merited ban as Rochester’s best verses, resolved not to pass twenty-five, and had her passport made out accordingly till her death at eighty-five.  She used to boast that, whenever a foreign official objected, she never failed to silence him by the remark, that he was the first gentleman of his country who ever told a lady she was older than she said she was.  Actuated probably by a similar feeling, and in the hope of securing to herself the benefit of the doubt, Mrs. Thrale omitted in the “Anecdotes” the year when these verses were addressed to her, and a sharp controversy has been raised as to the respective ages of herself and Dr. Johnson at the time.  It is thus summed up by one of the combatants: 

“In one place Mr. Croker says that at the commencement of the intimacy between Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, in 1765, the lady was twenty-five years old.  In other places he says that Mrs. Thrale’s thirty-fifth year coincided with Johnson’s seventieth.  Johnson was born in 1709.  If, therefore, Mrs. Thrale’s thirty-fifth year coincided with Johnson’s seventieth, she could have been only twenty-one years old in 1765.  This is not all.  Mr. Croker, in another place, assigns the year 1777 as the date of the complimentary lines which Johnson made on Mrs. Thrale’s thirty-fifth birthday.  If this date be correct Mrs. Thrale must have been born in 1742, and could have been only twenty-three when her acquaintance commenced.  Mr. Croker, therefore, gives us three different statements as to her age.  Two of the three must be incorrect.  We will not decide between them."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Macaulay’s Essays.]

Mr. Salusbury, referring to a china bowl in his possession, says:  “The slip of paper now in it is in my father’s handwriting, and copied, I have heard him say, from the original slip, which was worn out by age and fingering.  The exact words are, ’In this bason was baptised Hester Lynch Salusbury, 16th Jan. 1740-41 old style, at Bodville in Carnarvonshire.’”