Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale joined against this. Johnson.  ’Ask any man if he’d wish not to know of such an injury.’ Boswell.  ’Would you tell your friend to make him unhappy?’ Johnson.  ’Perhaps, Sir, I should not:  but that would be from prudence on my own account.  A man would tell his father.’ Boswell.  ’Yes; because he would not have spurious children to get any share of the family inheritance.’ Mrs. Thrale.  ‘Or he would tell his brother.’ Boswell.  ’Certainly his elder brother....  Would you tell Mr. ——?’ (naming a gentleman who assuredly was not in the least danger of so miserable a disgrace, though married to a fine woman). Johnson.  ’No, Sir:  because it would do no good; he is so sluggish, he’d never go to Parliament and get through a divorce.’” Marginal Note:  “Langton.”

There is every reason to believe that her behaviour to Johnson was uniformly marked by good-breeding and delicacy.  She treated him with a degree of consideration and respect which he did not always receive from other friends and admirers.  A foolish rumour having got into the newspapers that he had been learning to dance of Vestris, it was agreed that Lord Charlemont should ask him if it was true, and his lordship with (it is shrewdly observed) the characteristic spirit of a general of Irish volunteers, actually put the question, which provoked a passing feeling of irritation.  Opposite Boswell’s account of this incident she has written, “Was he not right in hating to be so treated? and would he not have been right to have loved me better than any of them, because I never did make a Lyon of him?”

One great charm of her companionship to cultivated men was her familiarity with the learned languages, as well as with French, Italian, and Spanish.  The author of “Piozziana” says:  “She not only read and wrote Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, but had for sixty years constantly and ardently studied the Scriptures and the works of commentators in the original languages.”  She did not know Greek, and he probably over-estimated her other acquirements, which Boswell certainly underestimates when he speaks slightingly of them on the strength of Johnson’s having said:  “It is a great mistake to suppose that she is above him (Thrale) in literary attainments.  She is more flippant, but he has ten times her learning:  he is a regular scholar; but her learning is that of a school-boy in one of the lower forms.”  If this were so, it is strange that Thrale should cut so poor a figure, should seem little better than a nonentity, whilst every imaginable topic was under animated discussion at his table; for Boswell was more ready to report the husband’s sayings than the wife’s.  In a marginal note on one of the printed letters she says:  “Mr. Thrale was a very merry talking man in 1760; but the distress of 1772, which affected his health, his hopes, and his whole soul, affected his temper too.  Perkins called it being planet struck, and I am not sure he was ever completely the same man again.”  The notes of his conversation during the antecedent period are equally meagre.[1] He is described by Madame D’Arblay as taking a singular amusement in hearing, instigating, and provoking a war of words, alternating triumph and overthrow, between clever and ambitious colloquial combatants.