“’If there’s delight in love, ’tis when I see
  The heart that others bleed for, bleed for me.’”

When Johnson is reported saying, “Those who have a style of distinguished excellence can always be distinguished,” she objects:  “It seems not.  The lines always quoted as Dryden’s, beginning,

  ‘To die is landing on some silent shore,’

are Garth’s after all.”  Johnson would have been still less pleased at her discovery that a line in his epitaph on Phillips,

  “Till angels wake thee with a note like thine,”

was imitated from Pope’s

  “And saints embrace thee with a love like mine.”

In one of her letters to him (June, 1782) she writes:  “Meantime let us be as merry as reading Burton upon Melancholy will make us.  You bid me study that book in your absence, and now, what have I found?  Why, I have found, or fancied, that he has been cruelly plundered:  that Milton’s first idea of ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ were suggested by the verses at the beginning; that Savage’s speech of Suicide in the ‘Wanderer’ grew up out of a passage you probably remember towards the 216th page; that Swift’s tale of the woman that holds water in her mouth, to regain her husband’s love by silence, had its source in the same farrago; and that there is an odd similitude between my Lord’s trick upon Sly the Tinker, in Shakspeare’s ‘Taming of the Shrew,’ and some stuff I have been reading in Burton.”

It would be easy to heap proof upon proof of the value and variety of Mrs. Thrale’s contributions to the colloquial treasures accumulated by Boswell and other members of the set; and Johnson’s deliberate testimony to her good qualities of head and heart will far more than counterbalance any passing expressions of disapproval or reproof with her mistimed vivacity, or alleged disregard of scrupulous accuracy in narrative, may have called forth.  No two people ever lived much together for a series of years without many fretful, complaining, dissatisfied, uncongenial moments,—­without letting drop captious or unkind expressions, utterly at variance with their habitual feelings and their matured judgments of each other.  The hasty word, the passing sarcasm, the sly hit at an acknowledged foible, should count for nothing in the estimate, when contrasted with earnest and deliberate assurances, proceeding from one who was commonly too proud to flatter, and in no mood for idle compliment when he wrote.

“Never (he writes in 1773) imagine that your letters are long; they are always too short for my curiosity.  I do not know that I was ever content with a single perusal....  My nights are grown again very uneasy and troublesome.  I know not that the country will mend them; but I hope your company will mend my days.  Though I cannot now expect much attention, and would not wish for more than can be spared from the poor dear lady (her mother), yet I shall see you and hear you every now and then; and to see and hear you, is always to hear wit, and to see virtue.”