He would not suffer her to be lightly spoken of in his presence, nor permit his name to be coupled jocularly with hers.  “I yesterday told him,” says Boswell, when they were traversing the Highlands, “I was thinking of writing a poetical letter to him, on his return from Scotland, in the style of Swift’s humorous epistle in the character of Mary Gulliver to her husband, Captain Lemuel Gulliver, on his return to England from the country of the Houyhnhnms:—­

  “’At early morn I to the market haste,
  Studious in ev’ry thing to please thy taste. 
  A curious fowl and sparagrass I chose;
  (For I remember you were fond of those:)
  Three shillings cost the first, the last seven groats;
  Sullen you turn from both, and call for OATS.’

He laughed, and asked in whose name I would write it.  I said in Mrs. Thrale’s.  He was angry.  ’Sir, if you have any sense of decency or delicacy, you won’t do that.’ Boswell.  ’Then let it be in Cole’s, the landlord of the Mitre tavern, where we have so often sat together.’ Johnson.  ‘Ay, that may do.’”

Again, at Inverary, when Johnson called for a gill of whiskey that he might know what makes a Scotchman happy, and Boswell proposed Mrs. Thrale as their toast, he would not have her drunk in whiskey.  Peter Pindar has maliciously added to this reproof:—­

  “We supped most royally, were vastly frisky,
  When Johnson ordered up a gill of whiskey. 
  Taking the glass, says I, ‘Here’s Mistress Thrale,’
  ‘Drink her in whiskey not,’ said he, ‘but ale.’”

So far from making light of her scholarship, he frequently accepted her as a partner in translations from the Latin.  The translations from Boethius, printed in the second volume of the Letters, are their joint composition.

After recapitulating Johnson’s other contributions to literature in 1766, Boswell says, “‘The Fountains,’ a beautiful little fairy tale in prose, written with exquisite simplicity, is one of Johnson’s productions; and I cannot withhold from Mrs. Thrale the praise of being the author of that admirable poem ‘The Three Warnings.’” Marginal note:  “How sorry he is!” Both the tale and the poem were written for a collection of “Miscellanies,” published by Mrs. Williams in that year.  The character of Floretta in “The Fountains” was intended for Mrs. Thrale, and she thus gracefully alludes to it in a letter to Johnson in Feb. 1782: 

“The newspapers would spoil my few comforts that are left if they could; but you tell me that’s only because I have the reputation, whether true or false, of being a wit forsooth; and you remember poor Floretta, who was teased into wishing away her spirit, her beauty, her fortune, and at last even her life, never could bear the bitter water which was to have washed away her wit; which she resolved to keep with all its consequences.”