“After having talked slightingly of music, he was observed to listen very attentively while Miss Thrale played on the harpsichord; and with eagerness he called to her, ’Why don’t you dash away like Burney?’ Dr. Burney upon this said to him, ’I believe, Sir, we shall make a musician of you at last.’  Johnson with candid complacency replied, ‘Sir, I shall be glad to have a new sense given to me.’”

In 1774, the Thrales made a tour in Wales, mainly for the purpose of revisiting her birthplace and estates.  They were accompanied by Johnson, who kept a diary of the expedition, beginning July 5th and ending September 24th.  It was preserved by his negro servant, and Boswell had no suspicion of its existence, for he says, “I do not find that he kept any journal or notes of what he saw there.”  The diary was first published by Mr. Duppa in 1816; and some manuscript notes by Mrs. Thrale which reached that gentleman too late for insertion, have been added in Mr. Murray’s recent edition of the Life.  The first entry is: 

“Tuesday, July 5.—­We left Streatham 11 A.M.  Price of four horses two shillings a mile.  Barnet 1.40 P.M.  On the road I read ’Tully’s Epistles.’  At night at Dunstable.”  At Chester, he records:—­“We walked round the walls, which are complete, and contain one mile, three quarters, and one hundred and one yards.”  Mrs. Thrale’s comment is, “Of those ill-fated walls Dr. Johnson might have learned the extent from any one.  He has since put me fairly out of countenance by saying, ’I have known my mistress fifteen years, and never saw her fairly out of humour but on Chester wall.’  It was because he would keep Miss Thrale beyond her hour of going to bed to walk on the wall, where from the want of light, I apprehended some accident to her, perhaps to him.”

He thus describes Mrs. Thrale’s family mansion: 

“Saturday, July 30.—­We went to Bach y Graig, where we found an old house, built 1567, in an uncommon and incommodious form—­My mistress chatted about tiring, but I prevailed on her to go to the top—­The floors have been stolen:  the windows are stopped—­The house was less than I seemed to expect—­The River Clwyd is a brook with a bridge of one arch, about one third of a mile—­The woods have many trees, generally young; but some which seem to decay—­They have been lopped—­The house never had a garden—­The addition of another story would make an useful house, but it cannot be great.”

On the 4th August, they visited Rhuddlan Castle and Bodryddan[1], of which he says:—­

[Footnote 1:  Now the property of Mr. Shipley Conway, the great-grandson of Johnson’s acquaintance, the Bishop of St. Asaph, and representative, through females, of Sir John Conway or Conwy, to whom Rhuddlan Castle, with its domain, was granted by Edward the First.]

“Stapylton’s house is pretty:  there are pleasing shades about it, with a constant spring that supplies a cold bath.  We then went out to see a cascade.  I trudged unwillingly, and was not sorry to find it dry.  The water was, however, turned on, and produced a very striking cataract."[1]