“Now whether she had ever told the man things that I might have said of him in his absence, by way of provoking him to go, and so rid herself of his tuition; whether he was puffed up with the last 100 guineas and longed to be spending it all’ Italiano; whether he thought Mr. Thrale would call him back, and he should be better established here than ever; or whether he really was idiot enough to be angry at my threatening to whip Susan and Sophy for going out of bounds, although he had given them leave, for Hetty said that was the first offence he took huff at, I never now shall know, for he never expressed himself as an offended man to me, except one day when he was not shaved at the proper hour forsooth, and then I would not quarrel with him, because nobody was by, and I knew him be so vile a lyar that I durst not trust his tongue with a dispute.  He is gone, however, loaded with little presents from me, and with a large share too of my good opinion, though I most sincerely rejoice in his departure, and hope we shall never meet more but by chance.

“Since our quarrel I had occasion to talk of him with Tom Davies, who spoke with horror of his ferocious temper; ‘and yet,’ says I, ’there is great sensibility about Baretti:  I have seen tears often stand in his eyes.’  ‘Indeed,’ replies Davies, ’I should like to have seen that sight vastly, when—­even butchers weep.’”

[Footnote 1:  In “The Streatham Portraits.” (See Vol.  II.)]

His intractable character appears from his own account of the rupture: 

“When Madam took it into her head to give herself airs, and treat me with some coldness and superciliousness, I did not hesitate to set down at breakfast my dish of tea not half drank, go for my hat and stick that lay in the corner of the room, turn my back to the house insalutato hospite, and walk away to London without uttering a syllable, fully resolved never to see her again, as was the case during no less than four years; nor had she and I ever met again as friends if she and her husband had not chanced upon me after that lapse of time at the house of a gentleman near Beckenham, and coaxed me into a reconciliation, which, as almost all reconciliations prove, was not very sincere on her side or mine; so that there was a total end of it on Mr. Thrale’s demise, which happened about three years after."[1]

[Footnote 1:  The European Magazine, 1788.]

The monotony of a constant residence at Streatham was varied by trips to Bath or Brighton; and it was so much a matter of course for Johnson to make one of the party, that when (1776), not expecting him so soon back from a journey with Boswell, the Thrale family and Baretti started for Bath without him, Boswell is disposed to treat their departure without the lexicographer as a slight: