[Footnote 1:  In a marginal note on Boswell, she says:  “The people (in 1783) did read shamefully.  Yet Mr. Lee, the poet, many years before Johnson was born, read so gracefully, the players would not accept his tragedies till they had heard them from other lips:  his own (they said) sweetened all which proceeded from them.”  Speaker Onslow equally was celebrated for his manner of reading.]

“July 1st, 1780.—­Mrs. Byron, who really loves me, was disgusted at Miss Burney’s carriage to me, who have been such a friend and benefactress to her:  not an article of dress, not a ticket for public places, not a thing in the world that she could not command from me:  yet always insolent, always pining for home, always preferring the mode of life in St. Martin’s Street to all I could do for her.  She is a saucy-spirited little puss to be sure, but I love her dearly for all that; and I fancy she has a real regard for me, if she did not think it beneath the dignity of a wit, or of what she values more—­the dignity of Dr. Burnett’s daughter—­to indulge it.  Such dignity! the Lady Louisa of Leicester Square![1] In good time!”

[Footnote 1:  Alluding to a character in “Evelina.”]

“1781.—­What a blockhead Dr. Burney is to be always sending for his daughter home so! what a monkey! is she not better and happier with me than she can be anywhere else?  Johnson is enraged at the silliness of their family conduct, and Mrs. Byron disgusted; I confess myself provoked excessively, but I love the girl so dearly—­and the Doctor, too, for that matter, only that he has such odd notions of superiority in his own house, and will have his children under his feet forsooth, rather than let ’em live in peace, plenty, and comfort anywhere from home.  If I did not provide Fanny with every wearable—­every wishable, indeed,—­it would not vex me to be served so; but to see the impossibility of compensating for the pleasures of St. Martin’s Street, makes one at once merry and mortified.

“Dr. Burney did not like his daughter should learn Latin even of Johnson, who offered to teach her for friendship, because then she would have been as wise as himself forsooth, and Latin was too masculine for Misses.  A narrow-souled goose-cap the man must be at last, agreeable and amiable all the while too, beyond almost any other human creature.  Well, mortal man is but a paltry animal! the best of us have such drawbacks both upon virtue, wisdom, and knowledge.”

In what his daughter calls a doggrel list of his friends and his feats, Dr. Burney has thus mentioned the Thrales: 

“1776.—­This year’s acquaintance began with the Thrales, Where I met with great talents ’mongst females and males, But the best thing it gave me from that time to this, Was the freedom it gave me to sound the abyss, At my ease and my leisure, of Johnson’s great mind, Where new treasures unnumber’d I constantly find.”

Highly to her credit, Mrs. Thrale did not omit any part of her own duties to her husband because he forgot his.  In March, 1780, she writes to Johnson: