had constantly prayed for him some time before his death.  The decease of him from whose friendship I had obtained many opportunities of amusement, and to whom I turned my thoughts as to a refuge from misfortunes, has left me heavy.  But my business is with myself.’  The passage enclosed in brackets I have copied from the original MS. Mr. Strahan, the editor, omitted it, no doubt from feelings of delicacy.  What a contrast in this to the widow who published a letter in which she had written:—­’I wish that you would put in a word of your own to Mr. Thrale about eating less!’ Piozzi Letters, ii.130.  Baretti, in a note on Piozzi Letters, ii.142, says that ’nobody ever had spirit enough to tell Mr. Thrale that his fits were apoplectic; such is the blessing of being rich that nobody dares to speak out.’  In Johnson’s Works (1787), xi.203, it is recorded that ’Johnson, who attended Thrale in his last moments, said, “His servants would have waited upon him in this awful period, and why not his friend?"’

[280] Johnson’s letters to the widow show how much he felt Thrale’s death.  ’April 5, 1781.  I am not without my part of the calamity.  No death since that of my wife has ever oppressed me like this.  April 7.  My part of the loss hangs upon me.  I have lost a friend of boundless kindness, at an age when it is very unlikely that I should find another.  April 9.  Our sorrow has different effects; you are withdrawn into solitude, and I am driven into company.  I am afraid of thinking what I have lost.  I never had such a friend before.  April 11.  I feel myself like a man beginning a new course of life.  I had interwoven myself with my dear friend.’ Piozzi Letters, ii. 191-97.  ‘I have very often,’ wrote Miss Burney, in the following June, ’though I mention them not, long and melancholy discourses with Dr. Johnson about our dear deceased master, whom, indeed, he regrets incessantly.’  Mme. D’Arblay’s Diary, ii. 63.  On his next birthday, he wrote:—­’My first knowledge of Thrale was in 1765.  I enjoyed his favour for almost a fourth part of my life.’ Pr. and Med. p.191.  One or two passages in Mrs. Thrale’s Letters shew her husband’s affection for Johnson.  On May 3, 1776, she writes:—­’Mr. Thrale says he shall not die in peace without seeing Rome, and I am sure he will go nowhere that he can help without you.’ Piozzi Letters, i.317.  A few days later, she speaks of ’our dear master, who cannot be quiet without you for a week.’ Ib. p.329.  Johnson, in his fine epitaph on Thrale (Works, i.153) broke through a rule which he himself had laid down.  In his Essay on Epitaphs (Ib. v 263), he said:—­’It is improper to address the epitaph to the passenger [traveller], a custom which an injudicious veneration for antiquity introduced again at the revival of letters.’  Yet in the monument in Streatham Church, we find the same Abi viator which he had censured in an epitaph on Henry IV of France.