In spite of sundry little sparrings, Johnson fully appreciated Goldsmith’s genius.  Possibly his authority hastened the spread of public appreciation, as he seemed to claim, whilst repudiating Boswell’s too flattering theory that it had materially raised Goldsmith’s position.  When Reynolds quoted the authority of Fox in favour of the Traveller, saying that his friends might suspect that they had been too partial, Johnson replied very truly that the Traveller was beyond the need of Fox’s praise, and that the partiality of Goldsmith’s friends had always been against him.  They would hardly give him a hearing.  “Goldsmith,” he added, “was a man who, whatever he wrote, always did it better than any other man could do.”  Johnson’s settled opinion in fact was that embodied in the famous epitaph with its “nihil tetigit quod non ornavit,” and, though dedications are perhaps the only literary product more generally insincere than epitaphs, we may believe that Goldsmith too meant what he said in the dedication of She Stoops to Conquer.  “It may do me some honour to inform the public that I have lived many years in intimacy with you.  It may serve the interests of mankind also to inform them that the greatest wit may be found in a character, without impairing the most unaffected piety.”

Though Johnson was thus rich in friendship, two connexions have still to be noticed which had an exceptional bearing upon his fame and happiness.  In January, 1765, he made the acquaintance of the Thrales.  Mr. Thrale was the proprietor of the brewery which afterwards became that of Barclay and Perkins.  He was married in 1763 to a Miss Hester Lynch Salisbury, who has become celebrated from her friendship with Johnson.[1] She was a woman of great vivacity and independence of character.  She had a sensitive and passionate, if not a very tender nature, and enough literary culture to appreciate Johnson’s intellectual power, and on occasion to play a very respectable part in conversation.  She had far more Latin and English scholarship than fell to the lot of most ladies of her day, and wit enough to preserve her from degenerating like some of the “blues,” into that most offensive of beings—­a feminine prig.  Her marriage had been one of convenience, and her husband’s want of sympathy, and jealousy of any interference in business matters, forced her, she says, to take to literature as her sole resource.  “No wonder,” she adds, “if I loved my books and children.”  It is, perhaps, more to be wondered at that her children seem to have had a rather subordinate place in her affections.  The marriage, however, though not of the happiest, was perfectly decorous.  Mrs. Thrale discharged her domestic duties irreproachably, even when she seems to have had some real cause of complaint.  To the world she eclipsed her husband, a solid respectable man, whose mind, according to Johnson, struck the hours very regularly, though it did not mark the minutes.