[Footnote 1:  Mrs. Thrale was born in 1740 or 1741, probably the latter.  Thrale was born in 1724.]

The Thrales were introduced to Johnson by their common friend, Arthur Murphy, an actor and dramatist, who afterwards became the editor of Johnson’s works.  One day, when calling upon Johnson, they found him in such a fit of despair that Thrale tried to stop his mouth by placing his hand before it.  The pair then joined in begging Johnson to leave his solitary abode, and come to them at their country-house at Streatham.  He complied, and for the next sixteen years a room was set apart for him, both at Streatham and in their house in Southwark.  He passed a large part of his time with them, and derived from the intimacy most of the comfort of his later years.  He treated Mrs. Thrale with a kind of paternal gallantry, her age at the time of their acquaintance being about twenty-four, and his fifty-five.  He generally called her by the playful name of “my mistress,” addressed little poems to her, gave her solid advice, and gradually came to confide to her his miseries and ailments with rather surprising frankness.  She flattered and amused him, and soothed his sufferings and did something towards humanizing his rugged exterior.  There was one little grievance between them which requires notice.  Johnson’s pet virtue in private life was a rigid regard for truth.  He spoke, it was said of him, as if he was always on oath.  He would not, for example, allow his servant to use the phrase “not at home,” and even in the heat of conversation resisted the temptation to give point to an anecdote.  The lively Mrs. Thrale rather fretted against the restraint, and Johnson admonished her in vain.  He complained to Boswell that she was willing to have that said of her, which the best of mankind had died rather than have said of them.  Boswell, the faithful imitator of his master in this respect, delighted in taking up the parable.  “Now, madam, give me leave to catch you in the fact,” he said on one occasion; “it was not an old woman, but an old man whom I mentioned, as having told me this,” and he recounts his check to the “lively lady” with intense complacency.  As may be imagined, Boswell and Mrs. Thrale did not love each other, in spite of the well-meant efforts of the sage to bring about a friendly feeling between his disciples.

It is time to close this list of friends with the inimitable Boswell.  James Boswell, born in 1740, was the eldest son of a Whig laird and lord of sessions.  He had acquired some English friends at the Scotch universities, among whom must be mentioned Mr. Temple, an English clergyman.  Boswell’s correspondence with Temple, discovered years after his death by a singular chance, and published in 1857, is, after the Life of Johnson, one of the most curious exhibitions of character in the language.  Boswell was intended for the Scotch bar, and studied civil law at Utrecht in the winter of 1762.  It was in the following summer that he made Johnson’s acquaintance.