Johnson and excepting only Miss Burney herself, to whom the secret was confided, and the situation therefore explained.  Gradually, according to Miss Burney, she became more petulant to Johnson than she was herself aware, gave palpable hints of being worried by his company, and finally excited his resentment and suspicion.  In one or two utterances, though he doubtless felt the expedience of reserve, he intrusted his forebodings to Miss Burney, and declared that Streatham was lost to him for ever.

At last, in the end of August, the crisis came.  Mrs. Thrale’s lawsuit had gone against her.  She thought it desirable to go abroad and save money.  It had moreover been “long her dearest wish” to see Italy, with Piozzi for a guide.  The one difficulty (as she says in her journal at the time), was that it seemed equally hard to part with Johnson or to take him with her till he had regained strength.  At last, however she took courage to confide to him her plans for travel.  To her extreme annoyance he fully approved of them.  He advised her to go; anticipated her return in two or three years; and told her daughter that he should not accompany them, even if invited.  No behaviour, it may be admitted, could be more provoking than this unforeseen reasonableness.  To nerve oneself to part with a friend, and to find the friend perfectly ready, and all your battery of argument thrown away is most vexatious.  The poor man should have begged her to stay with him, or to take him with her; he should have made the scene which she professed to dread, but which would have been the best proof of her power.  The only conclusion which could really have satisfied her—­though she, in all probability, did not know it—­would have been an outburst which would have justified a rupture, and allowed her to protest against his tyranny as she now proceeded to protest against his complacency.

Johnson wished to go to Italy two years later; and his present willingness to be left was probably caused by a growing sense of the dangers which threatened their friendship.  Mrs. Thrale’s anger appears in her journal.  He had never really loved her, she declares; his affection for her had been interested, though even in her wrath she admits that he really loved her husband; he cared less for her conversation, which she had fancied necessary to his existence, than for her “roast beef and plumb pudden,” which he now devours too “dirtily for endurance.”  She was fully resolved to go, and yet she could not bear that her going should fail to torture the friend whom for eighteen years she had loved and cherished so kindly.

No one has a right at once to insist upon the compliance of his friends, and to insist that it should be a painful compliance.  Still Mrs. Thrale’s petulant outburst was natural enough.  It requires notice because her subsequent account of the rupture has given rise to attacks on Johnson’s character.  Her “Anecdotes,” written in 1785, show that her real affection for Johnson was still coloured