The truth is plain enough.  Mrs. Thrale was torn by conflicting feelings.  She still loved Johnson, and yet dreaded his certain disapproval of her strongest wishes.  She respected him, but was resolved not to follow his advice.  She wished to treat him with kindness and to be repaid with gratitude, and yet his presence and his affection were full of intolerable inconveniences.  When an old friendship becomes a burden, the smaller infirmities of manner and temper to which we once submitted willingly, become intolerable.  She had borne with Johnson’s modes of eating and with his rough reproofs to herself and her friends during sixteen years of her married life; and for nearly a year of her widowhood she still clung to him as the wisest and kindest of monitors.  His manners had undergone no spasmodic change.  They became intolerable when, for other reasons, she resented his possible interference, and wanted a very different guardian and confidant; and, therefore, she wished to part, and yet wished that the initiative should come from him.

The decision to leave Streatham was taken.  Johnson parted with deep regret from the house; he read a chapter of the Testament in the library; he took leave of the church with a kiss; he composed a prayer commending the family to the protection of Heaven; and he did not forget to note in his journal the details of the last dinner of which he partook.  This quaint observation may have been due to some valetudinary motive, or, more probably, to some odd freak of association.  Once, when eating an omelette, he was deeply affected because it recalled his old friend Nugent.  “Ah, my dear friend,” he said “in an agony,” “I shall never eat omelette with thee again!” And in the present case there is an obscure reference to some funeral connected in his mind with a meal.  The unlucky entry has caused some ridicule, but need hardly convince us that his love of the family in which for so many years he had been an honoured and honour-giving inmate was, as Miss Seward amiably suggests, in great measure “kitchen-love.”

No immediate rupture followed the abandonment of the Streatham establishment.  Johnson spent some weeks at Brighton with Mrs. Thrale, during which a crisis was taking place, without his knowledge, in her relations to Piozzi.  After vehement altercations with her daughters, whom she criticizes with great bitterness for their utter want of heart, she resolved to break with Piozzi for at least a time.  Her plan was to go to Bath, and there to retrench her expenses, in the hopes of being able to recall her lover at some future period.  Meanwhile he left her and returned to Italy.  After another winter in London, during which Johnson was still a frequent inmate of her house, she went to Bath with her daughters in April, 1783.  A melancholy period followed for both the friends.  Mrs. Thrale lost a younger daughter, and Johnson had a paralytic stroke in June.  Death was sending preliminary warnings.  A correspondence