wrote he, “the first of womankind.”  It was her “kindness which soothed twenty years of a life radically wretched.”  “To see and hear you,” he wrote, “is always to hear wit and to see virtue.”  She belonged, in truth, to the most serviceable class of women,—­by no means to the highest order of her sex.  She was not a woman of deep heart, or of noble or tender feeling; but she had kindly and ready sympathies, and such a disposition to please as gave her the capacity of pleasing.  Her very faults added to her success.  She was vain and ambitious; but her vanity led her to seek the praises of others, and her ambition taught her how to gain them.  She was selfish; but she pleased herself not at the expense of others, but by paying them attentions which returned to her in personal gratifications.  She was made for such a position as that which she held at Streatham.  The highest eulogy of her is given in an incidental way by Boswell.  He reports Johnson as saying one day, “‘How few of his friends’ houses would a man choose to be at when he is sick!’ He mentioned one or two.  I recollect only Thrale’s.”

All the world of readers know the main incidents of Mrs. Thrale’s life.  Her own books, Boswell, Madame d’Arblay, have made us almost as familiar with her as with Dr. Johnson himself.  Not yet have people got tired of wondering at her marriage with Piozzi, or of amusing themselves with the gossip of the old lady who remained a wit at eighty years old, and, having outlived her great contemporaries, was happy in not outliving her own faculties.  Few characters not more remarkable have been more discussed than hers.  Macaulay, with characteristic unfairness, gave a view of her conduct which Mr. Hayward, in his recently published entertaining volumes,[A] shows to have been in great part the invention of the great essayist’s lively and unprincipled imagination.  In the autobiographical memorials of Mrs. Piozzi, now for the first time printed, there is much that throws light on her life, and her relations with her contemporaries.  They do not so much raise one’s respect for her, as present her to us as a very natural and generally likable sort of woman, even in those acts of her life which have been the most blamed.

[Footnote A:  Autobiography, Letters, and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale).  Edited, with Notes and an Introductory Account of her Life and Writings, by A. Hayward, Esq., Q.C.  In Two Volumes.  London, 1861.  Reprinted by Ticknor & Fields.]

If she had but died while she was mistress of Streatham, we should have only delightful recollections of her.  She would have been one of the most agreeable famous women on record.  But the last forty years of her life were not as charming as the first.  Her weaknesses gained mastery over her, her vanity led her into follies, and she who had once been the favorite correspondent of Dr. Johnson now appears as the correspondent of such inferior persona that no association is connected