Men who would trust Dr. Johnson with their orthodoxy, with their vocabulary, and with the most intimate vanity of their human wishes, refuse, with every mark of insolence, to trust him in regard to his wife.  On that one point no reverence is paid to him, no deference, no respect, not so much as the credit due to our common sanity.  Yet he is not reviled on account of his Thrale—­nor, indeed, is his Thrale now seriously reproached for her Piozzi.  It is true that Macaulay, preparing himself and his reader “in his well-known way” (as a rustic of Mr. Hardy’s might have it) for the recital of her second marriage, says that it would have been well if she had been laid beside the kind and generous Thrale when, in the prime of her life, he died.  But Macaulay has not left us heirs to his indignation.  His well-known way was to exhaust those possibilities of effect in which the commonplace is so rich.  And he was permitted to point his paragraphs as he would, not only by calling Mrs. Thrale’s attachment to her second husband “a degrading passion,” but by summoning a chorus of “all London” to the same purpose.  She fled, he tells us, from the laughter and hisses of her countrymen and countrywomen to a land where she was unknown.  Thus when Macaulay chastises Mrs. Elizabeth Porter for marrying Johnson, he is not inconsistent, for he pursues Mrs. Thrale with equal rigour for her audacity in keeping gaiety and grace in her mind and manners longer than Macaulay liked to see such ornaments added to the charm of twice “married brows.”

It is not so with succeeding essayists.  One of these minor biographers is so gentle as to call the attachment of Mrs. Thrale and Piozzi “a mutual affection.”  He adds, “No one who has had some experience of life will be inclined to condemn Mrs. Thrale.”  But there is no such courtesy, even from him, for Mrs. Johnson.  Neither to him nor to any other writer has it yet occurred that if England loves her great Englishman’s memory, she owes not only courtesy, but gratitude, to the only woman who loved him while there was yet time.

Not a thought of that debt has stayed the alacrity with which a caricature has been acclaimed as the only possible portrait of Mrs. Johnson.  Garrick’s school reminiscences would probably have made a much more charming woman grotesque.  Garrick is welcome to his remembrances; we may even reserve for ourselves the liberty of envying those who heard him.  But honest laughter should not fall into that tone of common antithesis which seems to say, “See what are the absurdities of the great!  Such is life!  On this one point we, even we, are wiser than Dr. Johnson—­we know how grotesque was his wife.  We know something of the privacies of her toilet-table.  We are able to compare her figure with the figures we, unlike him in his youth, have had the opportunity of admiring—­the figures of the well-bred and well-dressed.”  It is a sorry success to be able to say so much.