But in fact such a triumph belongs to no man.  When Samuel Johnson, at twenty-six, married his wife, he gave the dull an advantage over himself which none but the dullest will take.  He chose, for love, a woman who had the wit to admire him at first meeting, and in spite of first sight.  “That,” she said to her daughter, “is the most sensible man I ever met.”  He was penniless.  She had what was no mean portion for those times and those conditions; and, granted that she was affected, and provincial, and short, and all the rest with which she is charged, she was probably not without suitors; nor do her defects or faults seem to have been those of an unadmired or neglected woman.  Next, let us remember what was the aspect of Johnson’s form and face, even in his twenties, and how little he could have touched the senses of a widow fond of externals.  This one loved him, accepted him, made him happy, gave to one of the noblest of all English hearts the one love of its sombre life.  And English literature has had no better phrase for her than Macaulay’s—­“She accepted, with a readiness which did her little honour, the addresses of a suitor who might have been her son.”

Her readiness did her incalculable honour.  But it is at last worth remembering that Johnson had first done her incalculable honour.  No one has given to man or woman the right to judge as to the worthiness of her who received it.  The meanest man is generally allowed his own counsel as to his own wife; one of the greatest of men has been denied it.  “The lover,” says Macaulay, “continued to be under the illusions of the wedding day till the lady died.”  What is so graciously said is not enough.  He was under those “illusions” until he too died, when he had long passed her latest age, and was therefore able to set right that balance of years which has so much irritated the impertinent.  Johnson passed from this life twelve years older than she, and so for twelve years his constant eyes had to turn backwards to dwell upon her.  Time gave him a younger wife.

And here I will put into Mrs. Johnson’s mouth, that mouth to which no one else has ever attributed any beautiful sayings, the words of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore to the young husband she loved:  “Older than thou!  Let me never see thou knowest it.  Forget it!  I will remember it, to die before thy death.”

Macaulay, in his unerring effectiveness, uses Johnson’s short sight for an added affront to Mrs. Johnson.  The bridegroom was too weak of eyesight “to distinguish ceruse from natural bloom.”  Nevertheless, he saw well enough, when he was old, to distinguish Mrs. Thrale’s dresses.  He reproved her for wearing a dark dress; it was unsuitable, he said, for her size; a little creature should show gay colours “like an insect.”  We are not called upon to admire his wife; why, then, our taste being thus uncompromised, do we not suffer him to admire her?  It is the most gratuitous kind of intrusion.  Moreover, the biographers are eager to permit that touch of romance and grace in his relations to Mrs. Thrale, which they officially deny in the case of Mrs. Johnson.  But the difference is all on the other side.  He would not have bidden his wife dress like an insect.  Mrs. Thrale was to him “the first of womankind” only because his wife was dead.