Beauclerc, we learn, was wont to cap Garrick’s mimicry of Johnson’s love-making by repeating the words of Johnson himself in after-years—­“It was a love-match on both sides.”  And obviously he was as strange a lover as they said.  Who doubted it?  Was there any other woman in England to give such a suitor the opportunity of an eternal love?  “A life radically wretched,” was the life of this master of Letters; but she, who has received nothing in return except ignominy from these unthankful Letters, had been alone to make it otherwise.  Well for him that he married so young as to earn the ridicule of all the biographers in England; for by doing so he, most happily, possessed his wife for nearly twenty years.  I have called her his only friend.  So indeed she was, though he had followers, disciples, rivals, competitors, and companions, many degrees of admirers, a biographer, a patron, and a public.  He had also the houseful of sad old women who quarrelled under his beneficent protection.  But what friend had he?  He was “solitary” from the day she died.

Let us consider under what solemn conditions and in what immortal phrase the word “solitary” stands.  He wrote it, all Englishmen know where.  He wrote it in the hour of that melancholy triumph when he had been at last set free from the dependence upon hope.  He hoped no more, and he needed not to hope.  The “notice” of Lord Chesterfield had been too long deferred; it was granted at last, when it was a flattery which Johnson’s court of friends would applaud.  But not for their sake was it welcome.  To no living ear would he bring it and report it with delight.

He was indifferent, he was known.  The sensitiveness to pleasure was gone, and the sensitiveness to pain, slights, and neglect would thenceforth be suffered to rest; no man in England would put that to proof again.  No man in England, did I say?  But, indeed, that is not so.  No slight to him, to his person, or to his fame could have had power to cause him pain more sensibly than the customary, habitual, ready-made ridicule that has been cast by posterity upon her whom he loved for twenty years, prayed for during thirty-two years more, who satisfied one of the saddest human hearts, but to whom the world, assiduous to admire him, hardly accords human dignity.  He wrote praises of her manners and of her person for her tomb.  But her epitaph, that does not name her, is in the greatest of English prose.  What was favour to him?  “I am indifferent . . .  I am known . . .  I am solitary, and cannot impart it.”

MADAME ROLAND