Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi Part 12

"The prudence and resolution of your design to return so soon to your business and your duty deserves great praise; I shall communicate it on Wednesday to the other executors. Be pleased to let me know whether you would have me come to Streatham to receive you, or stay here till the next day."

Johnson was one of the executors and took pride in discharging his share of the trust. Mrs. Thrale's account of the pleasure he took in signing the doc.u.ments and cheques, is incidentally confirmed by Boswell:

"I could not but be somewhat diverted by hearing Johnson talk in a pompous manner of his new office, and particularly of the concerns of the brewery, which it was at last resolved should be sold. Lord Lucan tells a very good story, which, if not precisely exact, is certainly characteristical; that when the sale of Thrale's brewery was going forward, Johnson appeared bustling about, with an ink-horn and pen in his b.u.t.ton-hole, like an excise-man; and on being asked what he really considered to be the value of the property which was to be disposed of, answered, 'We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.'"

The executors had legacies of 200_l._ each; Johnson, to the surprise of his friends, being placed on no better footing than the rest. He himself was certainly disappointed. Mrs. Thrale says that his complacency towards Thrale was not wholly devoid of interested motives; and she adds that his manner towards Reynolds and Dr. Taylor was also softened by the vague expectation of being named in their wills. One of her marginal notes is: "Johnson mentioned to Reynolds that he had been told by Taylor he was to be his heir. His fondness for Reynolds, ay, and for Thrale, had a dash of interest to keep it warm." Again, on his saying to Reynolds, "I did not mean to offend you,"--"He never would offend Reynolds: he had his reason."

Many and heavy as were the reproaches subsequently heaped upon the widow, no one has accused her of having been found wanting in energy, propriety, or self-respect at this period. She took the necessary steps for promoting her own interests and those of her children with prudence and prompt.i.tude. Madame D'Arblay, who was carrying on a flirtation with one of the executors (Mr. Crutchley), and had personal motives for watching their proceedings, writes, April 29th:--

"Miss Thrale is steady and constant, and very sincerely grieved for her father.

"The four executors, Mr. Cator, Mr. Crutchley, Mr. Henry Smith, and Dr. Johnson, have all behaved generously and honourably, and seem determined to give Mrs. Thrale all the comfort and a.s.sistance in their power. She is to carry on the business jointly with them. Poor soul! it is a dreadful toil and worry to her."

In "Thraliana":

"_Streatham, 1st May_, 1781.--I have now appointed three days a week to attend at the counting-house. If an angel from heaven had told me twenty years ago that the man I knew by the name of _Dictionary Johnson_ should one day become partner with me in a great trade, and that we should jointly or separately sign notes, drafts, &c., for three or four thousand pounds of a morning, how unlikely it would have seemed ever to happen! Unlikely is no word tho',--it would have seemed _incredible_, neither of us then being worth a groat, G.o.d knows, and both as immeasurably removed from commerce as birth, literature, and inclination could get us. Johnson, however, who desires above all other good the acc.u.mulation of new ideas, is but too happy with his present employment; and the influence I have over him, added to his own solid judgment and a regard for truth, will at last find it in a small degree difficult to win him from the dirty delight of seeing his name in a new character flaming away at the bottom of bonds and leases."

"Apropos to writing verses in a language one don't understand, there is always the allowance given, and that allowance (like our excise drawbacks) commonly larger than it ought to be. The following translation of the verses written with a knife, has been for this reason uncommonly commended, though they have no merit except being done quick. Piozzi asked me on Sunday morning if ever I had seen them, and could explain them to _him_, for that he heard they were written by his friend Mr. Locke. The book in which they were reposited was not ferreted out, however, till Monday night, and on Tuesday morning I sent him verses and translation: we used to think the original was Garrick's, I remember."

Translation of the verses written with a knife.

"Taglia Amore un coltello, Cara, l'hai sent.i.ta dire; Per l'Amore alla Moda, Esso poco pu soffrire.

Cuori che non mai fur giunti p.r.o.nti stanno a separar, Cari nodi come i nostri Non son facili tagliar.

Questo dico, che se spezza Tua tenera bellezza, Molto ancor ci restera; Della mia buona fede Il Coltello non s'avvede, Ne di tua gran bonta.

Che tagliare speranze Ben tutto si puo, Per piaceri G.o.duti Oh, questo poi no?

Dolci segni!

Cari pegni!

Di felecita pa.s.sata, Non temer la coltellata, Resterete--Io loro: Se del caro ben gradita, Trovo questa donatura, Via pur la tagliatura Sol d'Amore sta ferita."

"The power of emptying one's head of a great thing and filling it with little ones to amuse care, is no small power, and I am proud of being able to write Italian verses while I am bargaining 150,000_l_., and settling an event of the highest consequence to my own and my children's welfare. David Barclay, the rich Quaker, will treat for our brewhouse, and the negotiation is already begun. My heart palpitates with hope and fear--my head is bursting with anxiety and calculation; yet I can listen to a singer and translate verses about a knife."

"Mrs. Montagu has been here; she says I ought to have a statue erected to me for my diligent attendance on my compting-house duties.

The _wits_ and the _blues_ (as it is the fas.h.i.+on to call them) will be happy enough, no doubt, to have me safe at the brewery--_out of their way_."

"A very strange thing happened in the year 1776, and I never wrote it down,--I must write it down now. A woman came to London from a distant county to prosecute some business, and fell into distress; she was sullen and silent, and the people with whom her affairs connected her advised her to apply for a.s.sistance to some friend.

What friends can I have in London? says the woman, n.o.body here knows anything of me. One can't tell _that_, was the reply. Where have you lived? I have wandered much, says she, but I am originally from Litchfield. Who did you know in Litchfield in your youth? Oh, n.o.body of any note, I'll warrant: I knew one _David Garrick_, indeed, but I once heard that he turned strolling player, and is probably dead long ago; I also knew an obscure man, _Samuel Johnson_, very good he was too; but who can know anything of poor Johnson? I was likewise acquainted with _Robert James_, a quack doctor. _He_ is, I suppose, no very reputable connection if I could find him. Thus did this woman name and discriminate the three best known characters in London--perhaps in Europe."

"'Such,' says Mrs. Montagu, 'is the dignity of Mrs. Thrale's virtue, and such her superiority in all situations of life, that nothing now is wanting but an earthquake to show how she will behave on _that_ occasion.' Oh, brave Mrs. Montagu! She is a monkey, though, to quarrel with Johnson so about Lyttleton's life: if he was a great character, nothing said of him in that book can hurt him; if he was not a great character, they are bustling about nothing."

"Mr. Crutchley lives now a great deal with me; the business of executor to Mr. Thrale's will makes much of his attendance necessary, and it begins to have its full effect in seducing and attaching him to the house,--Miss Burney's being always about me is probably another reason for his close attendance, and I believe it is so. What better could befall Miss Burney, or indeed what better could befall _him_, than to obtain a woman of honour, and character, and reputation for superior understanding? I would be glad, however, that he fell honestly in love with her, and was not trick'd or trapp'd into marriage, poor fellow; he is no match for the arts of a novel-writer. A mighty particular character Mr. Crutchley is: strangely mixed up of meanness and magnificence; liberal and splendid in large sums and on serious occasions, narrow and confined in the common occurrences of life; warm and generous in some of his motives, frigid and suspicious, however, for eighteen hours at least out of the twenty-four; likely to be duped, though always expecting fraud, and easily disappointed in realities, though seldom flattered by fancy. He is supposed by those that knew his mother and her connections to be Mr. Thrale's natural son, and in many things he resembles him, but not in person: as he is both ugly and awkward. Mr.

Thrale certainly believed he was his son, and once told me as much when Sophy Streatfield's affair was in question but n.o.body could persuade him to court the S.S. Oh! well does the Custom-house officer Green say,--

"'Coquets! leave off affected arts, Gay fowlers at a flock of hearts; Woodc.o.c.ks, to shun your snares have skill, You show so plain you strive to kill.'"

"_3rd June_, 1781.--Well! here have I, with the grace of G.o.d and the a.s.sistance of good friends, completed--I really think very happily--the greatest event of my life. I have sold my brewhouse to Barclay, the rich Quaker, for 135,000_l_., to be in four years' time paid. I have by this bargain purchased peace and a stable fortune, restoration to my original rank in life, and a situation undisturbed by commercial jargon, unpolluted by commercial frauds, undisgraced by commercial connections. They who succeed me in the house have purchased the power of being rich beyond the wish of rapacity[1], and I have procured the improbability of being made poor by flights of the fairy, speculation. 'Tis thus that a woman and men of feminine minds always--I speak popularly--decide upon life, and chuse certain mediocrity before probable superiority; while, as Eton Graham says sublimely,--

"'n.o.bler souls, Fir'd with the tedious and disrelish'd good, Seek their employment in acknowledg'd ill, Danger, and toil, and pain.'

"On this principle partly, and partly on worse, was dear Mr. Johnson something unwilling--but not much at last--to give up a trade by which in some years 15,000_l._ or 16,000_l._ had undoubtedly been got, but by which, in some years, its possessor had suffered agonies of terror and tottered twice upon the verge of bankruptcy. Well! if thy own conscience acquit, who shall condemn thee? Not, I hope, the future husbands of our daughters, though I should think it likely enough; however, as Johnson says very judiciously, they must either think right or wrong: if they think right, let us now think with them; if wrong, let us never care what they think. So adieu to brewhouse, and borough wintering; adieu to trade, and tradesmen's frigid approbation; may virtue and wisdom sanctify our contract, and make buyer and seller happy in the bargain!"

[Footnote 1: There is a curious similarity here to Johnson's phrase, "the potentiality of becoming rich beyond the dreams of avarice."]

After mentioning some friends who disapproved of the sale, she adds: "Mrs. Montagu has sent me her approbation in a letter exceedingly affectionate and polite. 'Tis over now, tho', and I'll clear my head of it and all that belongs to it; I will go to church, give G.o.d thanks, receive the sacrament and forget the frauds, follies, and inconveniences of a commercial life this day."

Madame D'Arblay was at Streatham on the day of the sale, and gives a dramatic colour to the ensuing scene:

"_Streatham, Thursday_.--This was the great and most important day to all this house, upon which the sale of the brewery was to be decided.

Mrs. Thrale went early to town, to meet all the executors, and Mr.

Barclay, the Quaker, who was the _bidder_. She was in great agitation of mind, and told me, if all went well she would wave a white pocket-handkerchief out of the coach window.

"Four o'clock came and dinner was ready, and no Mrs. Thrale. Five o'clock followed, and no Mrs. Thrale. Queeny and I went out upon the lawn, where we sauntered, in eager expectation, till near six, and then the coach appeared in sight, and a white pocket-handkerchief was waved from it. I ran to the door of it to meet her, and she jumped out of it, and gave me a thousand embraces while I gave my congratulations. We went instantly to her dressing-room, where she told me, in brief, how the matter had been transacted, and then we went down to dinner. Dr. Johnson and Mr. Crutchley had accompanied her home."

The event is thus announced to Langton by Johnson, in a letter printed by Boswell, dated June 16, 1781: "You will perhaps be glad to hear that Mrs. Thrale is disenc.u.mbered of her brewhouse, and that it seemed to the purchaser so far from an evil that he was content to give for it 135,000_l_. Is the nation ruined." _Marginal note_: "I suppose he was neither glad nor sorry."

Thrale died on the 4th April, 1781, and Mrs. Thrale left Streatham on the 7th October, 1782. The intervening eighteen months have been made the subject of an almost unprecedented amount of misrepresentation.

Hawkins, Boswell, Madame D'Arblay, and Lord Macaulay have vied with each other in founding uncharitable imputations on her conduct at this period of her widowhood; and it has consequently become necessary to recapitulate the authentic evidence relating to it. As Piozzi's name will occur occasionally, he must now be brought upon the scene.

He is first mentioned in "Thraliana" thus:

"_Brighton, July_, 1780.--I have picked up Piozzi here, the great Italian singer. He is amazingly like my father. He shall teach Hester."

A detailed account of the commencement of the acquaintance is given in one of the autobiographical fragments. She says he was recommended to her by letter by Madame D'Arblay as "a man likely to lighten the burthen of life to her," and that both she and Mr. Thrale took to him at once. Madame D'Arblay is silent as to the introduction or recommendation; but gives an amusing account of one of their first meetings:

"A few months after the Streathamite morning visit to St. Martin's Street, an evening party was arranged by Dr. Burney, for bringing thither again Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, at the desire of Mr. and Mrs. Greville and Mrs. Crewe; who wished, under the quiet roof of Dr.

Burney, to make acquaintance with these celebrated personages." The conversation flagged, and recourse was had to music--

"Piozzi, a first-rate singer, whose voice was deliciously sweet, and whose expression was perfect, sung in his very best manner, from his desire to do honour to _il Capo di Casa_; but _il Capo di Casa_ and his family alone did justice to his strains: neither the Grevilles nor the Thrales heeded music beyond what belonged to it as fas.h.i.+on: the expectations of the Grevilles were all occupied by Dr. Johnson; and those of the Thrales by the auth.o.r.ess of the Ode to Indifference.

When Piozzi, therefore, arose, the party remained as little advanced in any method or pleasure for carrying on the evening, as upon its first entrance into the room....

"Dr. Burney now began to feel considerably embarra.s.sed; though still he cherished hopes of ultimate relief from some auspicious circ.u.mstance that, sooner or later, would operate, he hoped, in his favour, through the magnetism of congenial talents.

"Vainly, however, he sought to elicit some observations that might lead to disserting discourse; all his attempts received only quiet, acquiescent replies, 'signifying nothing.' Every one was awaiting some spontaneous opening from Dr. Johnson.

"Mrs. Thrale, of the whole coterie, was alone at her ease. She feared not Dr. Johnson; for fear made no part of her composition; and with Mrs. Greville, as a fair rival genius, she would have been glad, from curiosity, to have had the honour of a little tilt, in full carelessness of its event; for though triumphant when victorious, she had spirits so volatile, and such utter exemption from envy or spleen, that she was gaily free from mortification when vanquished.

But she knew the meeting to have been fabricated for Dr. Johnson; and, therefore, though not without difficulty, constrained herself to be pa.s.sive.

"When, however, she observed the sardonic disposition of Mr. Greville to stare around him at the whole company in curious silence, she felt a defiance against his aristocracy beat in every pulse; for, however grandly he might look back to the long ancestry of the Brookes and the Grevilles, she had a glowing consciousness that her own blood, rapid and fluent, flowed in her veins from Adam of Saltsberg; and, at length, provoked by the dullness of a taciturnity that, in the midst of such renowned interlocutors, produced as narcotic a torpor as could have been caused by a dearth the most barren of human faculties; she grew tired of the music, and yet more tired of remaining, what as little suited her inclinations as her abilities, a mere cipher in the company; and, holding such a position, and all its concomitants, to be ridiculous, her spirits rose rebelliously above her control; and, in a fit of utter recklessness of what might be thought of her by her fine new acquaintance, she suddenly, but softly, arose, and stealing on tip-toe behind Signor Piozzi, who was accompanying himself on the piano-forte to an animated _arria parlante_, with his back to the company, and his face to the wall; she ludicrously began imitating him by squaring her elbows, elevating them with ecstatic shrugs of the shoulders, and casting up her eyes, while languis.h.i.+ngly reclining her head; as if she were not less enthusiastically, though somewhat more suddenly, struck with the transports of harmony than himself.

"This grotesque ebullition of ungovernable gaiety was not perceived by Dr. Johnson, who faced the fire, with his back to the performer and the instrument. But the amus.e.m.e.nt which such an unlooked for exhibition caused to the party, was momentary; for Dr. Burney, shocked lest the poor Signor should observe, and be hurt by this mimicry, glided gently round to Mrs. Thrale, and, with something between pleasantness and severity, whispered to her, 'Because, Madam, you have no ear yourself for music, will you destroy the attention of all who, in that one point, are otherwise gifted?'

"It was now that shone the brightest attribute of Mrs. Thrale, sweetness of temper. She took this rebuke with a candour, and a sense of its justice the most amiable: she nodded her approbation of the admonition; and, returning to her chair, quietly sat down, as she afterwards said, like a pretty little miss, for the remainder of one of the most humdrum evenings that she had ever pa.s.sed.

"Strange, indeed, strange and most strange, the event considered, was this opening intercourse between Mrs. Thrale and Signor Piozzi.

Little could she imagine that the person she was thus called away from holding up to ridicule, would become, but a few years afterwards, the idol of her fancy and the lord of her destiny! And little did the company present imagine, that this burlesque scene was but the first of a drama the most extraordinary of real life, of which these two persons were to be the hero and heroine: though, when the catastrophe was known, this incident, witnessed by so many, was recollected and repeated from coterie to coterie throughout London, with comments and sarcasms of endless variety."[1]

[Footnote 1: Memoirs of Dr. Burney, &c., vol. ii, pp. 105--111.]