Two days after he wrote thus to Mrs. Thrale: 'On Monday, the 16th, I sat for my picture, and walked a considerable way with little inconvenience.

He gives this account of it in one of his letters to Mrs. Thrale: 'Mrs. Siddons, in her visit to me, behaved with great modesty and propriety, and left nothing behind her to be censured or despised.

"It was behaving ill to Mrs. Thrale certainly to quarrel in her house.

Mr. Thrale had removed, that is to say, from his winter residence in the Borough.

Miss Burney describes a dinner at Mr. Thrale's, about this time, at which she met Johnson, Boswell, and Dudley Long.

'Mrs. Thrale,' wrote Miss Burney in 1780, 'is a most dear creature, but never restrains her tongue in anything, nor, indeed, any of her feelings.

Thrale, with all her excellence, can give up no occasion of making sport, however unseasonable or even painful...

'Mrs. Garrick and I,' wrote Hannah More (Memoirs, i. 208), 'were invited to an assembly at Mrs. Thrale's.

Just as my hair was dressed, came a servant to forbid our coming, for that Mr. Thrale was dead.

The rest of the entry should be given:'On Wednesday, 11, was buried my dear friend Thrale, who died on Wednesday 4; and with him were buried many of my hopes and pleasures.

I staid in the room, except that I visited Mrs. Thrale twice.]

What a contrast in this to the widow who published a letter in which she had written:'I wish that you would put in a word of your own to Mr. Thrale about eating less!'

Baretti, in a note on Piozzi Letters, ii.142, says that 'nobody ever had spirit enough to tell Mr. Thrale that his fits were apoplectic; such is the blessing of being rich that nobody dares to speak out.'

On his next birthday, he wrote:'My first knowledge of Thrale was in 1765.

On May 3, 1776, she writes:'Mr. Thrale says he shall not die in peace without seeing Rome, and I am sure he will go nowhere that he can help without you.'

Johnson, in his fine epitaph on Thrale (Works, i.153) broke through a rule which he himself had laid down.

Johnson's letters to Mrs. Thrale shew that he had long been well acquainted with the state of her husband's business.

In the year 1772, Mr. Thrale was in money difficulties.

Beattie wrote on June 1:'Everybody says Mr. Thrale should have left Johnson £200 a year; which, from a fortune like his, would have been a very inconsiderable deduction.'

Miss Burney thus writes of the day of the sale:'Mrs. Thrale went early to town, to meet all the executors, and Mr. Barclay, the Quaker, who was the bidder.

Four o'clock came and dinner was ready, and no Mrs. Thrale.

Baretti, in a MS. note on Piozzi Letters, i. 369, says that 'the two last years of Thrale's life his brewery brought him £30,000 a year neat profit.'

(Like Mrs. Thrale and Miss Burney, she cared nothing for dates.)

It was in the week after Thrale's death.

The Autobiography, Letters, and Literary Remains of Madam Piozzi (Mrs. Thrale).