ferred on a discontented wife than when Mr. Murphy one day persuaded Thrale over their wine "to wish for Dr. Johnson's conversation, extolling it in terms," says Mrs. Thrale, "which that of no other person could have deserved, till we were only in doubt how to obtain his company and find an excuse for the invitation." Their plans were accordingly laid; and Murphy, one winter afternoon, brought his friend, the great doctor, to dine in the Borough, to meet a certain young shoemaker, who was also a poet—Murphy cautioning Mrs. Thrale beforehand not to be surprised at Johnson's dress, figure, and behaviour. This first visit was a decided success. Johnson advised the shoemaker to give his nights and days to the study of Addison—which the shoemaker did not proceed to do; and on every subsequent Thursday through that winter of 1764-5 Johnson was again the guest of the Thrales.
The friendship thus begun matured itself on both sides until, one summer day in 1766, Mr. and Mrs. Thrale called upon Johnson in Fleet Street, and, finding him seriously ill and oppressed with melancholy, persuaded him to go on a long visit to Streatham Park. This visit extended over four months; and from that time until 1782 there was always a room set apart for Dr. Johnson both in the Borough and at Streatham. For almost all the remainder of his life, indeed, Johnson lived more with the Thrales than at his own home; spending usually the middle of each week with them, and reserving the Friday evenings for his club, and his Saturday and Sundays for Desmoulins, Williams, and the rest of the menagerie in his own den in Fleet Street.
Mrs. Thrale had heard of Dr. Johnson since she was a child in Hogarth's studio. The witty artist used to tell among his friends an excellent story, which Boswell has preserved, of his first meeting with Johnson in the house of Richardson the novelist. Hogarth and his host were talking together of the recent execution of Dr. Cameron, who had taken part in the rebellion of 1745, an d Hogarth was attempting to justify George II. for what most people regarded as very like a murder in cold blood. "While he was talking, he perceived a person standing at a window in the room, shaking his head, and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner. He concluded that he was an idiot whom his relations had put under the care of Mr. Richardson as a very good man. To his great surprise, however, this figure stalked forward to where he and Mr. Richardson were sitting, and ail at once took up the argument, and burst into an invective against George II., as one who upon all occasions was unrelenting and barbarous, mentioning many instances," etc. "In short," continues the story, "he displayed such a power of eloquence that Hogarth looked at him with astonishment and actually imagined that this idiot had been at the moment inspired." But, although Hogarth could laugh at Johnson when he liked, he was none the less one of his admirers, and was very earnest that his young friend Hester Salusbury should obtain the acquaintance, and if possible the friendship, of a man "whose conversation," he told her, "was to the talk of other men like Titian's painting compared to Hudson's." But, now, when at last the rich cadence of Johnson's voice was heard under her roof, it was not only for the sake of his brilliant and learned talk that she gave him so warm a welcome. His friendship with her and her husband was, in the truest sense, an alliance, affecting the habits of life and thought of all three.
From the first Johnson appears to have exerted himself to raise Mrs. Thrale's position in her husband's house. Thrale's well-covered table, and his clever wife, were both to Johnson's taste, as also the "potentiality of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice" which lay stored in the brewer's mighty vats. But the fox-hounds at Croydon were an incubus; nor was it long before Thrale himself was stimulated by Johnson's eloquence to new pursuits. "The scene," says his wife, "was soon to change. Fox-hounds were sold, and a seat in Parliament was suggested by our new inmate as more suitable to his dignity, more desirable in every respect." It is doubtful whether the change from the hunting-field to the House of Commons was a good one for a man of apoplectic tendencies; but in the mean time it had the effect of bringing Mrs. Thrale at once to the front. "I grew useful now, almost necessary; wrote the advertisements, looked to the treats; and people to whom I was till then unknown admired how happy Mr. Thrale must be in such a wonder of a wife."
An extensive circle and a round of social duties were the immediate result of her husband's Parliamentary life. But the society of nonentities was the least pleasure that Dr. Johnson's reforms procured for her. If he did not at once flood her rooms with the society of the Literary Club
