conversation, which she had fancied necessary to his existence, than for
her "roast beef and plumb pudden," which he now devours too "dirtily for
endurance." She was fully resolved to go, and yet she could not bear
that her going should fail to torture the friend whom for eighteen years
she had loved and cherished so kindly.

No one has a right at once to insist upon the compliance of his friends,
and to insist that it should be a painful compliance. Still Mrs.
Thrale's petulant outburst was natural enough. It requires notice
because her subsequent account of the rupture has given rise to attacks
on Johnson's character. Her "Anecdotes," written in 1785, show that her
real affection for Johnson was still coloured by resentment for his
conduct at this and a later period. They have an apologetic character
which shows itself in a statement as to the origin of the quarrel,
curiously different from the contemporary accounts in the diary. She
says substantially, and the whole book is written so as to give
probability to the assertion, that Johnson's bearishness and demands
upon her indulgence had become intolerable, when he was no longer under
restraint from her husband's presence. She therefore "took advantage" of
her lost lawsuit and other troubles to leave London, and thus escape
from his domestic tyranny. He no longer, as she adds, suffered from
anything but "old age and general infirmity" (a tolerably wide
exception!), and did not require her nursing. She therefore withdrew
from the yoke to which she had contentedly submitted during her
husband's life, but which was intolerable when her "coadjutor was no
more."

Johnson's society was, we may easily believe, very trying to a widow in
such a position; and it seems to be true that Thrale was better able
than Mrs. Thrale to restrain his oddities, little as the lady shrunk at