not so much as the credit due to our common sanity. Yet he is not
reviled on account of his Thrale--nor, indeed, is his Thrale now
seriously reproached for her Piozzi. It is true that Macaulay, preparing
himself and his reader "in his well-known way" (as a rustic of Mr.
Hardy's might have it) for the recital of her second marriage, says that
it would have been well if she had been laid beside the kind and generous
Thrale when, in the prime of her life, he died. But Macaulay has not
left us heirs to his indignation. His well-known way was to exhaust
those possibilities of effect in which the commonplace is so rich. And
he was permitted to point his paragraphs as he would, not only by calling
Mrs. Thrale's attachment to her second husband "a degrading passion," but
by summoning a chorus of "all London" to the same purpose. She fled, he
tells us, from the laughter and hisses of her countrymen and countrywomen
to a land where she was unknown. Thus when Macaulay chastises Mrs.
Elizabeth Porter for marrying Johnson, he is not inconsistent, for he
pursues Mrs. Thrale with equal rigour for her audacity in keeping gaiety
and grace in her mind and manners longer than Macaulay liked to see such
ornaments added to the charm of twice "married brows."

It is not so with succeeding essayists. One of these minor biographers
is so gentle as to call the attachment of Mrs. Thrale and Piozzi "a
mutual affection." He adds, "No one who has had some experience of life
will be inclined to condemn Mrs. Thrale." But there is no such courtesy,
even from him, for Mrs. Johnson. Neither to him nor to any other writer
has it yet occurred that if England loves her great Englishman's memory,
she owes not only courtesy, but gratitude, to the only woman who loved
him while there was yet time.

Not a thought of that debt has stayed the alacrity with which a
caricature has been acclaimed as the only possible portrait of Mrs.