Her readiness did her incalculable honour. But it is at last worth
remembering that Johnson had first done her incalculable honour. No one
has given to man or woman the right to judge as to the worthiness of her
who received it. The meanest man is generally allowed his own counsel as
to his own wife; one of the greatest of men has been denied it. "The
lover," says Macaulay, "continued to be under the illusions of the
wedding day till the lady died." What is so graciously said is not
enough. He was under those "illusions" until he too died, when he had
long passed her latest age, and was therefore able to set right that
balance of years which has so much irritated the impertinent. Johnson
passed from this life twelve years older than she, and so for twelve
years his constant eyes had to turn backwards to dwell upon her. Time
gave him a younger wife.

And here I will put into Mrs. Johnson's mouth, that mouth to which no one
else has ever attributed any beautiful sayings, the words of Marceline
Desbordes-Valmore to the young husband she loved: "Older than thou! Let
me never see thou knowest it. Forget it! I will remember it, to die
before thy death."

Macaulay, in his unerring effectiveness, uses Johnson's short sight for
an added affront to Mrs. Johnson. The bridegroom was too weak of
eyesight "to distinguish ceruse from natural bloom." Nevertheless, he
saw well enough, when he was old, to distinguish Mrs. Thrale's dresses.
He reproved her for wearing a dark dress; it was unsuitable, he said, for
her size; a little creature should show gay colours "like an insect." We
are not called upon to admire his wife; why, then, our taste being thus
uncompromised, do we not suffer him to admire her? It is the most
gratuitous kind of intrusion. Moreover, the biographers are eager to
permit that touch of romance and grace in his relations to Mrs. Thrale,