which they officially deny in the case of Mrs. Johnson. But the
difference is all on the other side. He would not have bidden his wife
dress like an insect. Mrs. Thrale was to him "the first of womankind"
only because his wife was dead.

Beauclerc, we learn, was wont to cap Garrick's mimicry of Johnson's love-
making by repeating the words of Johnson himself in after-years--"It was
a love-match on both sides." And obviously he was as strange a lover as
they said. Who doubted it? Was there any other woman in England to give
such a suitor the opportunity of an eternal love? "A life radically
wretched," was the life of this master of Letters; but she, who has
received nothing in return except ignominy from these unthankful Letters,
had been alone to make it otherwise. Well for him that he married so
young as to earn the ridicule of all the biographers in England; for by
doing so he, most happily, possessed his wife for nearly twenty years. I
have called her his only friend. So indeed she was, though he had
followers, disciples, rivals, competitors, and companions, many degrees
of admirers, a biographer, a patron, and a public. He had also the
houseful of sad old women who quarrelled under his beneficent protection.
But what friend had he? He was "solitary" from the day she died.

Let us consider under what solemn conditions and in what immortal phrase
the word "solitary" stands. He wrote it, all Englishmen know where. He
wrote it in the hour of that melancholy triumph when he had been at last
set free from the dependence upon hope. He hoped no more, and he needed
not to hope. The "notice" of Lord Chesterfield had been too long
deferred; it was granted at last, when it was a flattery which Johnson's
court of friends would applaud. But not for their sake was it welcome.
To no living ear would he bring it and report it with delight.