brewery in Southwark, and a still more pleasant apartment at the
villa of his friends on Streatham Common. A large part of every
year he passed in those abodes, abodes which must have seemed
magnificent and luxurious indeed, when compared with the dens in
which he had generally been lodged. But his chief pleasures were
derived from what the astronomer of his Abyssinian tale called
"the endearing elegance of female friendship." Mrs Thrale
rallied him, soothed him, coaxed him, and, if she sometimes
provoked him by her flippancy, made ample amends by listening to
his reproofs with angelic sweetness of temper. When he was
diseased in body and in mind, she was the most tender of nurses.
No comfort that wealth could purchase, no contrivance that
womanly ingenuity, set to work by womanly compassion, could
devise, was wanting to his sick-room. He requited her kindness
by an affection pure as the affection of a father, yet delicately
tinged with a gallantry, which, though awkward, must have been
more flattering than the attentions of a crowd of the fools who
gloried in the names, now obsolete, of Buck and Maccaroni. It
should seem that a full half of Johnson's life, during about
sixteen years, was passed under the roof of the Thrales. He
accompanied the family sometimes to Bath, and sometimes to
Brighton, once to Wales, and once to Paris. But he had at the
same time a house in one of the narrow and gloomy courts on the
north of Fleet Street. In the garrets was his library, a large
and miscellaneous collection of books, falling to pieces and
begrimed with dust. On a lower floor he sometimes, but very
rarely, regaled a friend with a plain dinner, a veal pie, or a
leg of lamb and spinage, and a rice pudding. Nor was the
dwelling uninhabited during his long absences. It was the home
of the most extraordinary assemblage of inmates that ever was