rney upon this said to him, 'I believe, Sir, we shall
make a musician of you at last.' Johnson with candid complacency
replied, 'Sir, I shall be glad to have a new sense given to me.'"

In 1774, the Thrales made a tour in Wales, mainly for the purpose of
revisiting her birthplace and estates. They were accompanied by
Johnson, who kept a diary of the expedition, beginning July 5th and
ending September 24th. It was preserved by his negro servant, and
Boswell had no suspicion of its existence, for he says, "I do not
find that he kept any journal or notes of what he saw there." The
diary was first published by Mr. Duppa in 1816; and some manuscript
notes by Mrs. Thrale which reached that gentleman too late for
insertion, have been added in Mr. Murray's recent edition of the
Life. The first entry is:

"_Tuesday, July 5_.--We left Streatham 11 A.M. Price of four horses
two shillings a mile. Barnet 1.40 P.M. On the road I read 'Tully's
Epistles.' At night at Dunstable." At Chester, he records:--"We
walked round the walls, which are complete, and contain one mile,
three quarters, and one hundred and one yards." Mrs. Thrale's comment
is, "Of those ill-fated walls Dr. Johnson might have learned the
extent from any one. He has since put me fairly out of countenance by
saying, 'I have known _my mistress_ fifteen years, and never saw her
fairly out of humour but on Chester wall.' It was because he would
keep Miss Thrale beyond her hour of going to bed to walk on the wall,
where from the want of light, I apprehended some accident to her,
perhaps to him."

He thus describes Mrs. Thrale's family mansion:

"_Saturday, July 30._--We went to Bach y Graig, where we found an old
house, built 1567, in an uncommon and incommodious form--My mistress
chatted about tiring, but I prevailed on her to go to the top--The
floors have been stolen: the windows are stopped--The house was less
than I seemed to expect--The River Clwyd is a brook with a bridge of
one arch, about one third of a mile--The woods have many trees,
generally young; but some which seem to decay--They have been
lopped--The house never had a garden--The addition of another story
would make an useful house, but it cannot be great."

On the 4th August, they visited Rhuddlan Castle and Bodryddan[1], of
which he says:--

[Footnote 1: Now the property of Mr. Shipley Conway, the
great-grandson of Johnson's acquaintance, the Bishop of St. Asaph,
and representative, through females