aused, and I could only say with Lady Macbeth,

'So! you've displaced the mirth, broke the good meeting
With most admir'd disorder.'

"Such accidents, however, occurred too often, and I was forced to
take advantage of my lost lawsuit, and plead inability of purse to
remain longer in London or its vicinage. I had been crossed in my
intentions of going abroad, and found it convenient, for every reason
of health, peace, and pecuniary circumstances, to retire to Bath,
where I knew Mr. Johnson would not follow me, and where I could for
that reason command some little portion of time for my own use; a
thing impossible while I remained at Streatham or at London, as my
hours, carriage, and servants, had long been at his command, who
would not rise in the morning till twelve o'clock perhaps, and oblige
me to make breakfast for him till the bell rung for dinner, though
much displeased if the toilet was neglected, and though much of the
time we passed together was spent in blaming or deriding, very
justly, my neglect of economy, and waste of that money which might
make many families happy. The original reason of our connexion, his
_particularly disordered health and spirits_[2], had been long at an
end, and he had no other ailments than old age and general infirmity,
which every professor of medicine was ardently zealous and generally
attentive to palliate, and to contribute all in their power for the
prolongation of a life so valuable.

"Veneration for his virtue, reverence for his talents, delight in his
conversation, and habitual endurance of a yoke my husband first put
upon me, and of which he contentedly bore his share for sixteen or
seventeen years, made me go on so long with Mr. Johnson; but the
perpetual confinement I will own to have been terrifying in the first
years of our friendship, and irksome in the last, nor could I pretend
to support it without help, when my coadjutor was no more. To the
assistance we gave him, the shelter our house afforded to his uneasy
fancies, and to the pains we took to soothe or repress them, the
world perhaps is indebted for the three political pamphlets, the new
edition and correction of his Dictionary, and for the Poets' Lives,
which he would scarce have lived, I think, and kept his faculties
entire, to have written, had not incessant care been exerted at the
time of his first coming to be our constant guest in the country; and
several times after that, when he found himself partic