ung lady who appeared at a masquerade in Paris,
habited as a Jesuit, during the height of the contention between the
Jansenists and Molinists concerning free will:--

"On s'etonne ici que Calviniste
Eut pris l'habit de Moliniste,
Puisque que cette jeune beaute
Ote a chacun sa liberte,
N'est ce pas une Janseniste."[1]

[Footnote 1: "Menagiana," vol. iii. p. 376. Edition of 1716. Equally
happy were Lord Chesterfield's lines to a young lady who appeared at
a Dublin ball, with an orange breastknot:--

Mrs. Thrale took the lead even when her husband might be expected to
strike in, as when Johnson was declaiming paradoxically against
action in oratory: "Action can have no effect on reasonable minds. It
may augment noise, but it never can enforce argument." _Mrs. Thrale_.
"What then, Sir, becomes of Demosthenes' saying, Action, action,
action?" _Johnson_. "Demosthenes, Madam, spoke to an assembly of
brutes, to a barbarous people." "The polished Athenians!" is her
marginal protest, and a conclusive one.

In English literature she was rarely at fault. In

"Pretty Tory, where's the jest
To wear that riband on thy breast,
When that same breast betraying shows
The whiteness of the rebel rose?"

White was adopted by the malcontent Irish as the French emblem.
Johnson's epigram may have been suggested by Propertius:

"Nullus liber erit si quis amare volet."]

reference to the flattery lavished on Garrick by Lord Mansfield and
Lord Chatham, Johnson had said, "When he whom everybody else
flatters, flatters me, then I am truly happy." _Mrs. Thrale_. "The
sentiment is in Congreve, I think." _Johnson_. "Yes, Madam, in 'The
Way of the World.'

"'If there's delight in love, 'tis when I see
The heart that others bleed for, bleed for me.'"

When Johnson is reported saying, "Those who have a style of
distinguished excellence can always be distinguished," she objects:
"It seems not. The lines always quoted as Dryden's, beginning,

'To die is landing on some silent shore,'

are Garth's after all." Johnson would have been still less pleased at
her discovery that a line in his epitaph on Phillips,

"Till angels wake thee with a note like thine,"

was imitated from Pope's

"And saints embrace thee with a love like mine."

In one of her letters to him (June, 1782) she writes: "Meantime let
us be as _merry_ as reading Burton upon _Melancholy_ will make us.
You bid me study that book in your absence