ny them, even if invited. No behaviour, it may be admitted,
could be more provoking than this unforeseen reasonableness. To nerve
oneself to part with a friend, and to find the friend perfectly ready,
and all your battery of argument thrown away is most vexatious. The poor
man should have begged her to stay with him, or to take him with her; he
should have made the scene which she professed to dread, but which would
have been the best proof of her power. The only conclusion which could
really have satisfied her--though she, in all probability, did not know
it--would have been an outburst which would have justified a rupture,
and allowed her to protest against his tyranny as she now proceeded to
protest against his complacency.

Johnson wished to go to Italy two years later; and his present
willingness to be left was probably caused by a growing sense of the
dangers which threatened their friendship. Mrs. Thrale's anger appears
in her journal. He had never really loved her, she declares; his
affection for her had been interested, though even in her wrath she
admits that he really loved her husband; he cared less for her
conversation, which she had fancied necessary to his existence, than for
her "roast beef and plumb pudden," which he now devours too "dirtily for
endurance." She was fully resolved to go, and yet she could not bear
that her going should fail to torture the friend whom for eighteen years
she had loved and cherished so kindly.

No one has a right at once to insist upon the compliance of his friends,
and to insist that it should be a painful compliance. Still Mrs.
Thrale's petulant outburst was natural enough. It requires notice
because her subsequent account of the rupture has given rise to attacks
on Johnson's character. Her "Anecdotes," written in 1785, show that her
real affection for Johnson was still coloured by resentment for his
conduct at this and a later period. They have an apologetic character
which shows itself in a statement as to the origin of the quarrel,
curiously different from the contemporary accounts in the diary. She
says substantially, and the whole book is written so as to give
probability to the assertion, that Johnson's bearishness and demands
upon her indulgence had become intolerable, when he was no longer under
restraint from her husband's presence. She therefore "took advantage" of
her lost lawsuit and other troubles to leave London, and thus escape
from his domestic tyranny. H