r hundred of these little letters of her lord's. It was
a loyal keeping. But what does Thackeray call it? His word is
"thrifty." He says: "There are four hundred letters of Dick Steele's to
his wife, which that thrifty woman preserved accurately."

"Thrifty" is a hard word to apply to her whom Steele styled, in the year
before her death, his "charming little insolent." She was ill in Wales,
and he, at home, wept upon her pillow, and "took it to be a sin to go to
sleep." Thrifty they may call her, and accurate if they will; but she
lies in Westminster Abbey, and Steele called her "your Prueship."

MRS. JOHNSON

This paper shall not be headed "Tetty." What may be a graceful enough
freedom with the wives of other men shall be prohibited in the case of
Johnson's, she with whose name no writer until now has scrupled to take
freedoms whereto all graces were lacking. "Tetty" it should not be, if
for no other reason, for this--that the chance of writing "Tetty" as a
title is a kind of facile literary opportunity; it shall be denied. The
Essay owes thus much amends of deliberate care to Dr. Johnson's wife.
But, indeed, the reason is graver. What wish would he have had but that
the language in the making whereof he took no ignoble part should
somewhere, at some time, treat his only friend with ordinary honour?

Men who would trust Dr. Johnson with their orthodoxy, with their
vocabulary, and with the most intimate vanity of their human wishes,
refuse, with every mark of insolence, to trust him in regard to his wife.
On that one point no reverence is paid to him, no deference, no respect,
not so much as the credit due to our common sanity. Yet he is not
reviled on account of his Thrale--nor, indeed, is his Thrale now
seriously reproached for her Piozzi. It is true that Macaulay, preparing
himself and his reader "in his well-known way" (as a rustic of Mr.
Hardy's might have it) for the recital of her second marriage, says that
it would have been well if she had been laid beside the kind and generous
Thrale when, in the prime of her life, he died. But Macaulay has not
left us heirs to his indignation. His well-known way was to exhaust
those possibilities of effect in which the commonplace is so rich. And
he was permitted to point his paragraphs as he would, not only by calling
Mrs. Thrale's attachment to her second husband "a degrading passion," but
by summoning a chorus of "all London" to the same purpose.